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The distaste isn't that people are making consumer's lives better, it's distaste that people are making worker's lives worse by making consumer's lives better,
by tedks 12y ago
The distaste isn't that people are making consumer's lives better, it's distaste that people are making worker's lives worse by making consumer's lives better, and thus enforcing and widening a social divide that makes it very unlikely for an Uber driver to be able to afford Uber rides.
Yes, it's possible to make every single industry a brutal, dog-eat-dog race to the bottom. Yes, we can close every single factory in the Dominican Republic that tries to unionize. Yes, we can elastize production all over the world to make everyone compete with literally everyone else. Yes, we can uberify the entire world.
But as this article points out, in very well-argued and cogent thought that doesn't seem knee-jerk to me at all, such races to the bottom only really help the hyper-rich, and soon will not even help you or me.
What will the lifestyle of developers be when our industry is Uberized? When you no longer have a job to count on, with steady benefits and health insurance and security, but whatever comes down the pipe that day? What happens when you're commodified by technology?
Because, make no mistake, the ratchet of progress turns only every in one direction. One day the bell will toll for you. And then you'll find out too late that we really are all in this together, except for the people that are quite literally setting us against each other like dogs.