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The Servant Economy

gnicholas 8y ago
> The unicorns have taken huge sums of money: on average, $1 billion in venture funding each. A sure-fire way to become a unicorn: raise $1B in VC. You're instantly worth a billion dollars, just based on your bank account.
- Deimorz 8y ago
  Some people are calling those "minotaurs" now, apparently: https://www.axios.com/minotaurs-companies-raised-more-than-1-billion-99250290-99b7-435d-82f9-810d172478cc.html https://www.axios.com/minotaurs-companies-raised-more-than-1...
- lazyasciiart 8y ago
  If you're really clever you could go into the round with a negative balance sheet.
- adrianN 8y ago
  Sell one billionth of your company for $1. Much easier.
dwighttk 8y ago
Blue Apron? Why is that included? Blue Apron is Uber for... what? Aren't the boxes just delivered by ups or fedex or usps or whatever? Do they have independent contractors filling the boxes?
- CharlesColeman 8y ago
  > Blue Apron is Uber for... what? Measuring food into portions.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - dwighttk 8y ago
    So McDonalds is Uber for cooking food?
thekhatribharat 8y ago
What about the quality of service guarantees provided by Uber-for-X platforms? Both the service provider and the service consumer can see each other's social ratings and feedback on these platforms. A whole new set of customers become willing to engage with a more diverse set of service providers solely because of the quality of service guarantees (and not just convenience of the tap of a button) - AirBnB and the recently YC-launched VanGo are good examples.
- Tade0 8y ago
  What about the quality of service guarantees provided by Uber-for-X platforms? Frankly after that one time when my driver turned in reverse to face the wrong way I don't think there are any in practice and the system had been gamed a long time ago.
- jimbokun 8y ago
  Actually, shouldn't "Uber-for-X" literally be the business model? Can't you abstract away the specifics for all the verticals, and let someone quickly spin up their specific vertical in a few minutes, leveraging producer/consumer data models, social ratings, feedback, fraud detection, etc. Any reason why each "Uber-for-X" should be it's own company with its own custom built back ends and front ends?
  - thekhatribharat 8y ago
    There are a good number of companies and open source projects in that space, that help with your Uber-for-X business. A few examples below - 1. Background checks for service providers - https://checkr.com https://checkr.com 2. Asset Tracking & Analytics - https://www.hypertrack.com/product https://www.hypertrack.com/product
  - no_identd 8y ago
    Now consider the next steps: * Turn-key standing up of Uber-for-X service * Automating provisioning and downtearing of Uber-for-X services based on economic supply & demand (Think Microservices and Heroku Dynos) * ...doing all that as a non-profit, because once you automate that, how does the money flow, assuming an open source application? Uh-oh. I mean hell you could probably do half of this within a few months if you also use eTurk or something. Could even use Remote Personal Assistant services, too. Just would need a really good process model before you can start on starting with that. Edit: Come to think of it, what Uber-for-X companies do sound a lot like something almost completely covered by things like this sluggish monster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frameworx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frameworx Originally developed by the biggest telcos. (Yes that is why this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3IPVWN-1ks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3IPVWN-1ks applies to ALL carriers.)
mothsonasloth 8y ago
Economically wealthy but time poor --> customer Economically poor but time rich --> servant Serfdom 2.0 Ladies and Gentlemen
- wwweston 8y ago
  Economically poor AND time poor --> high-efficiency and optimal return for capital! Remember kids, like Adam Smith said: in an efficient and competitive market, the price of a good or service falls to the cost of production. If you believe him, what does that mean for labor?
  - zeroname 8y ago
    > If you believe him, what does that mean for labor? It means you are fairly compensated for your work and you pay fair prices for the product of other people's work.
    - peteradio 8y ago
      I think it means there are a lot of jobs not worth doing but the worker doesn't know it's putting them in decline or the decline is better than the alternative. I do not think being paid below a living wage should be refered to as fair under any circumstances.
      - zeroname 8y ago
        I'm talking about a fair price. Wages are prices. A fair price is one that both parties agree to. Curiously, many people work for free. Is that unfair? I'm not talking about fairness in terms of equality. People are not equal in terms of economic value they never will be. Indeed, some people have no better choice than accept a job that pays less than a living wage. Would you deny them that possibility by mandating that every job needs to pay a living wage? Isn't that unfair?
        ABCLAW 8y ago
areoform 8y ago
Sometimes it's hard not to take a step back and wonder if the singularity has already occurred. Corporations are, in more ways than one, a form of Artificial Intelligence. They are greater than the sum of their parts, they possess attrition tolerance (i.e. any single node can be removed and the corporation will continue), and no single individual can understand the whole breadth of its execution in detail or hold it in their head. They have this almost emergent intelligence about them where corporations as a whole can decide to do things that individuals would find abhorrent. There is no one person who pushes the button. All of them who push the button as a part of this new entity that we've created. This AI doesn't have morality and it can never have morality simply because they aren't human. Individuals have morals. Corporations have objectives. And their objective is to maximize economic utility at all costs. So they launder money for drug lords and terrorists https://www.foxnews.com/world/hsbc-knowingly-helped-mexican-cartels-launder-billions-lawsuit-claims https://www.foxnews.com/world/hsbc-knowingly-helped-mexican-... https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/hsbc-holdings-plc-and-hsbc-bank-usa-na-admit-anti-money-laundering-and-sanctions-violations https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/hsbc-holdings-plc-and-hsbc-ba... . Knowingly kill human beings in clinical trials http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/02/pfizer.bextra/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/02/pfizer.bextra/index.htm... . And undermine the commons to maximize their utility towards their ends. While capitalism as a whole isn't an AI, it is an amazing computational process that has produced the greatest advancements in the standard of living in history. But the process is also similarly unmoved and lacking in human morality simply because it isn't human. It takes the route of lowest resistance and it creates to satisfy the utility function that it is computing. And that's it. Is it a shock that these processes have exposed these vulnerabilities in our society?
- sevensor 8y ago
  Interesting perspective. I've done a lot of black-box optimization, and the first thing you learn is that it's really good at breaking your model. What happens when the fitness function is evaluated on the global economy?
  - torpfactory 8y ago
    Global environmental catastrophe.
sevensor 8y ago
It's interesting to consider the gig economy as a reversion to the class-stratified social order that prevailed throughout so much of history. From that perspective, it's the last seven or eight decades that are particularly strange and deserving of study, and not the reemergence of a servant class.
- jpatokal 8y ago
  Servants for the rich never went away. What's new is the concept of easily summoned single-task servants for the middle class: now anybody with a phone and a bit of spare money can delegate tasks, and the people fulfilling those tasks lack even the basic job security of having a steady employer. All that said, I do find the article's use of "servant" somewhat demeaning. Is a self-employed tradesman like a plumber a "servant"? How about a freelance software developer? Where do you draw the line?
  - leetcrew 8y ago
    it's worth asking what the word servant even means/connotes. a first-rate butler can make $100k or more. if you have a well-paid butler working for a single household, a low wage house cleaner who cleans many different homes, a salaried web dev, and a freelance web dev, which members of the group would you describe as "servants"? does it matter if the butler makes more money than the devs?
    - torpfactory 8y ago
      I don' think that is a terribly good example to bring up. While there are certainly a small number of well paid butlers, there is a veritable army of contract cleaners who roam our offices and homes during the night and day. Most of them are making in the vicinity of minimum wage. I'm not sure if servant is the right word for them, but gosh it seems unfair just how badly paid they are.
      - gbacon 8y ago
        The economist must consider both the seen and the unseen. Let’s say a $15 minimum wage for custodians is instituted. Sure, it’s great for the “lucky” ones who remain employed. A moment’s reflection shows they aren’t lucky at all: they’re going to be the most productive of the bunch and not selected at random. This policy, allegedly put into place in the name of fairness, is decidedly unfair to people (for example young, inexperienced, or disabled) whose hourly productivity lies between the arbitrary minimum and consumers’ actual demand, or to the staff at the place of business who just picked up additional “other duties as assigned” because cleaning services just got so expensive. Competing on price for low-skill work that anyone can walk in off the street and do (that is, lots of competition) is a terrible strategy compared to competing on quality. Think: “Acme Cleaners, where all our employees have passed multiple background checks.”
jrbapna 8y ago
"Now you can do stuff that you could already do before, but you can do it with your phone. What it takes to make that work is incredible—venture capitalists have poured $672 million combined into Wag and Rover!—but the consumer impact is small. Instead of taking a number off a bulletin board in a coffee shop and calling Eric to walk Rufus, you hit a few buttons on your phone and Eric comes over." The above is a very cynical interpretation. What it fails to capture is the idea that incremental benefits multiplied by millions of people is a huge NET benefit to society as a whole. An anecdote: Arrived at the airport the other day and the baggage claim was backed up by about 30 minutes. While 30 minutes is not a big deal, multiply it across the 300 hundred or so passengers on the flight, and you'll get about 6 ENTIRE HUMAN DAYS were wasted due to an operational inefficiency. But hey, who needs uber when it only takes a few minutes to hail a cab? ;)
- jiveturkey 8y ago
  That's a silly way to evaluate utility, or at least your example is. Let's shave a minute of sleep off of everyone in the world. In just one day we will gain back 14 THOUSAND years of productivity.
  - jerf 8y ago
    And that's silly because...?
    - Barrin92 8y ago
      Because shaving off a minute of sleep isn't necessarily a profitable business that needs venture capital, which is the point of the article. There is no moat in moving something from a billboard to a smartphone app, there is no obvious way in which this 'appification' industry is actually profitable or a viable business. One particularly prominent example being moviepass. Is there some potential gain for customers in there somewhere, yes obviously but does that mean that sending you a credit card and having investors subsidize your cinema habits is a viable business or even worthy of being called 'technology'? No.
zeroname 8y ago
"An unkind summary, then, of the past half decade of the consumer internet: Venture capitalists have subsidized the creation of platforms for low-paying work that deliver on-demand servant services to rich people, while subjecting all parties to increased surveillance." The whole "rich vs poor divide" angle is nonsense. Like the article admits, all of these services were available before, but now they have the form of an app. The money goes to develop and advertise the whole show (creating jobs), but also to subsidize the labor. In effect, these services are more affordable than before. Uber is cheaper than a Taxi. Having your groceries delivered can be cheaper than doing it yourself, even if you earn small. All that venture capital comes from the rich and goes into the pockets of those who aren't rich. It's dumb money, the same kind that made pets.com (a ludicrous business) go to a 100 million dollar market cap. As soon as that capital dries up, these shops will close down, or raise prices. They will never make their money back, because nobody will be able to maintain a monopoly on a service that almost anyone can perform. That's also why the labor itself will stay cheap, no matter who the middleman is. It's not like these jobs were highly lucrative before all these capitalists walked in.
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  Uber wasn't available before Uber. Taxis were available, but those are very different things. It really is a job platform designed to take advantage of people who need multiple jobs, and surprise surprise, there's a slew of 'em here. It simply wouldn't work in a country that did not have such huge wealth disparity.
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    Neither would fast food. Is Uber worse than Taco Bell? You can ignore nutritional atrocities if you like...
  - zeroname 8y ago
    Taxis aren't very different things at all. That's why in many countries, Uber has been banned. They're regarded as taxis circumventing taxi regulations. > It really is a job platform designed to take advantage of people who need multiple jobs, and surprise surprise, there's a slew of 'em here. Any job offer is taking advantage of the fact that people aren't magical self-sufficient entities. There's nothing wrong with offering a job, nobody is forcing anyone to take it. > It simply wouldn't work in a country that did not have such huge wealth disparity. Wealth disparity has nothing to do with it. Uber prices are set by supply and demand. In some countries, Uber may need to pay more to attract drivers - and raise prices as a result.
tabtab 8y ago
Based on that chart, I should have invested in Gone Inc.
Androider 8y ago
The chart shows Instacart receiving the most VC to date. Now there's a company with a business model completely ass-backwards (in-store isle walking), a terrible customer experience (regularly out of items you order since there's no backend integration) and disappointment all around (swapping out products for vaguely related 5x pricier ones, or arriving with about half of what you needed to make your dinner). When that company rightfully craters, the blast zone is going to be spectacular.
- downrightmike 8y ago
  The VC money will crater, everyone else will just see it disappear. Grocery stores have been trying to make this successful for decades and fail every time. It is a nice idea, but the same problems exist and aren't solved, even in this iteration. So it will fail.
buboard 8y ago
> The haves and the have-nots might be given new names: the demanding and the on-demand It doesnt have to be split that way. "Living as a service" is our future, as more and more people end up living but also working on-demand instead of steady home / 8 hours. Technology was supposed to be the lubricant that would catalyze this conversion, and these startups might be just the beginning. Automation will only accelerate the trend, and in the end the platforms themselves will be commodified, because these services rely on physical proximity which inherently limits their network effects (hence why they subsidize their prices - a futile endeavor). I think attacking the model is not helping, improvement is what it needs.
no_identd 8y ago
Speaking of Servants and Economics: A while ago, I conjectured that Land Rent Theory doesn't properly factor in live-in servants, something I suspect would minorly affect the mathematics of it. By how much on a micro-scale, I can't say, but based on this an the above article, a more macro-scale-economical thought follows, on a more interesting level of abstraction than 'communal land prices': If we consider an area a given Uber-for-X service operates in, and given that the employees there finance their living within that area by working for those companies, don't those employees then map to them effectively becoming live in-servants of the entire group living within the respective areas of operations? You know what live in-servants used to get called in some circumstances? If you have an immediate answer to that question, you might want to think about whatever answer you immediately had at hand for a bit and how it got there. And if not, you might want to think very hard about which message you've failed to notice here.
- golergka 8y ago
  > You know what live in-servants used to get called in some circumstances? Are these circumstances involve free will and ability to make decisions about one's fortune or lack thereof?
  - Throwawayzoink 8y ago
    Having the ability to choose between 0$ and anything more than 0$ ?
- jessaustin 8y ago
  This is an ambitious rhetorical style. Most of us are probably going to fail your test and not realize it. Some of us will realize that the test itself is a heads-you-win-tails-we-lose pointless exercise anyway. If you are seeking to persuade, you could be more explicit.
  - ABCLAW 8y ago
    Slaves. He's talking about slaves.
jokoon 8y ago
I thought the internet would connect people who could do things together, not only to share a car or some chore, but to share company, help each other, build a network. That was the sharing economy. If you look at tinder, this concept of finding compatible people by economic goal, interest and location is really the ideal things we want from the internet. But instead we're back to the basics of market mechanics, profitability, jobs, consumption, comfort, and the ability to make money. It's not surprising. But I still have faith in an internet of proximity where people post ads, talk with nearby people for stuff they need or trade, instead of letting big money own how internet gets to be used.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- tinbad 8y ago
  IMO what you describe can be summarized as a UX problem. Those things are there but it takes time and effort to find them, usually hard to figure out and therefor not adoptable by the masses. It's much easier to sign up for FB and start consuming through their slick UX. This is why big money wins time and time again. This is why Bitcoin, Linux, IRC, p2p, etc never had as much of a mass breakthrough as some had hoped, and likely never will.
  - jsutton 8y ago
    On the contrary, if it is a UX problem, then the Bitcoins of the world should eventually have a breakthrough if the tech is valuable, so long as the right UX can be found. It happened to IRC already (Slack). We just need more focus and investment on UX.
    - no_identd 8y ago
      Fix the Developer UX of TCP/IP by surplanting it with GNUnet (Which still needs some serious improvements) & RINA (that also goes for RINA), and the rest will fall into place.
- buboard 8y ago
CryptoPunk 8y ago
>>These platforms may unlock new potentials within our cities and lives. They’ve definitely generated huge fortunes for a very small number of people. But mostly, they’ve served to make our lives marginally more convenient than they were before. Like so many other parts of the world tech has built, the societal trade-off, when fully calculated, seems as likely to fall in the red as in the black. People who work in the "servant" (aka service) industry using platforms like Uber are happy to have the opportunity. Giving people more work options is good, not bad. This idea that letting suppliers and consumers compete in a free market leads to a "race to the bottom" is an old trope that has been around since at least the time of Marx (Marx himself claimed that free market exchange would lead to the impoverishment of workers as a result of mechanization). The reality, as confirmed by economists and demonstrated by statistical evidence, has always been exactly the opposite: real wages have steadily increased over the last two centuries, meaning people are forced to work fewer hours to meet their basic needs, and have more time to do what they genuinely want. Even in a perfectly free market, overcoming the challenges of organizing a complex economy to raise the standard of living is a daunting task, strewn with the carcasses of dead startups, and years of sacrifice in funding and building out businesses to test new models, and in maintaining and administering established businessses to provide people with the goods/services that let them live their lives. We don't need to add to these difficulties with paternalistic restrictions on private property and free exchange rights motivated by bad ideas like the author's.
solidsnack9000 8y ago
With the conclusion, the author seems to present a good argument for the new platforms being more of an effect than a cause, but not see it. If "The inequalities of capitalist economies are not exactly news." and it was only in "...the short-lived narrowing of economic fortunes wrapped around the Second World War..." that we saw a different structure, maybe these platforms are merely the outcome of the social forces they could never be expected to control. The inequalities of capitalist economies are not exactly news. As my colleague Esther Bloom pointed out, “For centuries, a woman’s social status was clear-cut: either she had a maid or she was one.” Domestic servants—to walk the dog, do the laundry, clean the house, get groceries—were a fixture of life in America well into the 20th century. In the short-lived narrowing of economic fortunes wrapped around the Second World War that created what Americans think of as “the middle class,” servants became far less common, even as dual-income families became more the norm and the hours Americans worked lengthened. What the combined efforts of the Uber-for-X companies created is a new form of servant, one distributed through complex markets to thousands of different people. It was Uber, after all, that launched with the idea of becoming “everyone’s private driver,” a chauffeur for all. An unkind summary, then, of the past half decade of the consumer internet: Venture capitalists have subsidized the creation of platforms for low-paying work that deliver on-demand servant services to rich people, while subjecting all parties to increased surveillance. These platforms may unlock new potentials within our cities and lives. They’ve definitely generated huge fortunes for a very small number of people. But mostly, they’ve served to make our lives marginally more convenient than they were before. Like so many other parts of the world tech has built, the societal trade-off, when fully calculated, seems as likely to fall in the red as in the black.
3xblah 8y ago
"An unkind summary, then, of the past half decade of the consumer internet: Venture capitalists have subsidized the creation of platforms for low-paying work that deliver on-demand servant services to rich people, while subjecting all parties to increased surveillance." "Unkind"? How would we make it less "unkind"? Half-decade? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyLackey.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyLackey.com
- eevilspock 8y ago
  One day my friends and I were walking in downtown Seattle. Looking up we saw a huge billboard that simply said, "MyLackey.com". What an asinine, tone-deaf, elitist, heartless yet honest name we thought[1]. Later we learned one of the founders was Brian McGarvey, someone we had worked with in a prior startup. His idea was to take Kozmo.com[2] up a notch. It exemplified the dot-com boom, and now Facebook, Uber, and much of Silicon Valley then and today: get rich quick, fuck humanity. --- [1] Much the same way Trump's election is America being honest with itself. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com
abvdasker 8y ago
Mark my words, this is one of those tech articles that in 10 years will seem laughably outdated (not that anyone will remember this article in 10 years). It creates a false equivalency between the services that existed before and those that exist through the so-called "gig economy". But this part of the ending really bothered me: > Venture capitalists have subsidized the creation of platforms for low-paying work ... while subjecting all parties to increased surveillance. In general, there has been a remarkable lack of privacy or security violations by the so-alled "gig economy" companies. The author seems to be conflating the previous generation of information-only companies like Facebook and Google with gig economy companies like Uber. For all its ills, Uber does not get enough credit for the fact that it does not sell or otherwise distribute the customer's data for money. Instead it provides a service in exchange for pay. The information customers provide to Uber stays with Uber, which cannot be said of Facebook, Instagram, Google, LinkedIn or just about any other information-only tech company. That the author chooses to end his article with a factually ignorant statement about surveillance reveals a how devoid of substance the rest of the article turns out to be.
chpmrc 8y ago
Anyone who has lived or is living in a foreign country, and doesn't speak the language, appreciates the presence (or lack thereof) of these services. I know I do. Without even considering that there are people who get very anxious talking on the phone, for whom these are often a life saver. Where I live now there is no Uber but there is no app for taxis either. You have to call a number, be able to speak Spanish, wait 3-5 minutes and then they'll tell you the ID of the taxi, which you have to remember. If anything goes wrong the taxi driver has to call the station which in turn will call you and try to figure out where you are. Sorry but screw that!
- telesilla 8y ago
  There will be a private driver system in that country. Ask someone local you trust, they can give you the name of a driver who speaks english (or enough of it) and you can book them ahead when needed. It's like Uber for Uber, but old-school pre-app style. As it's been done for centuries.
  - chpmrc 8y ago
    "Ask someone local you trust" already assumes you've been there for enough time to know and befriend some local, which is almost never the case, for frequent travellers, plus "private" (more often than not unlicensed) drivers usually charge a ton more. Direct experience in multiple places.
justanotherjoe 8y ago
Employers seem to be happy for an automated performance metric of their employees. They said that it will let them provide incentives and bonuses for performing workers. I always saw it as a tool for punishing, not rewarding. Anyway, chasing rewards or running from punishment, are not what i call good living.
dotcoma 8y ago
Venture capitalists have subsidized the creation of platforms for low-paying work that deliver on-demand servant services to rich people, while subjecting all parties to increased surveillance. Spot on.

> The unicorns have taken huge sums of money: on average, $1 billion in venture funding each. A sure-fire way to become a unicorn: raise $1B in VC. You're instantly worth a billion dollars, just based on your bank account.

Deimorz 8y ago
Some people are calling those "minotaurs" now, apparently: https://www.axios.com/minotaurs-companies-raised-more-than-1-billion-99250290-99b7-435d-82f9-810d172478cc.html https://www.axios.com/minotaurs-companies-raised-more-than-1...
lazyasciiart 8y ago
If you're really clever you could go into the round with a negative balance sheet.
adrianN 8y ago
Sell one billionth of your company for $1. Much easier.

dwighttk 8y ago

Blue Apron? Why is that included? Blue Apron is Uber for... what? Aren't the boxes just delivered by ups or fedex or usps or whatever? Do they have independent contractors filling the boxes?

CharlesColeman 8y ago
> Blue Apron is Uber for... what? Measuring food into portions.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dwighttk 8y ago
  So McDonalds is Uber for cooking food?

thekhatribharat 8y ago

What about the quality of service guarantees provided by Uber-for-X platforms? Both the service provider and the service consumer can see each other's social ratings and feedback on these platforms. A whole new set of customers become willing to engage with a more diverse set of service providers solely because of the quality of service guarantees (and not just convenience of the tap of a button) - AirBnB and the recently YC-launched VanGo are good examples.

Tade0 8y ago
What about the quality of service guarantees provided by Uber-for-X platforms? Frankly after that one time when my driver turned in reverse to face the wrong way I don't think there are any in practice and the system had been gamed a long time ago.
jimbokun 8y ago
Actually, shouldn't "Uber-for-X" literally be the business model? Can't you abstract away the specifics for all the verticals, and let someone quickly spin up their specific vertical in a few minutes, leveraging producer/consumer data models, social ratings, feedback, fraud detection, etc. Any reason why each "Uber-for-X" should be it's own company with its own custom built back ends and front ends?
- thekhatribharat 8y ago
  There are a good number of companies and open source projects in that space, that help with your Uber-for-X business. A few examples below - 1. Background checks for service providers - https://checkr.com https://checkr.com 2. Asset Tracking & Analytics - https://www.hypertrack.com/product https://www.hypertrack.com/product
- no_identd 8y ago
  Now consider the next steps: * Turn-key standing up of Uber-for-X service * Automating provisioning and downtearing of Uber-for-X services based on economic supply & demand (Think Microservices and Heroku Dynos) * ...doing all that as a non-profit, because once you automate that, how does the money flow, assuming an open source application? Uh-oh. I mean hell you could probably do half of this within a few months if you also use eTurk or something. Could even use Remote Personal Assistant services, too. Just would need a really good process model before you can start on starting with that. Edit: Come to think of it, what Uber-for-X companies do sound a lot like something almost completely covered by things like this sluggish monster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frameworx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frameworx Originally developed by the biggest telcos. (Yes that is why this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3IPVWN-1ks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3IPVWN-1ks applies to ALL carriers.)

mothsonasloth 8y ago

Economically wealthy but time poor --> customer Economically poor but time rich --> servant Serfdom 2.0 Ladies and Gentlemen

wwweston 8y ago
Economically poor AND time poor --> high-efficiency and optimal return for capital! Remember kids, like Adam Smith said: in an efficient and competitive market, the price of a good or service falls to the cost of production. If you believe him, what does that mean for labor?
- zeroname 8y ago
  > If you believe him, what does that mean for labor? It means you are fairly compensated for your work and you pay fair prices for the product of other people's work.
  - peteradio 8y ago
    I think it means there are a lot of jobs not worth doing but the worker doesn't know it's putting them in decline or the decline is better than the alternative. I do not think being paid below a living wage should be refered to as fair under any circumstances.
    - zeroname 8y ago
      I'm talking about a fair price. Wages are prices. A fair price is one that both parties agree to. Curiously, many people work for free. Is that unfair? I'm not talking about fairness in terms of equality. People are not equal in terms of economic value they never will be. Indeed, some people have no better choice than accept a job that pays less than a living wage. Would you deny them that possibility by mandating that every job needs to pay a living wage? Isn't that unfair?
      - ABCLAW 8y ago

areoform 8y ago

Sometimes it's hard not to take a step back and wonder if the singularity has already occurred. Corporations are, in more ways than one, a form of Artificial Intelligence. They are greater than the sum of their parts, they possess attrition tolerance (i.e. any single node can be removed and the corporation will continue), and no single individual can understand the whole breadth of its execution in detail or hold it in their head. They have this almost emergent intelligence about them where corporations as a whole can decide to do things that individuals would find abhorrent. There is no one person who pushes the button. All of them who push the button as a part of this new entity that we've created. This AI doesn't have morality and it can never have morality simply because they aren't human. Individuals have morals. Corporations have objectives. And their objective is to maximize economic utility at all costs. So they launder money for drug lords and terrorists https://www.foxnews.com/world/hsbc-knowingly-helped-mexican-cartels-launder-billions-lawsuit-claims https://www.foxnews.com/world/hsbc-knowingly-helped-mexican-... https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/hsbc-holdings-plc-and-hsbc-bank-usa-na-admit-anti-money-laundering-and-sanctions-violations https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/hsbc-holdings-plc-and-hsbc-ba... . Knowingly kill human beings in clinical trials http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/02/pfizer.bextra/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/02/pfizer.bextra/index.htm... . And undermine the commons to maximize their utility towards their ends. While capitalism as a whole isn't an AI, it is an amazing computational process that has produced the greatest advancements in the standard of living in history. But the process is also similarly unmoved and lacking in human morality simply because it isn't human. It takes the route of lowest resistance and it creates to satisfy the utility function that it is computing. And that's it. Is it a shock that these processes have exposed these vulnerabilities in our society?

sevensor 8y ago
Interesting perspective. I've done a lot of black-box optimization, and the first thing you learn is that it's really good at breaking your model. What happens when the fitness function is evaluated on the global economy?
- torpfactory 8y ago
  Global environmental catastrophe.

sevensor 8y ago

It's interesting to consider the gig economy as a reversion to the class-stratified social order that prevailed throughout so much of history. From that perspective, it's the last seven or eight decades that are particularly strange and deserving of study, and not the reemergence of a servant class.

jpatokal 8y ago
Servants for the rich never went away. What's new is the concept of easily summoned single-task servants for the middle class: now anybody with a phone and a bit of spare money can delegate tasks, and the people fulfilling those tasks lack even the basic job security of having a steady employer. All that said, I do find the article's use of "servant" somewhat demeaning. Is a self-employed tradesman like a plumber a "servant"? How about a freelance software developer? Where do you draw the line?
- leetcrew 8y ago
  it's worth asking what the word servant even means/connotes. a first-rate butler can make $100k or more. if you have a well-paid butler working for a single household, a low wage house cleaner who cleans many different homes, a salaried web dev, and a freelance web dev, which members of the group would you describe as "servants"? does it matter if the butler makes more money than the devs?
  - torpfactory 8y ago
    I don' think that is a terribly good example to bring up. While there are certainly a small number of well paid butlers, there is a veritable army of contract cleaners who roam our offices and homes during the night and day. Most of them are making in the vicinity of minimum wage. I'm not sure if servant is the right word for them, but gosh it seems unfair just how badly paid they are.
    - gbacon 8y ago
      The economist must consider both the seen and the unseen. Let’s say a $15 minimum wage for custodians is instituted. Sure, it’s great for the “lucky” ones who remain employed. A moment’s reflection shows they aren’t lucky at all: they’re going to be the most productive of the bunch and not selected at random. This policy, allegedly put into place in the name of fairness, is decidedly unfair to people (for example young, inexperienced, or disabled) whose hourly productivity lies between the arbitrary minimum and consumers’ actual demand, or to the staff at the place of business who just picked up additional “other duties as assigned” because cleaning services just got so expensive. Competing on price for low-skill work that anyone can walk in off the street and do (that is, lots of competition) is a terrible strategy compared to competing on quality. Think: “Acme Cleaners, where all our employees have passed multiple background checks.”

jrbapna 8y ago

"Now you can do stuff that you could already do before, but you can do it with your phone. What it takes to make that work is incredible—venture capitalists have poured $672 million combined into Wag and Rover!—but the consumer impact is small. Instead of taking a number off a bulletin board in a coffee shop and calling Eric to walk Rufus, you hit a few buttons on your phone and Eric comes over." The above is a very cynical interpretation. What it fails to capture is the idea that incremental benefits multiplied by millions of people is a huge NET benefit to society as a whole. An anecdote: Arrived at the airport the other day and the baggage claim was backed up by about 30 minutes. While 30 minutes is not a big deal, multiply it across the 300 hundred or so passengers on the flight, and you'll get about 6 ENTIRE HUMAN DAYS were wasted due to an operational inefficiency. But hey, who needs uber when it only takes a few minutes to hail a cab? ;)

jiveturkey 8y ago
That's a silly way to evaluate utility, or at least your example is. Let's shave a minute of sleep off of everyone in the world. In just one day we will gain back 14 THOUSAND years of productivity.
- jerf 8y ago
  And that's silly because...?
  - Barrin92 8y ago
    Because shaving off a minute of sleep isn't necessarily a profitable business that needs venture capital, which is the point of the article. There is no moat in moving something from a billboard to a smartphone app, there is no obvious way in which this 'appification' industry is actually profitable or a viable business. One particularly prominent example being moviepass. Is there some potential gain for customers in there somewhere, yes obviously but does that mean that sending you a credit card and having investors subsidize your cinema habits is a viable business or even worthy of being called 'technology'? No.

zeroname 8y ago

"An unkind summary, then, of the past half decade of the consumer internet: Venture capitalists have subsidized the creation of platforms for low-paying work that deliver on-demand servant services to rich people, while subjecting all parties to increased surveillance." The whole "rich vs poor divide" angle is nonsense. Like the article admits, all of these services were available before, but now they have the form of an app. The money goes to develop and advertise the whole show (creating jobs), but also to subsidize the labor. In effect, these services are more affordable than before. Uber is cheaper than a Taxi. Having your groceries delivered can be cheaper than doing it yourself, even if you earn small. All that venture capital comes from the rich and goes into the pockets of those who aren't rich. It's dumb money, the same kind that made pets.com (a ludicrous business) go to a 100 million dollar market cap. As soon as that capital dries up, these shops will close down, or raise prices. They will never make their money back, because nobody will be able to maintain a monopoly on a service that almost anyone can perform. That's also why the labor itself will stay cheap, no matter who the middleman is. It's not like these jobs were highly lucrative before all these capitalists walked in.

peterwwillis 8y ago
Uber wasn't available before Uber. Taxis were available, but those are very different things. It really is a job platform designed to take advantage of people who need multiple jobs, and surprise surprise, there's a slew of 'em here. It simply wouldn't work in a country that did not have such huge wealth disparity.
- jessaustin 8y ago
  Neither would fast food. Is Uber worse than Taco Bell? You can ignore nutritional atrocities if you like...
- zeroname 8y ago
  Taxis aren't very different things at all. That's why in many countries, Uber has been banned. They're regarded as taxis circumventing taxi regulations. > It really is a job platform designed to take advantage of people who need multiple jobs, and surprise surprise, there's a slew of 'em here. Any job offer is taking advantage of the fact that people aren't magical self-sufficient entities. There's nothing wrong with offering a job, nobody is forcing anyone to take it. > It simply wouldn't work in a country that did not have such huge wealth disparity. Wealth disparity has nothing to do with it. Uber prices are set by supply and demand. In some countries, Uber may need to pay more to attract drivers - and raise prices as a result.

tabtab 8y ago

Based on that chart, I should have invested in Gone Inc.

Androider 8y ago

The chart shows Instacart receiving the most VC to date. Now there's a company with a business model completely ass-backwards (in-store isle walking), a terrible customer experience (regularly out of items you order since there's no backend integration) and disappointment all around (swapping out products for vaguely related 5x pricier ones, or arriving with about half of what you needed to make your dinner). When that company rightfully craters, the blast zone is going to be spectacular.

downrightmike 8y ago
The VC money will crater, everyone else will just see it disappear. Grocery stores have been trying to make this successful for decades and fail every time. It is a nice idea, but the same problems exist and aren't solved, even in this iteration. So it will fail.

buboard 8y ago

> The haves and the have-nots might be given new names: the demanding and the on-demand It doesnt have to be split that way. "Living as a service" is our future, as more and more people end up living but also working on-demand instead of steady home / 8 hours. Technology was supposed to be the lubricant that would catalyze this conversion, and these startups might be just the beginning. Automation will only accelerate the trend, and in the end the platforms themselves will be commodified, because these services rely on physical proximity which inherently limits their network effects (hence why they subsidize their prices - a futile endeavor). I think attacking the model is not helping, improvement is what it needs.

no_identd 8y ago

Speaking of Servants and Economics: A while ago, I conjectured that Land Rent Theory doesn't properly factor in live-in servants, something I suspect would minorly affect the mathematics of it. By how much on a micro-scale, I can't say, but based on this an the above article, a more macro-scale-economical thought follows, on a more interesting level of abstraction than 'communal land prices': If we consider an area a given Uber-for-X service operates in, and given that the employees there finance their living within that area by working for those companies, don't those employees then map to them effectively becoming live in-servants of the entire group living within the respective areas of operations? You know what live in-servants used to get called in some circumstances? If you have an immediate answer to that question, you might want to think about whatever answer you immediately had at hand for a bit and how it got there. And if not, you might want to think very hard about which message you've failed to notice here.

golergka 8y ago
> You know what live in-servants used to get called in some circumstances? Are these circumstances involve free will and ability to make decisions about one's fortune or lack thereof?
- Throwawayzoink 8y ago
  Having the ability to choose between 0$ and anything more than 0$ ?
jessaustin 8y ago
This is an ambitious rhetorical style. Most of us are probably going to fail your test and not realize it. Some of us will realize that the test itself is a heads-you-win-tails-we-lose pointless exercise anyway. If you are seeking to persuade, you could be more explicit.
- ABCLAW 8y ago
  Slaves. He's talking about slaves.

jokoon 8y ago

I thought the internet would connect people who could do things together, not only to share a car or some chore, but to share company, help each other, build a network. That was the sharing economy. If you look at tinder, this concept of finding compatible people by economic goal, interest and location is really the ideal things we want from the internet. But instead we're back to the basics of market mechanics, profitability, jobs, consumption, comfort, and the ability to make money. It's not surprising. But I still have faith in an internet of proximity where people post ads, talk with nearby people for stuff they need or trade, instead of letting big money own how internet gets to be used.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
tinbad 8y ago
IMO what you describe can be summarized as a UX problem. Those things are there but it takes time and effort to find them, usually hard to figure out and therefor not adoptable by the masses. It's much easier to sign up for FB and start consuming through their slick UX. This is why big money wins time and time again. This is why Bitcoin, Linux, IRC, p2p, etc never had as much of a mass breakthrough as some had hoped, and likely never will.
- jsutton 8y ago
  On the contrary, if it is a UX problem, then the Bitcoins of the world should eventually have a breakthrough if the tech is valuable, so long as the right UX can be found. It happened to IRC already (Slack). We just need more focus and investment on UX.
  - no_identd 8y ago
    Fix the Developer UX of TCP/IP by surplanting it with GNUnet (Which still needs some serious improvements) & RINA (that also goes for RINA), and the rest will fall into place.
buboard 8y ago

CryptoPunk 8y ago

>>These platforms may unlock new potentials within our cities and lives. They’ve definitely generated huge fortunes for a very small number of people. But mostly, they’ve served to make our lives marginally more convenient than they were before. Like so many other parts of the world tech has built, the societal trade-off, when fully calculated, seems as likely to fall in the red as in the black. People who work in the "servant" (aka service) industry using platforms like Uber are happy to have the opportunity. Giving people more work options is good, not bad. This idea that letting suppliers and consumers compete in a free market leads to a "race to the bottom" is an old trope that has been around since at least the time of Marx (Marx himself claimed that free market exchange would lead to the impoverishment of workers as a result of mechanization). The reality, as confirmed by economists and demonstrated by statistical evidence, has always been exactly the opposite: real wages have steadily increased over the last two centuries, meaning people are forced to work fewer hours to meet their basic needs, and have more time to do what they genuinely want. Even in a perfectly free market, overcoming the challenges of organizing a complex economy to raise the standard of living is a daunting task, strewn with the carcasses of dead startups, and years of sacrifice in funding and building out businesses to test new models, and in maintaining and administering established businessses to provide people with the goods/services that let them live their lives. We don't need to add to these difficulties with paternalistic restrictions on private property and free exchange rights motivated by bad ideas like the author's.

solidsnack9000 8y ago

With the conclusion, the author seems to present a good argument for the new platforms being more of an effect than a cause, but not see it. If "The inequalities of capitalist economies are not exactly news." and it was only in "...the short-lived narrowing of economic fortunes wrapped around the Second World War..." that we saw a different structure, maybe these platforms are merely the outcome of the social forces they could never be expected to control. The inequalities of capitalist economies are not exactly news. As my colleague Esther Bloom pointed out, “For centuries, a woman’s social status was clear-cut: either she had a maid or she was one.” Domestic servants—to walk the dog, do the laundry, clean the house, get groceries—were a fixture of life in America well into the 20th century. In the short-lived narrowing of economic fortunes wrapped around the Second World War that created what Americans think of as “the middle class,” servants became far less common, even as dual-income families became more the norm and the hours Americans worked lengthened. What the combined efforts of the Uber-for-X companies created is a new form of servant, one distributed through complex markets to thousands of different people. It was Uber, after all, that launched with the idea of becoming “everyone’s private driver,” a chauffeur for all. An unkind summary, then, of the past half decade of the consumer internet: Venture capitalists have subsidized the creation of platforms for low-paying work that deliver on-demand servant services to rich people, while subjecting all parties to increased surveillance. These platforms may unlock new potentials within our cities and lives. They’ve definitely generated huge fortunes for a very small number of people. But mostly, they’ve served to make our lives marginally more convenient than they were before. Like so many other parts of the world tech has built, the societal trade-off, when fully calculated, seems as likely to fall in the red as in the black.

3xblah 8y ago

eevilspock 8y ago
One day my friends and I were walking in downtown Seattle. Looking up we saw a huge billboard that simply said, "MyLackey.com". What an asinine, tone-deaf, elitist, heartless yet honest name we thought[1]. Later we learned one of the founders was Brian McGarvey, someone we had worked with in a prior startup. His idea was to take Kozmo.com[2] up a notch. It exemplified the dot-com boom, and now Facebook, Uber, and much of Silicon Valley then and today: get rich quick, fuck humanity. --- [1] Much the same way Trump's election is America being honest with itself. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com

abvdasker 8y ago

Mark my words, this is one of those tech articles that in 10 years will seem laughably outdated (not that anyone will remember this article in 10 years). It creates a false equivalency between the services that existed before and those that exist through the so-called "gig economy". But this part of the ending really bothered me: > Venture capitalists have subsidized the creation of platforms for low-paying work ... while subjecting all parties to increased surveillance. In general, there has been a remarkable lack of privacy or security violations by the so-alled "gig economy" companies. The author seems to be conflating the previous generation of information-only companies like Facebook and Google with gig economy companies like Uber. For all its ills, Uber does not get enough credit for the fact that it does not sell or otherwise distribute the customer's data for money. Instead it provides a service in exchange for pay. The information customers provide to Uber stays with Uber, which cannot be said of Facebook, Instagram, Google, LinkedIn or just about any other information-only tech company. That the author chooses to end his article with a factually ignorant statement about surveillance reveals a how devoid of substance the rest of the article turns out to be.

chpmrc 8y ago

Anyone who has lived or is living in a foreign country, and doesn't speak the language, appreciates the presence (or lack thereof) of these services. I know I do. Without even considering that there are people who get very anxious talking on the phone, for whom these are often a life saver. Where I live now there is no Uber but there is no app for taxis either. You have to call a number, be able to speak Spanish, wait 3-5 minutes and then they'll tell you the ID of the taxi, which you have to remember. If anything goes wrong the taxi driver has to call the station which in turn will call you and try to figure out where you are. Sorry but screw that!

telesilla 8y ago
There will be a private driver system in that country. Ask someone local you trust, they can give you the name of a driver who speaks english (or enough of it) and you can book them ahead when needed. It's like Uber for Uber, but old-school pre-app style. As it's been done for centuries.
- chpmrc 8y ago
  "Ask someone local you trust" already assumes you've been there for enough time to know and befriend some local, which is almost never the case, for frequent travellers, plus "private" (more often than not unlicensed) drivers usually charge a ton more. Direct experience in multiple places.

justanotherjoe 8y ago

Employers seem to be happy for an automated performance metric of their employees. They said that it will let them provide incentives and bonuses for performing workers. I always saw it as a tool for punishing, not rewarding. Anyway, chasing rewards or running from punishment, are not what i call good living.

dotcoma 8y ago

Venture capitalists have subsidized the creation of platforms for low-paying work that deliver on-demand servant services to rich people, while subjecting all parties to increased surveillance. Spot on.