{"id":176994,"date":"2020-01-27T21:07:00","date_gmt":"2020-01-28T02:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/01\/27\/if-this-is-the-future-its-a-dystopia\/"},"modified":"2020-01-27T21:07:00","modified_gmt":"2020-01-28T02:07:00","slug":"if-this-is-the-future-its-a-dystopia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/01\/27\/if-this-is-the-future-its-a-dystopia\/","title":{"rendered":"If This Is the Future, It’s a Dystopia"},"content":{"rendered":"

People are finally noticing that Silicon Valley’s vision of the future is a nightmare<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Vanessa Bain was less than a year into her gig as an Instacart shopper when the company announced it would no longer allow tipping on its app. Instacart instead began imposing a 10 percent \u201cservice fee\u201d that replaced the previous default tip of 10 percent. The change had no impact on customers, who could be forgiven for assuming that the new fee would still go to the workers who shopped for their groceries and delivered them to their homes. \u201cIt was deceptive to customers,\u201d Bain said. \u201cThey thought they were still tipping us, when instead it went to the company. It wasn\u2019t being passed to us at all.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span>When Bain, who lives in Palo Alto, California, became a shopper in 2016, she believed that gig work would provide her with both financial stability and schedule flexibility to take care of her young daughter. However, as independent contractors, Bain and her husband, a fellow shopper, don\u2019t receive sick leave or holidays. And in practice, the \u201cbe your own boss\u201d promise of the gig economy instantly vanishes the moment you take on a gig job: It is, instead, a system that relentlessly dictates your schedule. \u201cWe are controlled. We are treated like employees but without the perks,\u201d Jennifer Cotten, a Los Angeles area\u2013based shopper, told me. \u201cWe\u2019re told what order to deliver in and when to go.\u201d <\/span>

<\/span>The indignities of the gig economy are well established at this point, as the laissez-faire labor practices of companies like Uber, Instacart, Door Dash, and Lyft draw more critical scrutiny. Bain, Cotton, and their fellow shoppers are among the millions of precariously employed workers who rely on part-time jobs or side gigs to scrape together a living, all without the safety net of employer-based insurance. <\/span>

<\/span>But what is less widely acknowledged is how the gig economy interacts with other trends in California and forces unleashed by Silicon Valley\u2014rising housing costs, choked infrastructure\u2014to make life hell for those who live at or near the epicenter of America\u2019s technology industry. Together, they constitute a nightmare vision of what the world would look like if it were run by our digital overlords, as they sit atop a growing underclass that does their shopping and drives their cars\u2014all while barely able to make ends meet.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s not just Instacart, Door Dash, Uber and Lyft.  It’s the dockless scooter companies making cities unwalkable, it’s Amazon’s conscious sales of dangerous fakes and abuse of its employees, Facebook’s continuous lying about privacy, Twitter’s sh%$ show, PayPal’s abuse of its customers, etc.<\/p>\n

Who knew that view of the future in William Gibson’s stories would be so wildly optimistic as compared to the reality that we face?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People are finally noticing that Silicon Valley’s vision of the future is a nightmare: Vanessa Bain was less than a year into her gig as an Instacart shopper when the company announced it would no longer allow tipping on its app. Instacart instead began imposing a 10 percent \u201cservice fee\u201d that replaced the previous default …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[365,364,587,367,382],"class_list":["post-176994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-business","tag-evil","tag-gig-economy","tag-internet","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176994"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176994\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}