The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death (newyorker.com)

Writing for The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino documents stories of several people -- a nine-month pregnant Lyft driver, for instance -- who contribute to companies that work on the model of gig economy. Through these tales, Tolentino underscores an increasingly growing pattern in the Silicon Valley (and elsewhere) where companies offer hard-labor contracts to people, pay them peanuts (with little liabilities), and yet find a reason to celebrate their business and encourage more to come onboard. From the article: Fiverr, which had raised a hundred and ten million dollars in venture capital by November, 2015, has more about the "In Doers We Trust" campaign on its Web site. In one video, a peppy female voice-over urges "doers" to "always be available," to think about beating "the trust-fund kids," and to pitch themselves to everyone they see, including their dentist. A Fiverr press release about "In Doers We Trust" states, "The campaign positions Fiverr to seize today's emerging zeitgeist of entrepreneurial flexibility, rapid experimentation, and doing more with less. It pushes against bureaucratic overthinking, analysis-paralysis, and excessive whiteboarding." This is the jargon through which the essentially cannibalistic nature of the gig economy is dressed up as an aesthetic. No one wants to eat coffee for lunch or go on a bender of sleep deprivation -- or answer a call from a client while having sex, as recommended in the video. It's a stretch to feel cheerful at all about the Fiverr marketplace, perusing the thousands of listings of people who will record any song, make any happy-birthday video, or design any book cover for five dollars. I'd guess that plenty of the people who advertise services on Fiverr would accept some "whiteboarding" in exchange for employer-sponsored health insurance. At the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system. The contrast between the gig economy's rhetoric (everyone is always connecting, having fun, and killing it!) and the conditions that allow it to exist (a lack of dependable employment that pays a living wage) makes this kink in our thinking especially clear.

Comments

The Puritan philosophy of human worth

[Anonymous Coward]

This all stems from the widespread adoption in America of the the Puritan philosophy of human worth, best summed up as "the quality, quantity, and duration of achievement."

So, yes, by their standards the ultimate goal is to work hard, until death, to earn a place by the side of god as the most righteous. The bonus is that this also allows the hardest workers in life to demean those who have not worked so hard.

Re:The American obsession with self-reliance

[DarkOx]

Americans have to get over their fear of socialism and accept that, all other things being equal, a community that works together is stronger and more prosperous than one that does not.

You are both right and totally wrong at the same time. Socialism isn't about community its about the state as a stand in for community! Yes we need to accept that in the modern world very men can be islands. Bureaucracy isn't the answer though, it does not scale. Just sit an watch Argentina, Greece, and for that matter the whole Western Europe as it faces mass immigration! That is the future socialism results in.

What we need is actually a form of isolationism. We need force the capital class to have some ties to place and their community again. We can't let them just be world tourists! If you make it harder or impossible for them to import labor from elsewhere, make it hard for them to take their capital over national boarders, etc. They will be forced to invest in their local community to secure their own feature. Right now its "I need H1Bs because there are to few qualified Americans" It needs change to "I need to build a science center in $city and donate heavily to the local schools so my business will have pool of qualified people to hire in the future." That is what community is about and that is the relationship between capital and community we need to create.

Re:also in the news ...

[PoopJuggler]

Another reason for UBI. It disincentivizes companies from acting like that and levels the playing field a bit for the workers.

Re: Huh?

[BenBoy]

Oddly enough, the grandpost is (wholly inadvertently) insightful. Marx nails this one as a natural consequence of alienation. It's a tremendously important concept, and a great, still-fresh lens for looking at this moment in a historical way. Splendid bandwagon, really; give it a read.

Re: Huh?

[Archtech]

Thanks! If anyone is interested in reading a bit about the theory behind my point of view, the best place to start is David Graeber's magnificent "Debt: The First 5000 Years". You'll be chuckling within a few pages, and awed within the first 100.

You'll also be stunned at all the wrong beliefs that many people accept and take for granted. At the risk of further enraging those of other persuasions, I can reveal that one of Graeber's biggest ideas is that human beings naturally practice a form of "rough communism". Unless educated to do otherwise, we have a strong tendency to cooperate and help out. Here are a couple of choice extracts:

"After all, we do owe everything we are to others. This is simply true. The language we speak and even think in, our habits and opinions, the kind of food we like to eat, the knowledge that makes our lights switch on and toilets flush, even the style in which we carry out our gestures of defiance and rebellion against social conventions – all of this we learned from other people, most of them long dead. If we were to imagine what we owe them as a debt, it could only be infinite. The question is: Does it really make sense to think of this as a debt? After all, a debt is something that we could at least imagine paying back”.

“[Peter] Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him. The man objected indignantly:
“’Up in our country, we are human!’ said the hunter. ‘And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anyone say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs’.
“The last line is something of an anthropological classic, and similar statements about the refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found throughout the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began ‘comparing power with power, measuring, calculating’ and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt”.