22 ms·

VCs are financing an economy of servants

164 points by sarathyweb 5y ago

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jandrese 5y ago
Isn't this called "having a job"?
- smt88 5y ago
  The difference is that it's often one-on-one work doing unskilled, sometimes humiliating jobs for very low pay with no hope of a promotion or career, no benefits, etc. It's perhaps the indignity and the massive disparity in income that seem distasteful in the richest countries on earth.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    Why should the only jobs be careers? I don't think most people delivering takeout want the pressure of trying to get promotions and advancement. They like the flexibility. Lots of retired people I know drive Uber/Lyft to get themselves out of the house. They've already had a career. They don't want another one.
    - giantrobot 5y ago
      This leads back to the McJob [0] problem. McJobs lead to underemployment, the oft ignored cousin of unemployment. While the McJobs are often advertised by employers as extra money for e.g. high school students, for a lot of people they're primary jobs. For that cohort they want a better job but can't find them so take what they can get with the McJob. What we've seen in the past two decades with the four recessions we've experienced is companies cutting the "good" jobs and never bringing them back. In the overall job market they're replaced with McJobs, so the U3 rate goes down while the U6 goes up or remains steady and everyone rejoices because what the hell is the U6? McJobs also tend to have pretty high costs to the employees that aren't always obvious or even recognized. Split shifts and variable schedules (and demands for complete availability) make scheduling anything difficult or impossible. Getting child care is expensive. No medical benefits mean anyone not eligible for coverage under their parents' plans (provided they have insurance) mean ridiculous expenses for medical care. Wear and tear of vehicles for commuting to the split shifts or driving self-owned vehicles as a gig is expensive. Not all jobs need to be careers but we have an environment where most people working a non-career job are just wage slaves. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McJob https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McJob
  - golergka 5y ago
    Unskilled, humiliating jobs for very low pay with no hope of a promotion or career always existed. If this industry doesn't create more jobs like that, it means it's only getting the ones that were already here, and doesn't change anything. If this industry creates more jobs like that, shouldn't it mean that competition for the lower-skilled workers will increase and their pay will go up?
- hogFeast 5y ago
  No. You don't have a "job" if you work for most of these companies. You are self-employed.
Ericson2314 5y ago
I don't know about Europe, but in the US a lot of this relates to the fundamental inefficiency of the suburbs. In NYC already, paying smoeone on an e-bike to deliver 10 meals in one short trip is way better, but why stop there. There is no reason we cannot bring back the old pneumatic tube delivery systems of yore (and expand them according to 100-year-old sci-fi too). Conversely, none of that could ever be possible in the suburbs, and your doomed to waste your life in traffic in pay a poor immigrant to do so on your behalf.
- gumby 5y ago
  Not every meal is a burrito. all joking aside i sent myself a « pneumatique » a year or so before the system was shut down. I had to go to the post office to send it and I picked it up from the other one (rode the Métro to get it). Otherwise a courier would have transported it, I suppose (I don’t remember). In any case it was pretty inefficient by then and the ramification due to subsequent construction makes it impractical.
  - erdo 5y ago
    Wait. What? Was that a thing? I've only ever seen them in supermarkets to send cash upstairs. Was this in Paris?
    - zabzonk 5y ago
      https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Paris_pneumatic_post https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Paris_pneumatic_post
    - okr 5y ago
      In Berlin too: https://dewiki.de/Lexikon/Rohrpost_in_Berlin https://dewiki.de/Lexikon/Rohrpost_in_Berlin
    - cowbellemoo 5y ago
      Many cities had bulk mail pneumatic systems from the late 1800s into the post-WWI era, but Paris had a specific class of mail which was like a cross between a courier and a telegram served by the pneumatic system (which was big for handwritten love letters[0]) Pneumatic tubes interestingly started out as a bandwidth problem for telegraph operators. You couldn't cram enough operators and telegraph infrastructure into the stock exchange of London or Paris so the telegraph companies would have a dedicated pneumatic tube for sending paper dispatches from the stock exchange a few blocks to the telegraph headquarters, where hundreds of operators would then relay the information over wire. IMO, pneumatic technology peaked in 1920s Berlin where at the Resi night club you could give someone presents and recreational drugs delivered via pneumatic tube directly to their table.[1] I collected a bunch of ephemera about pneumatic tube and cash railway systems a while back. Highlights include a viscious scalping, notable passengers (cats, mice, spiders, kids, and the 3rd Duke of Buckingham), and many videos and pictures of surviving systems in operation. Here are my notes.[2] [0] https://www.nytimes.com/1925/11/21/archives/grandson-of-bret-harte-ends-life-in-paris-girls-reconciliation-note.html https://www.nytimes.com/1925/11/21/archives/grandson-of-bret... [1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pneumatic-tube-table-phone-flirting-berlin https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pneumatic-tube-table-p... [2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FHI8AMI74jPrVXBHLjBCwz2xjtwrRL6Bo4-kCv96Ie0/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FHI8AMI74jPrVXBHLjBCwz2x...
sergiotapia 5y ago
Thought exercise: poof these businesses vanish. What do all these people start doing to support their families? You think they care about you "getting exercise" when they can't feed their children?
- xenocratus 5y ago
  Presumably working for another company doing something more productive, built with the money that the poof'ed firms would've gotten.
  - iamstupidsimple 5y ago
    That's not how capital distribution works. These VCs would've put their money elsewhere, possibly something you consider 'even less productive'.
  - Matticus_Rex 5y ago
    Right now there's more money out there to be invested than there are good businesses to invest in. If those businesses were out there and were profitable enough to hire people more productively with a higher standard of living... where are they? This line of reasoning seems like a hand-wave.
- carabiner 5y ago
  Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
standardUser 5y ago
"The world’s most powerful VC investors are funding an economy where technology allows a ‘ruling class’ to command an ‘underclass’ of servants with the swipe of an app." This is such absurd hyperbole. Show me an economy where a significant number of people didn't have insecure incomes, lack of benefits or do menial work and maybe we can talk about how to recreate that in the modern world. Problem is, such an economy has never existed. Instead of faux yearning for a "return" to such a mythical system, let's talk about how to make our system better.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  >Show me an economy where a significant number of people didn't have insecure incomes Here in Germany and the 'German culture adjacent' countries (Switzerland/Austria/Benelux etc) that culture is still very much intact. When you turn 16 you can pick up a vocational program in the very large and still healthy Mittelstand, and you have a steady career for your entire life, decent pay, without having to have pretty much any universe education. The rat-race mentality and cultural divide into the 'cognitive class' and disenfranchised service work is not universal, it's a consequence of the de-industrialization that the Anglosphere in particular went through.
- petermcneeley 5y ago
  "Consider that in the history of many worlds, there have always been disposable creatures. They do the dirty work. They do the work that no one else wants to do because it's too difficult or too hazardous. ...You don't have to think about their welfare, you don't think about how they feel. Whole generations of disposable people." - NG
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andyxor 5y ago
what kind of patronizing ivory-tower marxist bs is that, these apps give people a way to earn a living, especially important for those in disadvantaged socioeconomic strata the authors claim to care about. The author would rather keep people unemployed and on welfare as to not to offend their sensibilities, such typical fake liberalism.
- arez 5y ago
  He's making the point that an unstable underpayed job is not something anyone would want. It's a fair question to ask which jobs we want in our society and which not. You probably would argue that "at least they have a job", but the jobs people have shapes the society we life in, stable, unstable, reasonably paid or not
  - andyxor 5y ago
    why would someone decide for others what they want or don't want? you can get a paying gig with apps even if you don't have a stable job record, prior convictions, bad credit, history of addiction or mental health issues or whatnot, you don't need to pass excruciating rounds of "background checks" and interviews which would filter you out because you're poor or look different People can raise themselves from poverty and support their family, even with these temp gigs you can pay your bills and avoid eviction, how arrogant and patronizing someone can be to deny people a honest way to make a living
    - hogFeast 5y ago
      You don't appear to connect some people having no choice with their lack of choice being exploited. The issue with people discriminated against is discrimination. The solution is not devising some totally new form of employment that has no security, no benefits, etc. so that people we hate can feed themselves. The solution is stopping discrimination (which btw, has been successful...it isn't a panacea). If you offered people doing these jobs the chance to take a normal job that paid the same, they would mostly take it. And the problem is that many people who work these jobs can't "support their family" (again, ppl do this work because they have no choice). These jobs aren't unlocking some new source of productivity. Uber has not made taxis faster or cheaper. Uber has just unleashed a bidding war where prices get driven down (benefitting relatively wealthy people) as activities that were formerly "jobs" are now self-employed. For people who drive taxis a 10% drop in income is material, for people who take taxis a 10% drop in prices is immaterial. It is that simple.
HenryKissinger 5y ago
> what kind of an economy do you want to produce with your decisions? How far do you want to push the division of labour between (elite) educated high earners and people providing menial services for this class? Investors don't ponder philosophical questions about the nature and long term societal implications of their decisions (well, most of them). They chase yield/roi/yoy. VC's aren't immoral. It just happens that some of the economic activities that optimize yield happen to be the so called 'gigs' that the author derides as "the servant economy".
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Barrin92 5y ago
>This makes me ask an even more fundamental question: is the structure and business model of most VC firms today unfit for solving complex problems sustainably and long-term? Was it ever actually fit for that? The VC economy basically always served one type of company, consumer-focused "lifestyle" or service 'technologies', and nowadays a lot of the institutions like a16z just appear to turn into straight up media outlets. VC success in the industrial sector, biotech, military or scientific applications has always been muted compared to the kind of money that flows into the leisure/consumer/entertainment economy. If you want to solve complex problems bet on Darpa or academia or bring back the corporate research lab whose demise is one of the real big problems today.
- omegalulw 5y ago
  Your point is missing a key idea: consumer/lifestyle technologies are highly profitable, with a much faster ROI.
  - leroman 5y ago
    There's an implicit assumption you are making where your "Return On Investment" measures $$$ and what I believe the article is trying to say is that is exactly the problem and you should be measuring something else
    - cbnotfromthere 5y ago
      " "Return On Investment" measures $$$" What else should measure???
- deleted 5y ago
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- MattGaiser 5y ago
  How much of this is just because for something to be big, it needs to be fairly universally used? I can't imagine any kind of irrigation company every being larger than Uber for example.
oblak 5y ago
So, the concern here is that VC money is helping individuals with a little bit of excess money hire other people to do their bidding. Sounds like one of those "on a computer" things to me. I know the delivery business is booming everywhere but I am mostly concerned from an environmental point of view because that laziness translates into huge amounts of perfectly good containers being treated like they are only good for one thing only: getting some food delivered to you, my liege
- mistrial9 5y ago
  the blue-collar, emotionally challenged, still-single at 40 guy down the street repeatedly makes big orders of food from Whole Foods to be delivered.. breakdown- he does not have a lot of extra money; he does not need more food, he is overweight and there is a lot of food in the fridge; Whole Foods used to be more expensive than other stores, I am unsure if he shops carefully or not In other words, this is a specific example that blurs class and disposable income lines, and is also arguably just bad judgement/addictive behavior on his part.. no grand plans or social changes, unless you count being lonely contributing to your poor health choices as social change.. yet the service is benefiting from his indulgence, and the economy is "growing" .. reality is messy and not cleanly in categories
  - oblak 5y ago
    Not sure why you are being downvoted. I also presume the primary clientele for such services is young adults or people who live alone / have room mates. Cooking for loved ones is a joy. Or so I've been told by my wife
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  Yet instead of 10 people all getting in their cars or ordering ubers, a single delivery driver can take an optimized route...
  - potatolicious 5y ago
    > a single delivery driver can take an optimized route... This is an oft-repeated claim that never seems to actually exist in real life. One of the original pitches of Uber et al was that it would make the whole system so efficient that drivers would get paid more overall thanks to [insert hand-waving here] technology. It's been many years since that promise was made and nothing like it has materialized. For one thing the ability to "batch" things like this is really minimal. You can't put 10 food orders into a single car, because the 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th persons will be receiving cold food. Even if you could batch two orders together, that relies on a level of scale that simply isn't reliably replicable (two orders within a narrow time window of each other, to very nearby restaurants, to destination generally near each other). I've personally seen it happen twice. And then we've also discovered that the delivery gig economy adds a massive new inefficiency that fully offsets the few batching inefficiencies that can be exploited (and then some): idling cars for fast response. It turns out if you want a delivery driver to be around quickly on-demand, you need a lot of cars idling/driving aimlessly, which overall produces even more waste than the status quo.
somethingAlex 5y ago
I fail to see how this new "servant economy" isn't an improvement on the unskilled labor sector. It's never been easier for someone who needs to work two jobs... to work two jobs; one with weekly hours and another you can do whenever is convenient. It has never been easier for a student to make some cash when it's convenient for them and with no weekly obligation. These are improvements on jobs that already existed and new jobs altogether. We should probably be focusing on how to provide more upward mobility and access to education instead of demonizing improvements to an economic sector which will always exist.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  > It's never been easier for someone who needs to work two jobs... to work two jobs People fought for 40 hour work week. If everyone works more hours it will kill productivity and also just suck. I am with you that this stuff is an effect not cause of declining worker power, but the fear this will further erode old victories is genuine and shouldn't be dismissed. Ultimately, yesterday's worker power is not a substitute for a lack today, but (hopefully) once that is somehow fixed, it is really important to turn these norms stuff back.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    > but the fear this will further erode old victories is genuine and shouldn't be dismissed. It should be dismissed because it shows the old “victories” were simply a happenstance of labor supply and demand. It is exposing the fact that there was not really a victory in the sense of it being codified into law. Any effort trying to blame VCs (or any business) for low wages or quality of life at work is a waste of time, as it simply requires a legislative solution.
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
      > It should be dismissed because it shows the old “victories” were simply a happenstance of labor supply and demand. Sure, but not in some exogenous passive way. Market power distorts heavily, and organizing is essential. > It is exposing the fact that there was not really a victory in the sense of it being codified into law. No, it was caudified into law. But law, especially a moribund poorly-written elgacy codebase like our law, is no substitute for ongoing power. That is a fundamental illiberalism of our current society, like it or not.
mgraczyk 5y ago
I wonder if the author has ever visited any developing economy, where racial stratifications of literal servants (doing chores in the home of the masters) is the norm. For example, a huge portion of the migrate Filipino and Indonesian populations in Hong Kong work as full time household servants. The stratification has nothing to do with venture capital. You could argue that VC money makes this industry less stable, and the lack of stability could have a negative impact on "servants", but that's an empirical prediction that I think is less compelling than the moralizing in the article.
tbrooks 5y ago
I wonder if the author’s primary gripe is with 1. VCs funding a so-called “servant economy” or… 2. The fact that there are these businesses that perpetuate some form of servanthood (to use the author’s parlance) If the gig marketplaces were bootstrapped, is there still an inherent problem?
- unclebucknasty 5y ago
  I'm not sure many of these businesses are bootstrappable, as they tend to require massive infusions of cash to make the economics work at start-up. See ride-sharing companies' years of multi-billion dollar losses.
toomuchcredit 5y ago
VCs are just cogs in the wheels taking us from an "Ownership Society" to a "Sharecropper's Society," as Buffett once put it. Private Equity buying up housing, is just the latest worrying trend in a troubling trajectory with excessive debt, centralization of power, concentration of wealth, etc.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  Private Equity buying up housing Speaking of this, an entire new construction neighborhood near where I live was just purchased, with all of the for-sale signs replaced with leasing info signs. You will own nothing, but you will not be happy about it.
  - gaspard234 5y ago
    I'm in a traditionally mexican east Austin neighborhood. I used to see a lot of houses bought by techies. Yes it was 'gentrification', but at least they lived in them and often eventually started families. In 2021, the 6-7 in my neighborhood which have sold for record prices are sitting empty with 'for lease' signs. Checking the property records they are all some under a different named LLC.
    - cinntaile 5y ago
      In the end they still have to find tenants, so the properties can't be empty forever or we'll have a lot of bankruptcies on our hands.
  - xwdv 5y ago
    Ugh, living in an entire community of renters is hell. They just don’t care as much about the homes, and everything goes to shit.
    - lumost 5y ago
      This is a stereotype, but having lived in a nice brand new apartment tower I can tell you it’s pretty true. People mess with all the common spaces at a level that’s not sustainable for management to fix. Renters as a group are insulated from maintenance costs and some individuals take advantage of this. Never lived in a condo tower, might be the same.
Animats 5y ago
"Already in 2019, one in 10 Brits was employed in the gig economy" That's a serious public policy problem.
yawnxyz 5y ago
isn't "servant economy" just a clickbait-ier rewording of "service economy"? So many sectors of the economy are about providing services... how is any of this different from working in the restaurant industry? Aren't many restaurants almost equally unprofitable as these VC-driven "servant economy" startups?
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  in the service economy, the customer meets the seller face-to-face, while this digitized economy is intentionally hiding all human-to-human interaction (so servants can be replaced with future robots). In exchange, they extract rents, and have almost full control on both sides. I guess intermediaries have always existed, but with tech they are all replaced by the one giant monopoly. It does make everyone feel more like cogs of the machine.
  - golergka 5y ago
    > while this digitized economy is intentionally hiding all human-to-human interaction I haven't worked in the service industry, but I heard, repeatedly, that the worst part of the job is dealing with clients. May be reducing human-to-human interaction isn't such a bad change for people working in that industry?
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      If you ever worked in retail, restaurants, or hotels, having to deal with the general public is the worst part of the job.
    - cblconfederate 5y ago
      Indeed that is true , but it is also their only opportunity to increase their payout. Being at the mercy of a machine with no options is more bleak. Telling people to "shut up and work" turns them to serfs
    - RC_ITR 5y ago
      A dirty-little-not-secret about people who complain about “then end of human interaction” is that many of them only have interactions with people who are forced to be nice to them. I would miss that too, but it’s not worth torturing an entire class of people over.
nikkinana 5y ago
Yay H1B and cheap labor!
cblconfederate 5y ago
Complete the picture: VCs are funded by unreasonably high valued exits, which are fueled by unreasonably easily printed money. This is where the whole system starts looking like a ponzi , fueled by the dollar's (and the US army's) infinite domination. If someone is determined to break this vicious circle, they 'd target the latter two. That's where this giant big tech bubble becomes life-threatening
motohagiography 5y ago
You know, gig economy jobs were dignified work until assholes like this guy started calling them "servants." I'll risk being a bit savage on this one because his entire perspective presumes that the people he is encountering in the gig economy are living under a false consciousness that they are his equal, but that they aren't and they have no hope of it because to him there is no obvious route from their "there" to his "here." It takes a second, but he's not worried about peers, he's concerned about mercifully distant others, presumably to sell some kind of framework that reduces to just listening to him. Yes, there it is. He asks, "is the structure and business model of most VC firms today unfit for solving complex problems sustainably and long-term? Do we need a rethink the VC business model more generally? A first starting point could be a strong embrace of ESG principles — if done correctly and beyond a simple tick-box and reporting exercise." The ESG principles he's advocating need to be "done correctly," which reminds me of another perfect framework I can't name off hand that requires its hosts only do it correctly for it to solve their problems, and I understand historically it has required some initial attrition. Most working people are smarter, more competent, and funnier than sleazy academics reduced to peddling frameworks and governance, and the author and his peers would benefit from being a bit more mindful before airing such patronizing concerns. Servants indeed. What a git.
- spamizbad 5y ago
  Please. Let's stop trying to virtue signal a bunch of work-dignity nonsense under the guise of humility, and pearl-clutching over using words like "servant" Gig work is a dead-end for its laborers. People with non-gig jobs - even "shitty" ones - actually have career advancement opportunities. They can leverage their qualities and hard work towards greater earning potential, rather than having it get wasted. Nothing like that exists in the gig space and that's by design.
  - throwaway743 5y ago
    This. 90% of the comments here give the impression that their posters would support a caste system.
  - motohagiography 5y ago
blamestross 5y ago
The modern economy is just finding the efficiency of "timeshare feudalism"
aiisahik 5y ago
I'm not a fan of VC either but this is unfair. (1) VCs have mostly funded the employment of well educated white collar workers. How else do computer science graduates get paid $120-150k 2 years out of college in the US? (2) There are horrible employers of low skilled workers out there. You ever tried to work in a restaurant kitchen in a city like NYC? You're being paid $25-40k to do absolutely brutal work for brutal hours. Nobody talks about this because there are no evil rich investors involved - just hard working business owners. The divide has always existed. It's just more news worthy now and has a large brand in front of it. Delivery companies are at least offering some level of competition in this horrible labor market.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > Nobody talks about this because there are no evil rich investors involved - just hard working business owners. Remember, it's fashionable to bash on "Big Tech" these days.
- lumost 5y ago
  There is an important distinction for many workers between the hard labor ina restaurant and the hard labor done for Uber for X. There is a chance with diligent effort that you can become manager for the restaurant or even start your own. The restaurant is even notionally liable for unemployment and minimum wage laws. Uber for X means permanent hard labor at low wages with no possibility for advancement or improved conditions.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    Just learn to code!
    - lumost 5y ago
      Uber has between 3 and 4 million drivers compared to 29000 employees. If you follow the HN and Blind comment threads there is substantial belief that they could survive with half to 1/4th that number. Even assuming that only 10% of Uber drivers care about advancement and learn to code that would create 300k new software engineers, far more than Uber could ever hope to employee. In fact this would be more software engineers than the total number of engineers employed by the top 5 tech companies by market cap.
charlescearl 5y ago
Curious to see how regulations upon “servant economy” (I think this is just old-fashioned expropriation / “primitive accumulation” at work) capitalism will play out in a nominally socialist context. Regulators in China have begun tighter regulation of the capitalists [1], given exposure of the abuses [2]. [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/china-market-regulator-boosts-food-delivery-worker-protections-2021-07-26/ https://www.reuters.com/business/china-market-regulator-boos... [2] https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/riders-03042021131132.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/riders-03042021131132...
wrs 5y ago
Anyone remember Kozmo [0]? It was hilarious to order one candy bar with free same day delivery and know that this ridiculously uneconomic service was being paid for by credulous VCs. But the joke is less funny when it’s 10% of the workforce… [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com
gnicholas 5y ago
> Interestingly, many of these ‘servant economy’ apps are not unit-economics positive even after years of operations (and far from profitable, as in the case of Uber or Deliveroo). Is the expectation that these startups will replace human labor with robots/autonomous vehicles in order to achieve profitability?
rmah 5y ago
It's like the author is unaware of why people invest in VC's and why VC's invest in companies. Is it actually possible that he thinks that VC's have "helping the world" as a primary goal? That is too funny. Their goal is singular: to make as much money as possible. The end.
908B64B197 5y ago
> The world’s most powerful VC investors are funding an economy where technology allows a ‘ruling class’ to command an ‘underclass’ of servants with the swipe of an app. The author is British, interestingly one of the few society that's actively protecting it's monarchy. You can't be more layered than that: you'll never ever be like these people, and the British people see nothing wrong with it nor these people having servants. They actually prefer it! But the little guy having someone deliver him lunch, that's "problematic". > 85% of Uber drivers are from Black, Asian or other underrepresented backgrounds (similar statistics can be found for Lyft drivers in the US). In 2018, almost 60% of gig workers in the UK were 18 to 34. We talk about people working in dark stores and dark kitchens, out of sight, out of mind — exactly like the servants who waited on Western aristocracy (and colonialists) in the past. Is this by design? Why else allow so much unskilled migrants?
- TheCowboy 5y ago
  Attacking an individual from the UK for "actively protecting it's[sic] monarchy" is pretty amazing when the article doesn't mention this at all.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    I wasn't attacking the author, I was just surprised to see that he was British.
andrewmutz 5y ago
These gig jobs don't promote inequality, they fight inequality. Without the gig apps, rich people are driving themselves to the store to buy their groceries and poor people are not being paid. With the gig apps, rich people are giving cash to poor people in a mutually beneficial manner. These apps help find more convenient and mutually beneficial ways that rich people can exchange money for services. If you have an unequal society, you would want to promote as many of these situations as possible. Each one is an opportunity to spread wealth around and reduce inequality. Getting your own groceries may feel more egalitarian, but it does nothing to help poor people. Hiring them to get your groceries actually puts money in their pocket.
- anemoiac 5y ago
  You could make the same argument about sharecropping in the Jim Crow South. For the gig economy to actually "fight inequality," it would have to ultimately lead to reduced inequality. I've heard plenty of arguments that gig work is low-paying and enables employers to subvert traditional worker protections, but nothing suggesting that it's closing the gap between the rich and poor.
rektide 5y ago
What forces of capital are doing anything else? Isn't this what capital wants, isn't accumulating more capital & generating new dependents part of the inherent goal of capitalists? I don't see VC's as particularly notable or different than anyone else, but I also feel like I could stand to have my perception loosened up a lot. The above is more than Socratic; I am curious what pieces of the economy, what engines of capital drive humanity towards independence rather than dependence.
clarge1120 5y ago
The "ruling class" will be shocked if/when the "servant class" flexes its muscle through a Union. Imagine a city, state or nation held hostage by a "Fraternity" that uses Signal to stage a delivery shutdown in order to make a demand. The demand? Agree to a Standard Delivery Tax that will go directly to the Fraternity. VC's may create a monster they cannot control.
joelbondurant 5y ago
When people act like being rich is a job, it's clown-show economics, all about finding risk free arbitrage opportunities, aka cum dumpsters.
deleted 5y ago
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164 points by sarathyweb 5y ago

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jandrese 5y ago

Isn't this called "having a job"?

smt88 5y ago
The difference is that it's often one-on-one work doing unskilled, sometimes humiliating jobs for very low pay with no hope of a promotion or career, no benefits, etc. It's perhaps the indignity and the massive disparity in income that seem distasteful in the richest countries on earth.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  Why should the only jobs be careers? I don't think most people delivering takeout want the pressure of trying to get promotions and advancement. They like the flexibility. Lots of retired people I know drive Uber/Lyft to get themselves out of the house. They've already had a career. They don't want another one.
  - giantrobot 5y ago
    This leads back to the McJob [0] problem. McJobs lead to underemployment, the oft ignored cousin of unemployment. While the McJobs are often advertised by employers as extra money for e.g. high school students, for a lot of people they're primary jobs. For that cohort they want a better job but can't find them so take what they can get with the McJob. What we've seen in the past two decades with the four recessions we've experienced is companies cutting the "good" jobs and never bringing them back. In the overall job market they're replaced with McJobs, so the U3 rate goes down while the U6 goes up or remains steady and everyone rejoices because what the hell is the U6? McJobs also tend to have pretty high costs to the employees that aren't always obvious or even recognized. Split shifts and variable schedules (and demands for complete availability) make scheduling anything difficult or impossible. Getting child care is expensive. No medical benefits mean anyone not eligible for coverage under their parents' plans (provided they have insurance) mean ridiculous expenses for medical care. Wear and tear of vehicles for commuting to the split shifts or driving self-owned vehicles as a gig is expensive. Not all jobs need to be careers but we have an environment where most people working a non-career job are just wage slaves. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McJob https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McJob
- golergka 5y ago
  Unskilled, humiliating jobs for very low pay with no hope of a promotion or career always existed. If this industry doesn't create more jobs like that, it means it's only getting the ones that were already here, and doesn't change anything. If this industry creates more jobs like that, shouldn't it mean that competition for the lower-skilled workers will increase and their pay will go up?
hogFeast 5y ago
No. You don't have a "job" if you work for most of these companies. You are self-employed.

Ericson2314 5y ago

I don't know about Europe, but in the US a lot of this relates to the fundamental inefficiency of the suburbs. In NYC already, paying smoeone on an e-bike to deliver 10 meals in one short trip is way better, but why stop there. There is no reason we cannot bring back the old pneumatic tube delivery systems of yore (and expand them according to 100-year-old sci-fi too). Conversely, none of that could ever be possible in the suburbs, and your doomed to waste your life in traffic in pay a poor immigrant to do so on your behalf.

gumby 5y ago
Not every meal is a burrito. all joking aside i sent myself a « pneumatique » a year or so before the system was shut down. I had to go to the post office to send it and I picked it up from the other one (rode the Métro to get it). Otherwise a courier would have transported it, I suppose (I don’t remember). In any case it was pretty inefficient by then and the ramification due to subsequent construction makes it impractical.
- erdo 5y ago
  Wait. What? Was that a thing? I've only ever seen them in supermarkets to send cash upstairs. Was this in Paris?
  - zabzonk 5y ago
    https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Paris_pneumatic_post https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Paris_pneumatic_post
  - okr 5y ago
    In Berlin too: https://dewiki.de/Lexikon/Rohrpost_in_Berlin https://dewiki.de/Lexikon/Rohrpost_in_Berlin
  - cowbellemoo 5y ago
    Many cities had bulk mail pneumatic systems from the late 1800s into the post-WWI era, but Paris had a specific class of mail which was like a cross between a courier and a telegram served by the pneumatic system (which was big for handwritten love letters[0]) Pneumatic tubes interestingly started out as a bandwidth problem for telegraph operators. You couldn't cram enough operators and telegraph infrastructure into the stock exchange of London or Paris so the telegraph companies would have a dedicated pneumatic tube for sending paper dispatches from the stock exchange a few blocks to the telegraph headquarters, where hundreds of operators would then relay the information over wire. IMO, pneumatic technology peaked in 1920s Berlin where at the Resi night club you could give someone presents and recreational drugs delivered via pneumatic tube directly to their table.[1] I collected a bunch of ephemera about pneumatic tube and cash railway systems a while back. Highlights include a viscious scalping, notable passengers (cats, mice, spiders, kids, and the 3rd Duke of Buckingham), and many videos and pictures of surviving systems in operation. Here are my notes.[2] [0] https://www.nytimes.com/1925/11/21/archives/grandson-of-bret-harte-ends-life-in-paris-girls-reconciliation-note.html https://www.nytimes.com/1925/11/21/archives/grandson-of-bret... [1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pneumatic-tube-table-phone-flirting-berlin https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pneumatic-tube-table-p... [2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FHI8AMI74jPrVXBHLjBCwz2xjtwrRL6Bo4-kCv96Ie0/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FHI8AMI74jPrVXBHLjBCwz2x...

sergiotapia 5y ago

Thought exercise: poof these businesses vanish. What do all these people start doing to support their families? You think they care about you "getting exercise" when they can't feed their children?

xenocratus 5y ago
Presumably working for another company doing something more productive, built with the money that the poof'ed firms would've gotten.
- iamstupidsimple 5y ago
  That's not how capital distribution works. These VCs would've put their money elsewhere, possibly something you consider 'even less productive'.
- Matticus_Rex 5y ago
  Right now there's more money out there to be invested than there are good businesses to invest in. If those businesses were out there and were profitable enough to hire people more productively with a higher standard of living... where are they? This line of reasoning seems like a hand-wave.
carabiner 5y ago
Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children

standardUser 5y ago

"The world’s most powerful VC investors are funding an economy where technology allows a ‘ruling class’ to command an ‘underclass’ of servants with the swipe of an app." This is such absurd hyperbole. Show me an economy where a significant number of people didn't have insecure incomes, lack of benefits or do menial work and maybe we can talk about how to recreate that in the modern world. Problem is, such an economy has never existed. Instead of faux yearning for a "return" to such a mythical system, let's talk about how to make our system better.

Barrin92 5y ago
>Show me an economy where a significant number of people didn't have insecure incomes Here in Germany and the 'German culture adjacent' countries (Switzerland/Austria/Benelux etc) that culture is still very much intact. When you turn 16 you can pick up a vocational program in the very large and still healthy Mittelstand, and you have a steady career for your entire life, decent pay, without having to have pretty much any universe education. The rat-race mentality and cultural divide into the 'cognitive class' and disenfranchised service work is not universal, it's a consequence of the de-industrialization that the Anglosphere in particular went through.
petermcneeley 5y ago
"Consider that in the history of many worlds, there have always been disposable creatures. They do the dirty work. They do the work that no one else wants to do because it's too difficult or too hazardous. ...You don't have to think about their welfare, you don't think about how they feel. Whole generations of disposable people." - NG

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andyxor 5y ago

what kind of patronizing ivory-tower marxist bs is that, these apps give people a way to earn a living, especially important for those in disadvantaged socioeconomic strata the authors claim to care about. The author would rather keep people unemployed and on welfare as to not to offend their sensibilities, such typical fake liberalism.

arez 5y ago
He's making the point that an unstable underpayed job is not something anyone would want. It's a fair question to ask which jobs we want in our society and which not. You probably would argue that "at least they have a job", but the jobs people have shapes the society we life in, stable, unstable, reasonably paid or not
- andyxor 5y ago
  why would someone decide for others what they want or don't want? you can get a paying gig with apps even if you don't have a stable job record, prior convictions, bad credit, history of addiction or mental health issues or whatnot, you don't need to pass excruciating rounds of "background checks" and interviews which would filter you out because you're poor or look different People can raise themselves from poverty and support their family, even with these temp gigs you can pay your bills and avoid eviction, how arrogant and patronizing someone can be to deny people a honest way to make a living
  - hogFeast 5y ago
    You don't appear to connect some people having no choice with their lack of choice being exploited. The issue with people discriminated against is discrimination. The solution is not devising some totally new form of employment that has no security, no benefits, etc. so that people we hate can feed themselves. The solution is stopping discrimination (which btw, has been successful...it isn't a panacea). If you offered people doing these jobs the chance to take a normal job that paid the same, they would mostly take it. And the problem is that many people who work these jobs can't "support their family" (again, ppl do this work because they have no choice). These jobs aren't unlocking some new source of productivity. Uber has not made taxis faster or cheaper. Uber has just unleashed a bidding war where prices get driven down (benefitting relatively wealthy people) as activities that were formerly "jobs" are now self-employed. For people who drive taxis a 10% drop in income is material, for people who take taxis a 10% drop in prices is immaterial. It is that simple.

HenryKissinger 5y ago

> what kind of an economy do you want to produce with your decisions? How far do you want to push the division of labour between (elite) educated high earners and people providing menial services for this class? Investors don't ponder philosophical questions about the nature and long term societal implications of their decisions (well, most of them). They chase yield/roi/yoy. VC's aren't immoral. It just happens that some of the economic activities that optimize yield happen to be the so called 'gigs' that the author derides as "the servant economy".

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Barrin92 5y ago

>This makes me ask an even more fundamental question: is the structure and business model of most VC firms today unfit for solving complex problems sustainably and long-term? Was it ever actually fit for that? The VC economy basically always served one type of company, consumer-focused "lifestyle" or service 'technologies', and nowadays a lot of the institutions like a16z just appear to turn into straight up media outlets. VC success in the industrial sector, biotech, military or scientific applications has always been muted compared to the kind of money that flows into the leisure/consumer/entertainment economy. If you want to solve complex problems bet on Darpa or academia or bring back the corporate research lab whose demise is one of the real big problems today.

omegalulw 5y ago
Your point is missing a key idea: consumer/lifestyle technologies are highly profitable, with a much faster ROI.
- leroman 5y ago
  There's an implicit assumption you are making where your "Return On Investment" measures $$$ and what I believe the article is trying to say is that is exactly the problem and you should be measuring something else
  - cbnotfromthere 5y ago
    " "Return On Investment" measures $$$" What else should measure???
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MattGaiser 5y ago
How much of this is just because for something to be big, it needs to be fairly universally used? I can't imagine any kind of irrigation company every being larger than Uber for example.

oblak 5y ago

So, the concern here is that VC money is helping individuals with a little bit of excess money hire other people to do their bidding. Sounds like one of those "on a computer" things to me. I know the delivery business is booming everywhere but I am mostly concerned from an environmental point of view because that laziness translates into huge amounts of perfectly good containers being treated like they are only good for one thing only: getting some food delivered to you, my liege

mistrial9 5y ago
the blue-collar, emotionally challenged, still-single at 40 guy down the street repeatedly makes big orders of food from Whole Foods to be delivered.. breakdown- he does not have a lot of extra money; he does not need more food, he is overweight and there is a lot of food in the fridge; Whole Foods used to be more expensive than other stores, I am unsure if he shops carefully or not In other words, this is a specific example that blurs class and disposable income lines, and is also arguably just bad judgement/addictive behavior on his part.. no grand plans or social changes, unless you count being lonely contributing to your poor health choices as social change.. yet the service is benefiting from his indulgence, and the economy is "growing" .. reality is messy and not cleanly in categories
- oblak 5y ago
  Not sure why you are being downvoted. I also presume the primary clientele for such services is young adults or people who live alone / have room mates. Cooking for loved ones is a joy. Or so I've been told by my wife
vorpalhex 5y ago
Yet instead of 10 people all getting in their cars or ordering ubers, a single delivery driver can take an optimized route...
- potatolicious 5y ago
  > a single delivery driver can take an optimized route... This is an oft-repeated claim that never seems to actually exist in real life. One of the original pitches of Uber et al was that it would make the whole system so efficient that drivers would get paid more overall thanks to [insert hand-waving here] technology. It's been many years since that promise was made and nothing like it has materialized. For one thing the ability to "batch" things like this is really minimal. You can't put 10 food orders into a single car, because the 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th persons will be receiving cold food. Even if you could batch two orders together, that relies on a level of scale that simply isn't reliably replicable (two orders within a narrow time window of each other, to very nearby restaurants, to destination generally near each other). I've personally seen it happen twice. And then we've also discovered that the delivery gig economy adds a massive new inefficiency that fully offsets the few batching inefficiencies that can be exploited (and then some): idling cars for fast response. It turns out if you want a delivery driver to be around quickly on-demand, you need a lot of cars idling/driving aimlessly, which overall produces even more waste than the status quo.

somethingAlex 5y ago

I fail to see how this new "servant economy" isn't an improvement on the unskilled labor sector. It's never been easier for someone who needs to work two jobs... to work two jobs; one with weekly hours and another you can do whenever is convenient. It has never been easier for a student to make some cash when it's convenient for them and with no weekly obligation. These are improvements on jobs that already existed and new jobs altogether. We should probably be focusing on how to provide more upward mobility and access to education instead of demonizing improvements to an economic sector which will always exist.

Ericson2314 5y ago
> It's never been easier for someone who needs to work two jobs... to work two jobs People fought for 40 hour work week. If everyone works more hours it will kill productivity and also just suck. I am with you that this stuff is an effect not cause of declining worker power, but the fear this will further erode old victories is genuine and shouldn't be dismissed. Ultimately, yesterday's worker power is not a substitute for a lack today, but (hopefully) once that is somehow fixed, it is really important to turn these norms stuff back.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > but the fear this will further erode old victories is genuine and shouldn't be dismissed. It should be dismissed because it shows the old “victories” were simply a happenstance of labor supply and demand. It is exposing the fact that there was not really a victory in the sense of it being codified into law. Any effort trying to blame VCs (or any business) for low wages or quality of life at work is a waste of time, as it simply requires a legislative solution.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    > It should be dismissed because it shows the old “victories” were simply a happenstance of labor supply and demand. Sure, but not in some exogenous passive way. Market power distorts heavily, and organizing is essential. > It is exposing the fact that there was not really a victory in the sense of it being codified into law. No, it was caudified into law. But law, especially a moribund poorly-written elgacy codebase like our law, is no substitute for ongoing power. That is a fundamental illiberalism of our current society, like it or not.

mgraczyk 5y ago

I wonder if the author has ever visited any developing economy, where racial stratifications of literal servants (doing chores in the home of the masters) is the norm. For example, a huge portion of the migrate Filipino and Indonesian populations in Hong Kong work as full time household servants. The stratification has nothing to do with venture capital. You could argue that VC money makes this industry less stable, and the lack of stability could have a negative impact on "servants", but that's an empirical prediction that I think is less compelling than the moralizing in the article.

tbrooks 5y ago

I wonder if the author’s primary gripe is with 1. VCs funding a so-called “servant economy” or… 2. The fact that there are these businesses that perpetuate some form of servanthood (to use the author’s parlance) If the gig marketplaces were bootstrapped, is there still an inherent problem?

unclebucknasty 5y ago
I'm not sure many of these businesses are bootstrappable, as they tend to require massive infusions of cash to make the economics work at start-up. See ride-sharing companies' years of multi-billion dollar losses.

toomuchcredit 5y ago

VCs are just cogs in the wheels taking us from an "Ownership Society" to a "Sharecropper's Society," as Buffett once put it. Private Equity buying up housing, is just the latest worrying trend in a troubling trajectory with excessive debt, centralization of power, concentration of wealth, etc.

nitrogen 5y ago
Private Equity buying up housing Speaking of this, an entire new construction neighborhood near where I live was just purchased, with all of the for-sale signs replaced with leasing info signs. You will own nothing, but you will not be happy about it.
- gaspard234 5y ago
  I'm in a traditionally mexican east Austin neighborhood. I used to see a lot of houses bought by techies. Yes it was 'gentrification', but at least they lived in them and often eventually started families. In 2021, the 6-7 in my neighborhood which have sold for record prices are sitting empty with 'for lease' signs. Checking the property records they are all some under a different named LLC.
  - cinntaile 5y ago
    In the end they still have to find tenants, so the properties can't be empty forever or we'll have a lot of bankruptcies on our hands.
- xwdv 5y ago
  Ugh, living in an entire community of renters is hell. They just don’t care as much about the homes, and everything goes to shit.
  - lumost 5y ago
    This is a stereotype, but having lived in a nice brand new apartment tower I can tell you it’s pretty true. People mess with all the common spaces at a level that’s not sustainable for management to fix. Renters as a group are insulated from maintenance costs and some individuals take advantage of this. Never lived in a condo tower, might be the same.

Animats 5y ago

"Already in 2019, one in 10 Brits was employed in the gig economy" That's a serious public policy problem.

yawnxyz 5y ago

isn't "servant economy" just a clickbait-ier rewording of "service economy"? So many sectors of the economy are about providing services... how is any of this different from working in the restaurant industry? Aren't many restaurants almost equally unprofitable as these VC-driven "servant economy" startups?

cblconfederate 5y ago
in the service economy, the customer meets the seller face-to-face, while this digitized economy is intentionally hiding all human-to-human interaction (so servants can be replaced with future robots). In exchange, they extract rents, and have almost full control on both sides. I guess intermediaries have always existed, but with tech they are all replaced by the one giant monopoly. It does make everyone feel more like cogs of the machine.
- golergka 5y ago
  > while this digitized economy is intentionally hiding all human-to-human interaction I haven't worked in the service industry, but I heard, repeatedly, that the worst part of the job is dealing with clients. May be reducing human-to-human interaction isn't such a bad change for people working in that industry?
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    If you ever worked in retail, restaurants, or hotels, having to deal with the general public is the worst part of the job.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    Indeed that is true , but it is also their only opportunity to increase their payout. Being at the mercy of a machine with no options is more bleak. Telling people to "shut up and work" turns them to serfs
  - RC_ITR 5y ago
    A dirty-little-not-secret about people who complain about “then end of human interaction” is that many of them only have interactions with people who are forced to be nice to them. I would miss that too, but it’s not worth torturing an entire class of people over.

nikkinana 5y ago

Yay H1B and cheap labor!

cblconfederate 5y ago

Complete the picture: VCs are funded by unreasonably high valued exits, which are fueled by unreasonably easily printed money. This is where the whole system starts looking like a ponzi , fueled by the dollar's (and the US army's) infinite domination. If someone is determined to break this vicious circle, they 'd target the latter two. That's where this giant big tech bubble becomes life-threatening

motohagiography 5y ago

You know, gig economy jobs were dignified work until assholes like this guy started calling them "servants." I'll risk being a bit savage on this one because his entire perspective presumes that the people he is encountering in the gig economy are living under a false consciousness that they are his equal, but that they aren't and they have no hope of it because to him there is no obvious route from their "there" to his "here." It takes a second, but he's not worried about peers, he's concerned about mercifully distant others, presumably to sell some kind of framework that reduces to just listening to him. Yes, there it is. He asks, "is the structure and business model of most VC firms today unfit for solving complex problems sustainably and long-term? Do we need a rethink the VC business model more generally? A first starting point could be a strong embrace of ESG principles — if done correctly and beyond a simple tick-box and reporting exercise." The ESG principles he's advocating need to be "done correctly," which reminds me of another perfect framework I can't name off hand that requires its hosts only do it correctly for it to solve their problems, and I understand historically it has required some initial attrition. Most working people are smarter, more competent, and funnier than sleazy academics reduced to peddling frameworks and governance, and the author and his peers would benefit from being a bit more mindful before airing such patronizing concerns. Servants indeed. What a git.

spamizbad 5y ago
Please. Let's stop trying to virtue signal a bunch of work-dignity nonsense under the guise of humility, and pearl-clutching over using words like "servant" Gig work is a dead-end for its laborers. People with non-gig jobs - even "shitty" ones - actually have career advancement opportunities. They can leverage their qualities and hard work towards greater earning potential, rather than having it get wasted. Nothing like that exists in the gig space and that's by design.
- throwaway743 5y ago
  This. 90% of the comments here give the impression that their posters would support a caste system.
- motohagiography 5y ago

blamestross 5y ago

The modern economy is just finding the efficiency of "timeshare feudalism"

aiisahik 5y ago

I'm not a fan of VC either but this is unfair. (1) VCs have mostly funded the employment of well educated white collar workers. How else do computer science graduates get paid $120-150k 2 years out of college in the US? (2) There are horrible employers of low skilled workers out there. You ever tried to work in a restaurant kitchen in a city like NYC? You're being paid $25-40k to do absolutely brutal work for brutal hours. Nobody talks about this because there are no evil rich investors involved - just hard working business owners. The divide has always existed. It's just more news worthy now and has a large brand in front of it. Delivery companies are at least offering some level of competition in this horrible labor market.

908B64B197 5y ago
> Nobody talks about this because there are no evil rich investors involved - just hard working business owners. Remember, it's fashionable to bash on "Big Tech" these days.
lumost 5y ago
There is an important distinction for many workers between the hard labor ina restaurant and the hard labor done for Uber for X. There is a chance with diligent effort that you can become manager for the restaurant or even start your own. The restaurant is even notionally liable for unemployment and minimum wage laws. Uber for X means permanent hard labor at low wages with no possibility for advancement or improved conditions.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  Just learn to code!
  - lumost 5y ago
    Uber has between 3 and 4 million drivers compared to 29000 employees. If you follow the HN and Blind comment threads there is substantial belief that they could survive with half to 1/4th that number. Even assuming that only 10% of Uber drivers care about advancement and learn to code that would create 300k new software engineers, far more than Uber could ever hope to employee. In fact this would be more software engineers than the total number of engineers employed by the top 5 tech companies by market cap.

charlescearl 5y ago

Curious to see how regulations upon “servant economy” (I think this is just old-fashioned expropriation / “primitive accumulation” at work) capitalism will play out in a nominally socialist context. Regulators in China have begun tighter regulation of the capitalists [1], given exposure of the abuses [2]. [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/china-market-regulator-boosts-food-delivery-worker-protections-2021-07-26/ https://www.reuters.com/business/china-market-regulator-boos... [2] https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/riders-03042021131132.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/riders-03042021131132...

wrs 5y ago

Anyone remember Kozmo [0]? It was hilarious to order one candy bar with free same day delivery and know that this ridiculously uneconomic service was being paid for by credulous VCs. But the joke is less funny when it’s 10% of the workforce… [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com

gnicholas 5y ago

> Interestingly, many of these ‘servant economy’ apps are not unit-economics positive even after years of operations (and far from profitable, as in the case of Uber or Deliveroo). Is the expectation that these startups will replace human labor with robots/autonomous vehicles in order to achieve profitability?

rmah 5y ago

It's like the author is unaware of why people invest in VC's and why VC's invest in companies. Is it actually possible that he thinks that VC's have "helping the world" as a primary goal? That is too funny. Their goal is singular: to make as much money as possible. The end.

908B64B197 5y ago

> The world’s most powerful VC investors are funding an economy where technology allows a ‘ruling class’ to command an ‘underclass’ of servants with the swipe of an app. The author is British, interestingly one of the few society that's actively protecting it's monarchy. You can't be more layered than that: you'll never ever be like these people, and the British people see nothing wrong with it nor these people having servants. They actually prefer it! But the little guy having someone deliver him lunch, that's "problematic". > 85% of Uber drivers are from Black, Asian or other underrepresented backgrounds (similar statistics can be found for Lyft drivers in the US). In 2018, almost 60% of gig workers in the UK were 18 to 34. We talk about people working in dark stores and dark kitchens, out of sight, out of mind — exactly like the servants who waited on Western aristocracy (and colonialists) in the past. Is this by design? Why else allow so much unskilled migrants?

TheCowboy 5y ago
Attacking an individual from the UK for "actively protecting it's[sic] monarchy" is pretty amazing when the article doesn't mention this at all.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  I wasn't attacking the author, I was just surprised to see that he was British.

andrewmutz 5y ago

These gig jobs don't promote inequality, they fight inequality. Without the gig apps, rich people are driving themselves to the store to buy their groceries and poor people are not being paid. With the gig apps, rich people are giving cash to poor people in a mutually beneficial manner. These apps help find more convenient and mutually beneficial ways that rich people can exchange money for services. If you have an unequal society, you would want to promote as many of these situations as possible. Each one is an opportunity to spread wealth around and reduce inequality. Getting your own groceries may feel more egalitarian, but it does nothing to help poor people. Hiring them to get your groceries actually puts money in their pocket.

anemoiac 5y ago
You could make the same argument about sharecropping in the Jim Crow South. For the gig economy to actually "fight inequality," it would have to ultimately lead to reduced inequality. I've heard plenty of arguments that gig work is low-paying and enables employers to subvert traditional worker protections, but nothing suggesting that it's closing the gap between the rich and poor.

rektide 5y ago

What forces of capital are doing anything else? Isn't this what capital wants, isn't accumulating more capital & generating new dependents part of the inherent goal of capitalists? I don't see VC's as particularly notable or different than anyone else, but I also feel like I could stand to have my perception loosened up a lot. The above is more than Socratic; I am curious what pieces of the economy, what engines of capital drive humanity towards independence rather than dependence.

clarge1120 5y ago

The "ruling class" will be shocked if/when the "servant class" flexes its muscle through a Union. Imagine a city, state or nation held hostage by a "Fraternity" that uses Signal to stage a delivery shutdown in order to make a demand. The demand? Agree to a Standard Delivery Tax that will go directly to the Fraternity. VC's may create a monster they cannot control.

joelbondurant 5y ago

When people act like being rich is a job, it's clown-show economics, all about finding risk free arbitrage opportunities, aka cum dumpsters.

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