

The Internet is destroying work - jusben1369
http://www.salon.com/2013/07/12/the_new_proletariat_workers_of_the_cloud/

======
diydsp
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.

------
ds9
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/financializatio...](http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/financialization-
as-a-cause-of-economic-malaise/) 2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-
seeking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking)

~~~
kasey_junk
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
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
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.

------
cpursley
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.

~~~
mempko
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
> 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.

------
xwowsersx
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.

~~~
127001brewer
The article is trying to highlight two different types of "jobs": ones that
can provide a family with a "comfortable lifestyle" and ones in which people
struggle to make ends meat.

I think the article makes a far leap to say the internet is responsible for
the decreasing middle class. There are many factors, such as manufacturing
automation, in our changing economic conditions.

Overall, I do not think the internet will be huge catalyst for job growth - in
terms of providing millions of new jobs. But it will always be a huge catalyst
for economic growth.

The following was insightful:

 _" It suddenly occurred to me," wrote Packer, "that the hottest tech start-
ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand,
because that’s who thinks them up."_

Hopefully those twenty years old developers will solve more meaningful
problems than sharing cat photos.

As an aside, I'm surprised that any discussion on "basic income" \- you know
it's coming - hasn't mention the Star Trek economy. Seriously, how do people
in Star Trek universe survive in their economy?

~~~
dragonwriter
> As an aside, I'm surprised that any discussion on "basic income" \- you know
> it's coming - hasn't mention the Star Trek economy. Seriously, how do people
> in Star Trek universe survive in their economy?

The descriptions (or, perhaps more accurately, "indicia") of the economy in
Star Trek are so wildly inconsistent that its a really, really bad basis for
any kind of discussion, even among fictional settings.

~~~
flyinRyan
Why is it inconsistent? It's consistent with techno-anarchy: scarcity is a
solved problem. Without finite resources there is no longer any point to
capitalism, a system which allocates finite resources.

So people are left to live life how ever they see fit. No more commercials,
since that's pointless. Without commercials, there's no TV shows just designed
to get viewers since you no longer need them. If you manage to make something
new you may as well share it with everyone (via a replicator) because... what
else could you do? "Karma" is all that's left to chase.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Why is it inconsistent?

Because it isn't internally consistent.

> It's consistent with techno-anarchy: scarcity is a solved problem.

You seem to think that I was using "inconsistent" to mean "inconsistent with
some external expectations" or "inconsistent with my expectations of what is
plausible", but I was referring to _internal_ consistency, not consistency
with external expectations.

> Without finite resources there is no longer any point to capitalism, a
> system which allocates finite resources.

Neither the absence of finite resources nor the absence of capitalism are
consistent features of the economy in Star Trek.

> So people are left to live life how ever they see fit.

This is rather emphatically not a consistent feature of the economy of Star
Trek.

~~~
flyinRyan
>Because it isn't internally consistent.

Example?

>Neither the absence of finite resources nor the absence of capitalism are
consistent features of the economy in Star Trek.

It is in the earth economy. Other cultures still have money, but humans do
not.

>This is rather emphatically not a consistent feature of the economy of Star
Trek.

Well, obviously you can't just go be a star ship captain because so many want
to do this. But you certainly don't have to flip burgers at McDonald's. You
can pursue any dream and it will only be your talents that decide, not your
financial situation.

~~~
dragonwriter
> > Neither the absence of finite resources nor the absence of capitalism are
> consistent features of the economy in Star Trek.

> It is in the earth economy. Other cultures still have money, but humans do
> not.

Well, yeah, that's claimed sometimes, but at other times the Federation _does_
have a currency [1][2], and at least some resources are apparently rationed on
Earth aside from the use of money [3].

If you want to rationalize the presentations into near-constitency, you could
assume that the Federation has a monetary system but also has (or at least,
core worlds like Earth have) a (by early 21st century standards)
extraordinarily generous ration of most commonly used goods and public
services, such that most people rarely bother to acquire or use money, though
some non-hobby style jobs (including Starfleet!) exist that pay money, and
interaction outside of the Federation (and, quite probably, off the core
worlds within the Federation) frequently requires money (as occasionally might
interactions on the core worlds.) But that's just a rationalization of what is
pretty clearly an incoherent body of fiction, rather than what the designed
reality of the fiction is.

[1] [http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Federation_credit](http://en.memory-
alpha.org/wiki/Federation_credit)

[2] [http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Money](http://en.memory-
alpha.org/wiki/Money)

[3] [http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Transporter_credit](http://en.memory-
alpha.org/wiki/Transporter_credit)

------
theorique
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!_

~~~
minikites
What a rosy Econ 101 view of the world. In reality, tons of people are
desperate for money and put up with a lot of predatory business processes.
Lots of people work without healthcare because they're purposely scheduled for
just enough hours to make them less than full time.

[http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-
mcclelland-f...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-
free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor)

[http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2001/07/dangerous-
meatpa...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2001/07/dangerous-meatpacking-
jobs-eric-schlosser)

~~~
marknutter
A lot of businesses are desperate for good workers and put up with a lot of
predatory worker behaviors.

~~~
fnimick
Rubbish. This is an employer's economy, and they have all the power. I can be
replaced a lot easier than I can find another job.

~~~
flyinRyan
It's _always_ an employer's economy. We call it an "employees economy" when
they exploit us a bit less than they have previously. But even now, what some
are calling the best time in history to be a software dev, there was a startup
right here on HN complaining about how hard it was to find the perfect
employee and how they've been looking _for over a year_. Could you go without
income for _a year_? I sure as hell couldn't.

------
homosaur
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
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.

------
seiferteric
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.

------
kenster07
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
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
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.

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

------
jusben1369
I'm not sure if the Internet is destroying or just amplifying current general
trends.

------
ankitml
100 years back people said, electricity is destroying work.

------
tadruj
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
You mean by recombining other people's work and calling it your own?

~~~
tadruj
No, by combining and creating value greater than the sum of parts!

~~~
mempko
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
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?

