13 ms·

The Internet is destroying work

38 points by jusben1369 13y ago

jusben1369 13y ago
I'm not sure if the Internet is destroying or just amplifying current general trends.
ds9 13y ago
Whenever technology advances, industries based on the previous ways of doing things must die off, and the next generation of workers will work equally long and hard at new occupations. Horses vs. cars, domestic workers vs. washing machines, it has happened over and over. It's inevitably hard on the disemployed workers, as many will be unable to retrain for whatever the new jobs demand. But this is only an argument for a "social safety net", not for resisting progress. Unfortunately this is not the whole explanation of the shrinking of the middle class. The internet is only one factor and not the biggest. The main cause is corporate takeover of governments, leading to "financialization" (i.e., make money by trading things that are only indirectly based one real goods, without producing new value) [1], oligopolistic, rent-seeking industries [2] and lack of popular influence on governments. 1. e.g. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/financialization-as-a-cause-of-economic-malaise/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/financializatio... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
- kasey_junk 13y ago
  That's not true. As we've made technology advances historically we've removed working hours. It just hasn't happened with the new digital revolution.
  - ds9 13y ago
    Working hours were reduced only in the 20th century, and mainly then due to the influence of unions. There was very little reduction prior to this era - basically it was dawn to dusk on farms, then with the industrial revolution, dawn to dusk or even longer in factories, mines and other industries. Reformers have always argued, "New tech lets us produce the same output with less work, so let's have more leisure time" - but capital owners see it instead as an opportunity to work their employees (serfs, proletarians, then "at will" employees) the same hours and make more money.
    - Roboprog 13y ago
      Post Reagan era politics did a pretty good job at obliterating unions, AND, burying the history of the first half of the 20th century, eh? The problem as I see it with either a communist welfare state or feudalism is that either extreme provides little incentive for most people to be creative/inventive, as there is little to gain for them. Alas, we seem to be swinging toward a kind of corporate feudalism, at least in the US.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > As we've made technology advances historically we've removed working hours. Not at all true; up until the 20th century and the influence of labor unions, technological advances mostly increased working hours. Technology removes barriers that limit working hours (artificial lighting is pretty much the textbook example of this, but is very far from the only example), and increases in productivity due to technology increase the expected marginal output of each working hour, which increases the incentive to work (or, where the value of the output is captured by someone other than the worker, to employ/compel work.)
    - waps 13y ago
      Exactly. If you go back 3-4 centuries you'll find that people basically worked 2-3 months per year, tops. Hell, even my grandfather remembers a time when that was the case. I once researched it for a particular city in Europe in 1856, because information on it was readily available to me. 56 working days. I think for the large majority of history we were in the situation that there wasn't nearly enough work for all people, and we're simply getting to an actual peak in human employment and seeing the initial effects of labour needs not rising any more. It's a matter of only a little bit of time until the need for labour drops back to what it was since the later days of the Roman Empire until the industrial revolution : 10-15% employment at best (discounting illegal work like prostitution, which, scarily, must have been the second largest "employer" for over a millenium, and of course discounting wars, which employed many more). I personally think will be back into that situation by the end of the next decade.
homosaur 13y ago
I'm not going to remark on the topic of Internet job annihilation because I feel like I have nothing else intelligent to say, but I wanted to add I do feel the Fancy Hands thing. Something about that entire proposition struck me as disturbing from the beginning. "Not an elite? Then pretend you're one with your very own anonymous slave!" How much clearer could it be that even those anonymous slaves will be replaced by robots the second that it's technically feasible.
- Zikes 13y ago
  That technical infeasibility is precisely why the business exists. If it were technically feasible, a person could purchase their own device or system to manage such tasks and Fancy Hands and similar services would become obsolete, or graduate to more complex tasks that are still as yet technically infeasible.
- zanny 13y ago
  Good? It is clear people using this service don't want to do the task, but likewise don't value having it done either. Though the examples given in the article seem more like things one would want to interact with themselves. If people are willing to take money for this work, and someone else wants it done, that is economics. The broader question is "does raw human labor possess value anymore?" and if the answer is no, in the sense that a working human with no domain skills is laboring below a living wage, then it is time to rethink our economic model, and minimum wage is just a hatchet to stymie the bigger issue - the systemic devaluation of human output. Because machines are better at it.
xwowsersx 13y ago
What's with this obsession with jobs? If all we wanted were "jobs", we could create 100 million real quickly. Just go destroy a bunch of stuff and get people to work, rebuilding everything again.
- akama 13y ago
  Doing that doesn't increase value though.
- Tharkun 13y ago
  We're a long way away from this yet, but eventually we likely will run out of work. Some jobs are harder to automate than others, and some arguably will never be (robotic artists seem a little silly?) automated. At some point in the future we're going to have to ask ourselves the question: what the hell do we do with ourselves? Working less would probably be a good start. But then what? Do we turn into a dystopian planet of hedonistic oafs?
  - 127001brewer 13y ago
    Do we turn into a dystopian planet of hedonistic oafs? I guess you haven't seen any of the recent reality TV shows lately...
  - kasey_junk 13y ago
    We've been through this before, many many times. The agrarian revolution, the industrial revolution, etc. Each time we keep getting more time off (the 40 hour work week would sound ridiculous to someone in 1860). The problem as I see it is that we haven't lowered our standard work week to match our new productivity. We should be working around 27-30 hours at most.
    - yardie 13y ago
      According to my nontechnical friends, they are down to the 20-30 hour work week. Buhhtttt, businesses are also cutting compensation as well so working 30hr/wk is costing you more than working 40. As in completely dropped health plans, 401K, paid holidays, etc.
rasur 13y ago
Jaron Lanier's "Who Owns The Future" is worth reading on this subject too, fwiw.
diydsp 13y ago
Hmmm. This title says "working class," but the title of the linked article is "The Internet’s destroying work — and turning the old middle-class into the new proletariat." (capitalization as in the original, btw). Get prepared for another mental jerk when you read the subtitle of the article, which puts the responsibility for destruction on the new _economy_, which is distinct from classes. (Which aspect of the economy, deficit spending? new welfare laws? reduced military budget? bailouts? who knows, who cares! -it's all about people with money and power that I don't have, so they're Bad-) Someone needs to get their terms organized... The article itself is full of phrases like "seems like" and other wishy-washy half-assertions. Before we get up in arms and wield terms like "destroying," let's see if we can clearly document the changes the internet is creating... Oh, but then we wouldn't have sensationalist web-magazine articles to validate middle-class guilt... :) SO, with that in mind, perhaps we can narrow the discussion down from leviathan topics like "internet, economy and classes" to the topic of "Fancy Hands," which is the web-facilitated service referred to in 90% of the paragraphs of the article. So often, that one would be forgiven for believing this article was ghost-written by FancyHands.com in the first place.
seiferteric 13y ago
I think these discussions are always funny, the internet has not killed the working class. The working class was destroyed by the loss of manufacturing to other countries. What does the internet have to do with this? Its more about globalization.
theorique 13y ago
This article is full of bias. The writer has an anti-business agenda and cherry picked a group of examples in order to make these kind of services wrong. If they don't pay enough to get workers, then guess what? No one will work there!
- EliRivers 13y ago
  I can find someone so badly off, so desperate for any money at all, that I can pay them a pittance with zero security and benefits. Doesn't make it right. I appreciate that your ideology essentially defines the market as the definition of right and wrong. I disagree strongly.
  - GhotiFish 13y ago
    I don't know what to think, myself. On the one hand, people are not rational, and they will not act rationally when their life is on the line. See: Negotiating for health care, what EA does to everyone working for them, your example, ect ect. On the other hand, better that they make no money at all?
    - mempko 13y ago
      You fall into the market trap. That is, that only through the market the solution lies. The reality is your time may be better spent disrupting the system that requires money to survive. In the mean time, support charities that don't expect anything else in return..
    - flyinRyan 13y ago
      Or better yet, strengthen unions again so we can do something about the fact that the discrepancy between median worker pay and executive pay is probably larger than it was in fucking feudal times.
      - GhotiFish 13y ago
        So, better that unions have a few people that make lots of money? Unions help ensure job security, you're covering your own hide here. People in poverty don't have their foot in the door, and increasing the expense of a hire decreases the desire of a company to take the risk. Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of CEO pay, but it's not relevant. How does that thinking go? Take the money CEO's are making and give it to the impoverished? And what shall they do for that money? Pump gas? There arn't enough gas stations, there's not enough menial labor, and there's more than enough machines. As cruel as it sounds, are workers not a commodity? Is their rarity of skills not a prize with a price tag? What do you say to the companies looking for people in very high supply? You have to buy at high prices? response: "OK, Then never mind" I don't know what the solution is, but what is there to do that is worth the money right now?
cpursley 13y ago
Please change the nonsense and purposely divisive "workingclass" title to that of the actual article. This is a politically-charged phrase that implies that nobody else actually works, or that they don't work as hard.
- geebee 13y ago
  I agree. This article is a worthy submission to HN, but there's absolutely no reason to change the title.
- mempko 13y ago
  working class is a term that is very specific and it is used correctly by the OP. working class are those that don't have capital. Does not mean those with capital don't work. People who work with Fancy Hands most certainly don't have capital.
  - jlgaddis 13y ago
    > People who work with Fancy Hands most certainly don't have capital. You might be surprised. One of the wealthiest people I know is the stereotypical "cheapskate tightwad" (and he'll readily admit it). He will do pretty much anything he can to earn an extra dollar and he squanders as much of it away as possible. He plans to retire before his 40th birthday and I suspect that he will do exactly that and live quite comfortably the rest of his life as well.
kenster07 13y ago
Linkbait title. This author still thinks about economics in terms from over a 100 years ago. Many technological advancement allow us to produce more efficiently, i.e. produce the same amount of output with less input cost, including labor. When we get to the point when we can produce all the output we need with virtually no input cost, and by the hands of an increasingly small % of the population, I'm not sure modern economic theory has anything to say about such a situation, because it is built on many implicit assumptions about the scarcity of resources which may not be true forever.
- Joeri 13y ago
  Demand can be artificially created, and goods can be intangible (digital). We can increase the amount of 'stuff' the average person buys by several orders of magnitude at least.
  - waps 13y ago
    This specific idea is predicated on preventing piracy. If you can't do that, it won't work. And preventing piracy means comparing what someone has on their computer with some centralized ownership database. And that requires more intrusion in your personal devices than even the NSA wants. The digital economy depends on giving powers to the government that we don't want to give them, and frankly, powers so sweeping that they'd get abused in a second too. Plus we've all seen how digital good concentrate wealth. The top10 games make 50% of all income ? This would make things a lot worse, not better.
tadruj 13y ago
If your work is measured in lines of code or git commits, then you ARE a working class. If you're scared about your future so much that you want to read every TC article, learn every new hip language and attend every meet-up, just to stay on top of things, while selling your LOC to some company, you ARE a working class. Go be an entrepreneur and start creating value.
- mempko 13y ago
  You mean by recombining other people's work and calling it your own?
  - tadruj 13y ago
    No, by combining and creating value greater than the sum of parts!
    - mempko 13y ago
      You have it all wrong. They just need to APPEAR that they created value by hiding the fact that most of the work was already done, just enough for the next VC round.
axus 13y ago
Don't the errand-running services only create jobs? "Waiting on hold" and "making reservations" seem like positions that didn't exist before. How many people have full-time assistants?
ankitml 13y ago
100 years back people said, electricity is destroying work.

38 points by jusben1369 13y ago

I'm not sure if the Internet is destroying or just amplifying current general trends.

ds9 13y ago

Whenever technology advances, industries based on the previous ways of doing things must die off, and the next generation of workers will work equally long and hard at new occupations. Horses vs. cars, domestic workers vs. washing machines, it has happened over and over. It's inevitably hard on the disemployed workers, as many will be unable to retrain for whatever the new jobs demand. But this is only an argument for a "social safety net", not for resisting progress. Unfortunately this is not the whole explanation of the shrinking of the middle class. The internet is only one factor and not the biggest. The main cause is corporate takeover of governments, leading to "financialization" (i.e., make money by trading things that are only indirectly based one real goods, without producing new value) [1], oligopolistic, rent-seeking industries [2] and lack of popular influence on governments. 1. e.g. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/financialization-as-a-cause-of-economic-malaise/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/financializatio... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

kasey_junk 13y ago
That's not true. As we've made technology advances historically we've removed working hours. It just hasn't happened with the new digital revolution.
- ds9 13y ago
  Working hours were reduced only in the 20th century, and mainly then due to the influence of unions. There was very little reduction prior to this era - basically it was dawn to dusk on farms, then with the industrial revolution, dawn to dusk or even longer in factories, mines and other industries. Reformers have always argued, "New tech lets us produce the same output with less work, so let's have more leisure time" - but capital owners see it instead as an opportunity to work their employees (serfs, proletarians, then "at will" employees) the same hours and make more money.
  - Roboprog 13y ago
    Post Reagan era politics did a pretty good job at obliterating unions, AND, burying the history of the first half of the 20th century, eh? The problem as I see it with either a communist welfare state or feudalism is that either extreme provides little incentive for most people to be creative/inventive, as there is little to gain for them. Alas, we seem to be swinging toward a kind of corporate feudalism, at least in the US.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > As we've made technology advances historically we've removed working hours. Not at all true; up until the 20th century and the influence of labor unions, technological advances mostly increased working hours. Technology removes barriers that limit working hours (artificial lighting is pretty much the textbook example of this, but is very far from the only example), and increases in productivity due to technology increase the expected marginal output of each working hour, which increases the incentive to work (or, where the value of the output is captured by someone other than the worker, to employ/compel work.)
  - waps 13y ago
    Exactly. If you go back 3-4 centuries you'll find that people basically worked 2-3 months per year, tops. Hell, even my grandfather remembers a time when that was the case. I once researched it for a particular city in Europe in 1856, because information on it was readily available to me. 56 working days. I think for the large majority of history we were in the situation that there wasn't nearly enough work for all people, and we're simply getting to an actual peak in human employment and seeing the initial effects of labour needs not rising any more. It's a matter of only a little bit of time until the need for labour drops back to what it was since the later days of the Roman Empire until the industrial revolution : 10-15% employment at best (discounting illegal work like prostitution, which, scarily, must have been the second largest "employer" for over a millenium, and of course discounting wars, which employed many more). I personally think will be back into that situation by the end of the next decade.

homosaur 13y ago

I'm not going to remark on the topic of Internet job annihilation because I feel like I have nothing else intelligent to say, but I wanted to add I do feel the Fancy Hands thing. Something about that entire proposition struck me as disturbing from the beginning. "Not an elite? Then pretend you're one with your very own anonymous slave!" How much clearer could it be that even those anonymous slaves will be replaced by robots the second that it's technically feasible.

Zikes 13y ago
That technical infeasibility is precisely why the business exists. If it were technically feasible, a person could purchase their own device or system to manage such tasks and Fancy Hands and similar services would become obsolete, or graduate to more complex tasks that are still as yet technically infeasible.
zanny 13y ago
Good? It is clear people using this service don't want to do the task, but likewise don't value having it done either. Though the examples given in the article seem more like things one would want to interact with themselves. If people are willing to take money for this work, and someone else wants it done, that is economics. The broader question is "does raw human labor possess value anymore?" and if the answer is no, in the sense that a working human with no domain skills is laboring below a living wage, then it is time to rethink our economic model, and minimum wage is just a hatchet to stymie the bigger issue - the systemic devaluation of human output. Because machines are better at it.

xwowsersx 13y ago

What's with this obsession with jobs? If all we wanted were "jobs", we could create 100 million real quickly. Just go destroy a bunch of stuff and get people to work, rebuilding everything again.

akama 13y ago
Doing that doesn't increase value though.
Tharkun 13y ago
We're a long way away from this yet, but eventually we likely will run out of work. Some jobs are harder to automate than others, and some arguably will never be (robotic artists seem a little silly?) automated. At some point in the future we're going to have to ask ourselves the question: what the hell do we do with ourselves? Working less would probably be a good start. But then what? Do we turn into a dystopian planet of hedonistic oafs?
- 127001brewer 13y ago
  Do we turn into a dystopian planet of hedonistic oafs? I guess you haven't seen any of the recent reality TV shows lately...
- kasey_junk 13y ago
  We've been through this before, many many times. The agrarian revolution, the industrial revolution, etc. Each time we keep getting more time off (the 40 hour work week would sound ridiculous to someone in 1860). The problem as I see it is that we haven't lowered our standard work week to match our new productivity. We should be working around 27-30 hours at most.
  - yardie 13y ago
    According to my nontechnical friends, they are down to the 20-30 hour work week. Buhhtttt, businesses are also cutting compensation as well so working 30hr/wk is costing you more than working 40. As in completely dropped health plans, 401K, paid holidays, etc.

rasur 13y ago

Jaron Lanier's "Who Owns The Future" is worth reading on this subject too, fwiw.

diydsp 13y ago

Hmmm. This title says "working class," but the title of the linked article is "The Internet’s destroying work — and turning the old middle-class into the new proletariat." (capitalization as in the original, btw). Get prepared for another mental jerk when you read the subtitle of the article, which puts the responsibility for destruction on the new _economy_, which is distinct from classes. (Which aspect of the economy, deficit spending? new welfare laws? reduced military budget? bailouts? who knows, who cares! -it's all about people with money and power that I don't have, so they're Bad-) Someone needs to get their terms organized... The article itself is full of phrases like "seems like" and other wishy-washy half-assertions. Before we get up in arms and wield terms like "destroying," let's see if we can clearly document the changes the internet is creating... Oh, but then we wouldn't have sensationalist web-magazine articles to validate middle-class guilt... :) SO, with that in mind, perhaps we can narrow the discussion down from leviathan topics like "internet, economy and classes" to the topic of "Fancy Hands," which is the web-facilitated service referred to in 90% of the paragraphs of the article. So often, that one would be forgiven for believing this article was ghost-written by FancyHands.com in the first place.

seiferteric 13y ago

I think these discussions are always funny, the internet has not killed the working class. The working class was destroyed by the loss of manufacturing to other countries. What does the internet have to do with this? Its more about globalization.

theorique 13y ago

This article is full of bias. The writer has an anti-business agenda and cherry picked a group of examples in order to make these kind of services wrong. If they don't pay enough to get workers, then guess what? No one will work there!

EliRivers 13y ago
I can find someone so badly off, so desperate for any money at all, that I can pay them a pittance with zero security and benefits. Doesn't make it right. I appreciate that your ideology essentially defines the market as the definition of right and wrong. I disagree strongly.
- GhotiFish 13y ago
  I don't know what to think, myself. On the one hand, people are not rational, and they will not act rationally when their life is on the line. See: Negotiating for health care, what EA does to everyone working for them, your example, ect ect. On the other hand, better that they make no money at all?
  - mempko 13y ago
    You fall into the market trap. That is, that only through the market the solution lies. The reality is your time may be better spent disrupting the system that requires money to survive. In the mean time, support charities that don't expect anything else in return..
  - flyinRyan 13y ago
    Or better yet, strengthen unions again so we can do something about the fact that the discrepancy between median worker pay and executive pay is probably larger than it was in fucking feudal times.
    - GhotiFish 13y ago
      So, better that unions have a few people that make lots of money? Unions help ensure job security, you're covering your own hide here. People in poverty don't have their foot in the door, and increasing the expense of a hire decreases the desire of a company to take the risk. Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of CEO pay, but it's not relevant. How does that thinking go? Take the money CEO's are making and give it to the impoverished? And what shall they do for that money? Pump gas? There arn't enough gas stations, there's not enough menial labor, and there's more than enough machines. As cruel as it sounds, are workers not a commodity? Is their rarity of skills not a prize with a price tag? What do you say to the companies looking for people in very high supply? You have to buy at high prices? response: "OK, Then never mind" I don't know what the solution is, but what is there to do that is worth the money right now?

cpursley 13y ago

Please change the nonsense and purposely divisive "workingclass" title to that of the actual article. This is a politically-charged phrase that implies that nobody else actually works, or that they don't work as hard.

geebee 13y ago
I agree. This article is a worthy submission to HN, but there's absolutely no reason to change the title.
mempko 13y ago
working class is a term that is very specific and it is used correctly by the OP. working class are those that don't have capital. Does not mean those with capital don't work. People who work with Fancy Hands most certainly don't have capital.
- jlgaddis 13y ago
  > People who work with Fancy Hands most certainly don't have capital. You might be surprised. One of the wealthiest people I know is the stereotypical "cheapskate tightwad" (and he'll readily admit it). He will do pretty much anything he can to earn an extra dollar and he squanders as much of it away as possible. He plans to retire before his 40th birthday and I suspect that he will do exactly that and live quite comfortably the rest of his life as well.

kenster07 13y ago

Linkbait title. This author still thinks about economics in terms from over a 100 years ago. Many technological advancement allow us to produce more efficiently, i.e. produce the same amount of output with less input cost, including labor. When we get to the point when we can produce all the output we need with virtually no input cost, and by the hands of an increasingly small % of the population, I'm not sure modern economic theory has anything to say about such a situation, because it is built on many implicit assumptions about the scarcity of resources which may not be true forever.

Joeri 13y ago
Demand can be artificially created, and goods can be intangible (digital). We can increase the amount of 'stuff' the average person buys by several orders of magnitude at least.
- waps 13y ago
  This specific idea is predicated on preventing piracy. If you can't do that, it won't work. And preventing piracy means comparing what someone has on their computer with some centralized ownership database. And that requires more intrusion in your personal devices than even the NSA wants. The digital economy depends on giving powers to the government that we don't want to give them, and frankly, powers so sweeping that they'd get abused in a second too. Plus we've all seen how digital good concentrate wealth. The top10 games make 50% of all income ? This would make things a lot worse, not better.

tadruj 13y ago

If your work is measured in lines of code or git commits, then you ARE a working class. If you're scared about your future so much that you want to read every TC article, learn every new hip language and attend every meet-up, just to stay on top of things, while selling your LOC to some company, you ARE a working class. Go be an entrepreneur and start creating value.

mempko 13y ago
You mean by recombining other people's work and calling it your own?
- tadruj 13y ago
  No, by combining and creating value greater than the sum of parts!
  - mempko 13y ago
    You have it all wrong. They just need to APPEAR that they created value by hiding the fact that most of the work was already done, just enough for the next VC round.

axus 13y ago

Don't the errand-running services only create jobs? "Waiting on hold" and "making reservations" seem like positions that didn't exist before. How many people have full-time assistants?

ankitml 13y ago

100 years back people said, electricity is destroying work.