Could an Online Marketplace for Guilt Turn Sin Into a Charitable Resource?
Posted by Alex_Pasternack on Tuesday, Apr 20, 2010
Rhizome’s Seven on Seven event on April 17 at New York’s New Museum was a kind of large hadron collider for the already orbiting electrons of art and technology, pairing rising stars from the art and digital worlds. See our descriptions of each of the collaborations, and stand by for more coverage on Motherboard.
Absolution Exchange
Joshua Schacter (Google engineer)
Monica Narula (artist, Raqs Media Collective founder)
How to incur a price for one’s lapses, and turn guilt from a negative into a resource, perhaps a source of charitable giving? That challenge proved “too hard” for this pair. So they started at the beginning: what price sin? To find out, Schacter posted a series of questionnaires on Amazon’s fascinating Mechanical Turk, a virtual factory that farms out simple tasks to anyone on the internet, paying them about 2 cents per job. Through voting, they determined that “being mad at my spouse because of a dream" incurred a $20 fee, “hitting another car and driving away 20 years ago” was priced at $100, and feeling guilty for being too successful was worth a $1000 indulgence.
Narula described the framework as “a reminder of how our guilt systems work,” and a way of moving from the “given structure” of 7 deadly sins to a crowd-sourced, “self-generated set of guilt norms.” The lingering question: is it a sin to put a market price on sin?
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