The Gig Economy Celebrates Working To Excess
<i>&quot;...It does require a fairly dystopian strain of doublethink for a company to celebrate how hard and how constantly its employees must work to make a living, given that these companies are themselves setting the terms...&quot;</i><p>&quot;setting the terms&quot; is a bit over-the-top here. If I want to go from here to the airport, and you have a car, and I offer you twenty bucks, is that okay? Does it somehow become bad if we meet online in a chat room? How about if a thousand people in this city make this trade on a chat room today? So somebody sets up an online app. At that point do the people setting up the app &quot;set the terms&quot;? Does it happen when they have standards for who can use the app?<p>In that last statement, where the app creators start setting standards for who can participate, we run into problems -- mainly because if you&#x27;re the gatekeeper, you can charge rent on both parties seeking the deal. Other than that, there&#x27;s nothing amiss or terrible going on here.<p>Western literature has this childish and somewhat verklempt tradition of taking something that&#x27;s new and making it into an emotional outburst. Thoreau goes out into the woods and laments the arrival of trains, the stresses of the city, and the war against Mexico. Dickens with his cutting criticism of Victorian England.<p>When done well, it&#x27;s a thing of beauty. Most of the time, however, authors get a little too tied-up in belly-button-gazing and confuse &quot;things that I can become emotional about and rant&quot; with &quot;things that are important and transcend time&quot; We all take the shortcut of &quot;if it&#x27;s important to me, it must be important&quot;<p>I am a bit concerned about Uber, Lyft, and the gig economy. On one hand, I am concerned that companies are exerting so much control over the marketplace that they&#x27;re not innovating as much as they are creating monopolies. On the other hand, however, I am concerned that because this destroys the concept of &quot;a job&quot; for so many people, and the relationship to their employer and country -- they are going to push hard for limiting all sorts of free trade under the rubric of &quot;something must be done!&quot;<p>In this case, quite literally, the writer begins her essay with an example of how people might feel that something must be done for the children.<p>My first wife worked a 9-5 W-2 job during her labor with our second child. I didn&#x27;t tell her to do it, we didn&#x27;t need the money. She said she&#x27;d rather be doing something than hanging out at home or the hospital. I guess I could tell the story of our second child in much the same way as this author told the story of the Lyft driver in labor -- how some folks &quot;might&quot; look at it as exploitation. But I&#x27;m not 17 any more, and I don&#x27;t tend to view individual choices as being some kind of massive battle between forces that I must take sides on. It was her choice and she made it. For me to come along later and use it as an example for <i>any</i> kind of political bullshit is whack. Rant all you want about whatever topic you&#x27;d like, but never take agency away from folks simply because you think you might get a little extra mileage out of your essay.