gig economy

Venture Capital is a plague

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Allowing masses of underpaid workers to be exploited in order to provide widespread convenience was always a depraved bargain, built on a rickety ethical and economic foundation.

Source: Instacart Is a Parasite and a Sham | The New Republic

This industry is ripe for some entity to come out with a co-op model where drivers are not only the employees making the delivery, but also owner shareholders in the company. No one will get rich quickly but they’d earn substantially more than poverty wages.

The “uber but for x” economic model is reliant on destroying everything around it so VC can get rich. Hopefully we won’t need 50 years to gig economy doesn’t work, just like trickle-down economics.

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In the olden days they used to call it indentured servitude

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I still use ride hailing and food delivery services, but the fact is that the core functionality of these apps — despite all their fancy technology — is not significantly different than having a servant. What the technology has done is pool the servants, make them available to more people, make it easier to communicate tasks, and — most importantly — make it possible to not think of them as servants at all.

Source: The Gig Economy Is White People Discovering Servants | by Indi Samarajiva | Medium

When you don’t think of people as your servant you don’t have to think about the implications of servitude— including the linguistics of it, like “master”, “servant”, or “honor”. How long before people find themselves finding themselves in “exclusive contracts” with a specific gig agency?

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