Uber went public last week with an IPO for a market valuation of approximately $76 billion, which took 7.6% nosedive by May 10th. In nerd speak, this makes it one of the worst performing IPOs in stock market history, and its valuation was waaaay below the $90-$120 billion promised to stockholders. These people must’ve gotten a grievous head injury, because this company has celebrated burning cash like a Woodstock ‘99 stage for the last decade.
Meanwhile, the same week, an international movement of Uber and Lyft driver went on “strike”. However, strikes exist as a leverage tactic to force a demand, and the events of last week were a highly visible protest that failed to win a single concession from either company. Maybe the bad optics put a dent in the Uber IPO, but this was more likely fears over the long-term viability of the company.
This lack of actionable power to force better working conditions shows how successful gig economy corporations have been at achieving their ultimate goal of near-total alienation of their workforce. Make you as fragile and desperate as possible, destroy the possibility of wealth, and sell a part-time, benefits-free job as “freedom” for you. This is only freedom from a decent standard of living, labor solidarity, social stability, and a meaningful life filled with purpose.
What’s important to understand is that gig companies didn’t create this environment, they merely exploited it.
What’s important to understand is that gig companies didn’t create this environment, they merely exploited it. It’s not exactly a secret that large-scale trade unions have been negotiating their own annihilation. Almost no gig economy companies powered by apps existed prior to the 2008 financial crash, and it was only during the disastrous Wall Street bailouts that they expanded in any meaningful way. Between December 2007 and early 2010, some 8.7 million jobs evaporated, and from 2008 to now, almost 600 Uberconomy companies have launched internationally. These companies did not hire 8.7 million people, mind you, they contracted the people who lost those jobs.
The sharing/gig economy sells its bullshit as freedom, and worse, a path to a green sustainable lifestyle designed to assuage liberal guilt over basic consumption. If you don’t own a car, you don’t have to contribute to C02 emissions. Ignore the fact that Uber and Lyft increased San Francisco traffic by 62% from 2010 – 2016. Double ignore the fact that Airbnb encourages plane travel, around 9% of all transportation CO2 sources, one of the most carbon intensive things you can personally do besides operating a personal coal-fired power plant. Also mostly certainly ignore the fact 100 companies result in 71% of emissions in the first place.
(Ride-sharing apps have a hidden benefit, however. Persons with disabilities often can’t rely on underfunded public transit, which have obnoxious restrictions and means-testing. Let’s not throw the good out with the bad.)
Marketing firms have long since abandoned the idea of selling a path to wealth, or even the middle class, as this message continually rings hollow. There is no business plan for any of these companies that can make everyone rich. They started selling something else: a path to a type of technocratic bohemianism.
Eat, Post, Love
The Uberconomy created a recent phenomenon: the “digital nomad”, a nauseating label for someone who lives in rentals, takes rideshares, and works freelance as they travel as a lifestyle choice. There’s a certain romanticism to it, life on the road doing posts, but in reality, it’s an intensely precarious way of living. You own nothing, but you have nothing to tie you down. This type of lifestyle might appeal to someone who wishes to liberate themselves from the bougie trappings of consumerism (Oh no I’m too rich to be happy! Woe is me!), but what they fail to realize is that they are trading one cage for another. Both are traps, and they will be swapping a lack of control for a lack of stability, allowing themselves to be hyper-exploited with an additional layer of labor uncertainty.
They are setting themselves up to fail, and casting their future to the sustainability of companies who can rise meteorically only to crash spectacularly. Many “how to nomad” guides emphasize having a huge, impractical amount of savings (3-6 months of rent) in an economy where 57% of people have less than $1,000 dollars in their savings. You should also have health insurance and lots of tech, because this is actually a glorified vacation for people who post too much.
This lifestyle is also one of enormous privilege, the Silicon Valley version of Becky’s year off “backpacking in Europe” (i.e. getting psychically obliterated on mushrooms in Amsterdam).
This lifestyle is also one of enormous privilege, the Silicon Valley version of Becky’s year off “backpacking in Europe” (i.e. getting psychically obliterated on mushrooms in Amsterdam). Unlike actual homeless people, who rarely choose to be, hip digital nomads can put a stop to it at any time. On the flipside, skyrocketing rent in urban areas and crushing student loan debt can make a nomadic lifestyle less than a choice, a form of technologically enhanced homelessness, and becomes something darker: a grind to just stay alive. 38% of self-described digital nomads made less than $10,000 a year, 30% below the federal poverty limit.
And last of all, they fall into that corporate-friendly vortex of “independent contractors”. Sounds so much nicer than “digital serf”. A serf works the land owned by a lord, and in return for not dying, the serf pays the lord a percentage of their earnings from the land. Companies love independent contractors, they want serfs badly. No need to pay benefits, and you can fire them at the drop of a hat. You don’t even have to see their smelly faces since they can work out of a literal plywood box for 400/month. And when you’re a taxi company like Uber that literally doesn’t own any cars, you can make them pay to rent one from Hertz.
Reality Bytes
Labor in 2019 America has a desperate, intense alienation on a scale unheard, one of the most precarious workforces in our country’s history. 1 out of 5 jobs are contract workers, with the bulk of post-recession jobs being part time (65% of which have zero benefits). This is Gilded Age potential for failure, considering the uncertain financial future of all these gig companies. American capitalism crashes about every ten years, so we’re living on borrowed time. The 2008 financial disaster was a dress rehearsal for another fullblown depression, this upcoming flameout most likely a combination of Chinese trade war, loan debt implosion, and the high profile failure of these very same gig companies.
American workers live on a knife edge already, and such precariousness breeds paralysis, an understandable anxiety to taking political risks in fear of losing even more. The imagination of the corporate state to humiliate and degrade the American worker is near-infinite.
“American workers live on a knife edge already, and such precariousness breeds paralysis, an understandable anxiety to taking political risks in fear of losing even more.”
The Uberconomy is an attempt to monetize normal human interactions, like giving someone a ride or having a houseguest, down to the person-to-person interaction. This is growing a generation always on the verge of poverty, panicked, exhausted, due to re-branded exploitation as a new, hip way to live, fixing none of its problems and creating a whole slew of unexpected ones. The purpose is to finally make money off what is considering generous behavior (giving someone a ride, sharing your home, dogsitting, running out to get food, handmade gifts) and to externalize labor to an even more decentralized source.
The beneficiaries are sometimes the laborers, but mostly a small, exclusive group of technology executives and shareholders. They always ask for their cut for essentially developing the same app a hundred times, a social peer-to-peer network combined with a map that can push notifications. None of this is revolutionary or innovative, maybe innovative in the depths these companies will go to enforce their will, including targeting officials with fake versions of their own apps.
Remember when US propaganda told us if we enacted socialism we’d all have to share the same things? Instead of the government owning everything, it’s Silicon Valley, which at this point might as well be a corporate takeover. We’re being forced to monetize our own property by companies who literally just run an app. The sharing/gig economy has the superficial affectation of a communist society in its marketing: freedom from work, personal agency, maximum control over one’s life to pursue what they desire, not what they are forced to.
There’s very few things more alienating than working yourself to death for a piece of software on your phone.
What’s ironic is that Silicon Valley has created the reality of Cold War propaganda against socialism: stagnant wages, widespread scarcity, shared housing (called co-living), controlled by an unelected elite, and even a lack of personal possessions. Capitalism has created everything that we were told would happen under socialism. Silicon Valley has tricked people into thinking technocratic asceticism is somehow more pure, less distracting, not a widespread commodification of normal human activity. There’s very few things more alienating than working yourself to death for a piece of software on your phone.
Capitalism is hurtling towards a final economic goal: the permanent alienation of all workers, fully automated and privatized; a generation of despair staring at apps, begging for just another ride, one more delivery, right before oblivion.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.