
The Servant Economy - webappsecperson
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/what-happened-uber-x-companies/584236/
======
sevensor
It's interesting to consider the gig economy as a reversion to the class-
stratified social order that prevailed throughout so much of history. From
that perspective, it's the last seven or eight decades that are particularly
strange and deserving of study, and not the reemergence of a servant class.

~~~
jpatokal
Servants for the rich never went away. What's new is the concept of easily
summoned single-task servants for the middle class: now anybody with a phone
and a bit of spare money can delegate tasks, and the people fulfilling those
tasks lack even the basic job security of having a steady employer.

All that said, I do find the article's use of "servant" somewhat demeaning. Is
a self-employed tradesman like a plumber a "servant"? How about a freelance
software developer? Where do you draw the line?

~~~
tokyodude
why is this special? every time to eat out I'm paying someone to make a meal
for me instead of making it myself. I pay the delivery person to get my
package to me rather than drive myself to the manufacturer. I pay people to
make furniture for me rather than building it myself although I did help my
dad build some in the past. I pay an accountant to do my taxes instead of
doing them myself. I pay people to make clothing even though my mom used to
make clothes.

what's special about Lyft drivers to Uber Eats? seems like absolutely nothing

~~~
coldtea
> _why is this special? every time to eat out I 'm paying someone to make a
> meal for me instead of making it myself._

You don't just order a person waiting for orders to cook you a meal special
for you, though, and have their daily income depend on whether you ordered or
not. That was a problem restaurant owners had -- which was part of the "risk"
in being an entrepreneur.

Cooks weren't paid per meal (door-to-door salesmen were paid in commission,
musicians might been paid for gigs, etc, but that was the exception not the
rule -- working gig per gig was a thing for hobos during the Great
Depression). Now this model is getting more widespread ("gig economy").

~~~
gbacon
_Everyone_ works on commission. If you don’t believe me, try not showing up
for a few days. An employee’s stable, dependable paycheck is a comforting
illusion. When hungry diners abandon a certain restaurant, the cook finds
herself unemployed.

Not sure whether you intended to use scare quotes around risk or asterisks for
_emphasis_. The entrepreneur’s role is coordinating present production with
future demand and placing real-money bets accordingly. That’s no freebie.

~~~
coldtea
> _Everyone works on commission. If you don’t believe me, try not showing up
> for a few days._

You keep using this word, commission. I don't think it means what you think it
means.

Yes, job's are not for life, and if a business goes under, or if you don't
show up, etc, you will get let off/fired.

That's not the same as a "per gig" payment.

> _An employee’s stable, dependable paycheck is a comforting illusion._

Well, in many places in the world, it's a concrete reality, protected by law.
You can't get fired without notice (and in some places, serious cause), you're
given several months pay if you're laid off, and you have legal right to your
payment as long as you're employed whether the company has business that day
or not (e.g. an off day or week at a restaurant).

With a "gig economy" workers, none of these guarantees exists.

They're more like freelancers with very small contracts.

~~~
captainredbeard
FWIW, fewer businesses are started per capita in those countries and they grow
slowly, too.

------
gnicholas
> _The unicorns have taken huge sums of money: on average, $1 billion in
> venture funding each._

A sure-fire way to become a unicorn: raise $1B in VC. You're instantly worth a
billion dollars, just based on your bank account.

~~~
Deimorz
Some people are calling those "minotaurs" now, apparently:
[https://www.axios.com/minotaurs-companies-raised-more-
than-1...](https://www.axios.com/minotaurs-companies-raised-more-
than-1-billion-99250290-99b7-435d-82f9-810d172478cc.html)

------
chpmrc
Anyone who has lived or is living in a foreign country, and doesn't speak the
language, appreciates the presence (or lack thereof) of these services. I know
I do. Without even considering that there are people who get very anxious
talking on the phone, for whom these are often a life saver.

Where I live now there is no Uber but there is no app for taxis either. You
have to call a number, be able to speak Spanish, wait 3-5 minutes and then
they'll tell you the ID of the taxi, which you have to remember. If anything
goes wrong the taxi driver has to call the station which in turn will call you
and try to figure out where you are.

Sorry but screw that!

~~~
telesilla
There will be a private driver system in that country. Ask someone local you
trust, they can give you the name of a driver who speaks english (or enough of
it) and you can book them ahead when needed. It's like Uber for Uber, but old-
school pre-app style. As it's been done for centuries.

~~~
chpmrc
"Ask someone local you trust" already assumes you've been there for enough
time to know and befriend some local, which is almost never the case, for
frequent travellers, plus "private" (more often than not unlicensed) drivers
usually charge a ton more. Direct experience in multiple places.

------
mothsonasloth
Economically wealthy but time poor --> customer

Economically poor but time rich --> servant

Serfdom 2.0 Ladies and Gentlemen

~~~
wwweston
Economically poor AND time poor --> high-efficiency and optimal return for
capital!

Remember kids, like Adam Smith said: in an efficient and competitive market,
the price of a good or service falls to the cost of production.

If you believe him, what does that mean for labor?

~~~
zeroname
> If you believe him, what does that mean for labor?

It means you are fairly compensated for your work and you pay fair prices for
the product of other people's work.

~~~
peteradio
I think it means there are a lot of jobs not worth doing but the worker
doesn't know it's putting them in decline or the decline is better than the
alternative. I do not think being paid below a living wage should be refered
to as fair under any circumstances.

~~~
zeroname
I'm talking about a fair price. Wages are prices. A fair price is one that
both parties agree to. Curiously, many people work _for free_. Is that unfair?

I'm not talking about fairness in terms of equality. People are not equal in
terms of economic value they never will be. Indeed, some people have no better
choice than accept a job that pays less than a living wage. Would you deny
them that possibility by mandating that every job needs to pay a living wage?
Isn't that unfair?

~~~
ABCLAW
>A fair price is one that both parties agree to.

There's this lovely fiction in law that contracts should be upheld because two
consenting parties both get ahead by reaching a bargain. All transactions are
positive, so we should uphold bargains as a default. Super duper.

But then history gave us a ton of examples of contracts which are negotiated
in the context of a power or informational asymmetry. Boo.

Contracts for labour are predominantly contracts which are negotiated in the
context of power and informational asymmetries, which is why developed nations
have backstopping legislation to prevent wholesale abuse.

I guess your original statement being untenable forced you to redefine fair to
mean 'whatever they agreed to' which is tautological. Yes, the agreements will
be what was agreed to, but does that actually address the post you were
replying to?

~~~
gbacon
You accused someone else of brandishing tautology after having written a few
sentences previous

 _But then history gave us a ton of examples of contracts which are negotiated
in the context of a power or informational asymmetry …_

No two people or entities possess the exact same information. You don’t define
how you’re using power. _Every_ transaction can be said to have these
asymmetries, a tautological characterization that happens to be a bogeyman
from cultural Marxism.

Voluntarily agreed contracts, in contrast, are a distinct and thus helpful
category. Seeing as much does require the realization that some contracts’
terms are rejected and consequently never become agreements.

~~~
ABCLAW
I don't think you know what a tautology is. Me making an argument you don't
like isn't tautological.

Basic contract theory requires A. A is not always true. Accordingly, we
modulate applying basic contract theory on the basis of how true A is. When A
is not true, we don't apply it.

This applies in respect of large M&A deals as well as in respect of labour
law. Making transactions work better requires us to understand when
transactions work well and when they don't.

------
jokoon
I thought the internet would connect people who could do things together, not
only to share a car or some chore, but to share company, help each other,
build a network. That was the sharing economy.

If you look at tinder, this concept of finding compatible people by economic
goal, interest and location is really the ideal things we want from the
internet.

But instead we're back to the basics of market mechanics, profitability, jobs,
consumption, comfort, and the ability to make money. It's not surprising. But
I still have faith in an internet of proximity where people post ads, talk
with nearby people for stuff they need or trade, instead of letting big money
own how internet gets to be used.

~~~
tinbad
IMO what you describe can be summarized as a UX problem. Those things are
there but it takes time and effort to find them, usually hard to figure out
and therefor not adoptable by the masses. It's much easier to sign up for FB
and start consuming through their slick UX. This is why big money wins time
and time again. This is why Bitcoin, Linux, IRC, p2p, etc never had as much of
a mass breakthrough as some had hoped, and likely never will.

~~~
jsutton
On the contrary, if it is a UX problem, then the Bitcoins of the world should
eventually have a breakthrough if the tech is valuable, so long as the right
UX can be found. It happened to IRC already (Slack). We just need more focus
and investment on UX.

~~~
no_identd
Fix the Developer UX of TCP/IP by surplanting it with GNUnet (Which still
needs some serious improvements) & RINA (that also goes for RINA), and the
rest will fall into place.

------
Androider
The chart shows Instacart receiving the most VC to date. Now there's a company
with a business model completely ass-backwards (in-store isle walking), a
terrible customer experience (regularly out of items you order since there's
no backend integration) and disappointment all around (swapping out products
for vaguely related 5x pricier ones, or arriving with about half of what you
needed to make your dinner).

When that company rightfully craters, the blast zone is going to be
spectacular.

~~~
downrightmike
The VC money will crater, everyone else will just see it disappear. Grocery
stores have been trying to make this successful for decades and fail every
time. It is a nice idea, but the same problems exist and aren't solved, even
in this iteration. So it will fail.

------
jrbapna
"Now you can do stuff that you could already do before, but you can do it with
your phone. What it takes to make that work is incredible—venture capitalists
have poured $672 million combined into Wag and Rover!—but the consumer impact
is small. Instead of taking a number off a bulletin board in a coffee shop and
calling Eric to walk Rufus, you hit a few buttons on your phone and Eric comes
over."

The above is a very cynical interpretation. What it fails to capture is the
idea that incremental benefits multiplied by millions of people is a huge NET
benefit to society as a whole.

An anecdote: Arrived at the airport the other day and the baggage claim was
backed up by about 30 minutes. While 30 minutes is not a big deal, multiply it
across the 300 hundred or so passengers on the flight, and you'll get about 6
ENTIRE HUMAN DAYS were wasted due to an operational inefficiency.

But hey, who needs uber when it only takes a few minutes to hail a cab? ;)

~~~
nostrademons
The weird thing about this line of thinking is that if you take it to its
logical conclusions, you quickly conclude that nothing really matters anymore,
because all we do is exist on this earth.

One of my early projects at Google involved latency optimization - incredibly
boring, invisible stuff. At the end of the project, we'd saved maybe
20ms/search, and my boss was like "20ms/search * 3 billion searches/day = 60M
seconds/day = 16K hours/day. Every day, you've saved humanity 16,000 hours of
their lives."

And then I 20%'d on the PacMan doodle, which had an estimated 400 million
hours of total playing time. Well, shit. There goes the next 68 years of
latency optimizations.

(As an aside, this feels a lot like what Silicon Valley does. Save time on
your job so you can waste it on social media, crypto gambling, or computer
games. You just can't win, because there is no win condition - we'll continue
to exist regardless of what we choose to do in the meantime.)

~~~
jrbapna
Chuckled a bit at this. The other way to interpret it is _everything matters_

The doodle is a net win, because it makes people happy (and they can skip it
if it doesn’t). The latency makes everybody sad. You increased net happiness
in the world.

~~~
Mirioron
I'd like to echo this point. People having more time to do what they want is a
net benefit itself. How they choose to use that time is up to them.

~~~
somberi
“Beware the barrenness of a busy life. “ — Socrates

------
dwighttk
Blue Apron? Why is that included?

Blue Apron is Uber for... what? Aren't the boxes just delivered by ups or
fedex or usps or whatever? Do they have independent contractors filling the
boxes?

~~~
CharlesColeman
> Blue Apron is Uber for... what?

Measuring food into portions.

~~~
dwighttk
So McDonalds is Uber for cooking food?

------
thekhatribharat
What about the quality of service guarantees provided by Uber-for-X platforms?
Both the service provider and the service consumer can see each other's social
ratings and feedback on these platforms. A whole new set of customers become
willing to engage with a more diverse set of service providers solely because
of the quality of service guarantees (and not just convenience of the tap of a
button) - AirBnB and the recently YC-launched VanGo are good examples.

~~~
jimbokun
Actually, shouldn't "Uber-for-X" literally be the business model? Can't you
abstract away the specifics for all the verticals, and let someone quickly
spin up their specific vertical in a few minutes, leveraging producer/consumer
data models, social ratings, feedback, fraud detection, etc.

Any reason why each "Uber-for-X" should be it's own company with its own
custom built back ends and front ends?

~~~
no_identd
Now consider the next steps:

* Turn-key standing up of Uber-for-X service

* Automating provisioning and downtearing of Uber-for-X services based on economic supply & demand (Think Microservices and Heroku Dynos)

* ...doing all that as a non-profit, because once you automate that, how does the money flow, assuming an open source application?

Uh-oh.

I mean hell you could probably do half of this within a few months if you also
use eTurk or something. Could even use Remote Personal Assistant services,
too. Just would need a really good process model before you can start on
starting with that.

Edit:

Come to think of it, what Uber-for-X companies do sound a lot like something
almost completely covered by things like this sluggish monster:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frameworx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frameworx)

Originally developed by the biggest telcos. (Yes that is why this video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3IPVWN-1ks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3IPVWN-1ks)
applies to ALL carriers.)

------
CryptoPunk
>>These platforms may unlock new potentials within our cities and lives.
They’ve definitely generated huge fortunes for a very small number of people.
But mostly, they’ve served to make our lives marginally more convenient than
they were before. Like so many other parts of the world tech has built, the
societal trade-off, when fully calculated, seems as likely to fall in the red
as in the black.

People who work in the "servant" (aka service) industry using platforms like
Uber are happy to have the opportunity.

Giving people more work options is good, not bad. This idea that letting
suppliers and consumers compete in a free market leads to a "race to the
bottom" is an old trope that has been around since at least the time of Marx
(Marx himself claimed that free market exchange would lead to the
impoverishment of workers as a result of mechanization).

The reality, as confirmed by economists and demonstrated by statistical
evidence, has always been exactly the opposite: real wages have steadily
increased over the last two centuries, meaning people are forced to work fewer
hours to meet their basic needs, and have more time to do what they genuinely
want.

Even in a perfectly free market, overcoming the challenges of organizing a
complex economy to raise the standard of living is a daunting task, strewn
with the carcasses of dead startups, and years of sacrifice in funding and
building out businesses to test new models, and in maintaining and
administering established businessses to provide people with the
goods/services that let them live their lives.

We don't need to add to these difficulties with paternalistic restrictions on
private property and free exchange rights motivated by bad ideas like the
author's.

------
justanotherjoe
Employers seem to be happy for an automated performance metric of their
employees. They said that it will let them provide incentives and bonuses for
performing workers. I always saw it as a tool for punishing, not rewarding.
Anyway, chasing rewards or running from punishment, are not what i call good
living.

------
buboard
> The haves and the have-nots might be given new names: the demanding and the
> on-demand

It doesnt have to be split that way. "Living as a service" is our future, as
more and more people end up living but also working on-demand instead of
steady home / 8 hours. Technology was supposed to be the lubricant that would
catalyze this conversion, and these startups might be just the beginning.
Automation will only accelerate the trend, and in the end the platforms
themselves will be commodified, because these services rely on physical
proximity which inherently limits their network effects (hence why they
subsidize their prices - a futile endeavor). I think attacking the model is
not helping, improvement is what it needs.

------
areoform
Sometimes it's hard not to take a step back and wonder if the singularity has
already occurred. Corporations are, in more ways than one, a form of
Artificial Intelligence. They are greater than the sum of their parts, they
possess attrition tolerance (i.e. any single node can be removed and the
corporation will continue), and no single individual can understand the whole
breadth of its execution in detail or hold it in their head. They have this
almost emergent intelligence about them where corporations as a whole can
decide to do things that individuals would find abhorrent. There is no one
person who pushes the button. All of them who push the button as a part of
this new entity that we've created.

This AI doesn't have morality and it can never have morality simply because
they aren't human. Individuals have morals. Corporations have objectives. And
their objective is to maximize economic utility at all costs. So they launder
money for drug lords and terrorists [https://www.foxnews.com/world/hsbc-
knowingly-helped-mexican-...](https://www.foxnews.com/world/hsbc-knowingly-
helped-mexican-cartels-launder-billions-lawsuit-claims)
[https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/hsbc-holdings-plc-and-hsbc-
ba...](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/hsbc-holdings-plc-and-hsbc-bank-usa-na-
admit-anti-money-laundering-and-sanctions-violations) . Knowingly kill human
beings in clinical trials
[http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/02/pfizer.bextra/index.htm...](http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/02/pfizer.bextra/index.html)
. And undermine the commons to maximize their utility towards their ends.

While capitalism as a whole isn't an AI, it is an amazing computational
process that has produced the greatest advancements in the standard of living
in history. But the process is also similarly unmoved and lacking in human
morality simply because it isn't human. It takes the route of lowest
resistance and it creates to satisfy the utility function that it is
computing. And that's it.

Is it a shock that these processes have exposed these vulnerabilities in our
society?

~~~
tathougies
> lacking in human morality simply because it isn't human.

You seem to be under the impression that humans would do the right thing. This
claim is repeated without justification. In fact, the claim is ridiculous on
its face because corporations are certainly human, given that they are run,
operated, and staffed by human beings. Claiming them to be 'not human' is
simply copping out facing the depraved reality of human existence.

~~~
jiveturkey
except we already know that in groups, people act differently than they would
individually.

the GP statement is, by that argument, strictly correct. 'composed of' humans
is not the same as 'being' human.

He did go on to say, this exposes the weakness in _society_ , which is a
collection of _humans_.

------
no_identd
Speaking of Servants and Economics:

A while ago, I conjectured that Land Rent Theory doesn't properly factor in
live-in servants, something I suspect would minorly affect the mathematics of
it. By how much on a micro-scale, I can't say, but based on this an the above
article, a more macro-scale-economical thought follows, on a more interesting
level of abstraction than 'communal land prices':

If we consider an area a given Uber-for-X service operates in, and given that
the employees there finance their living within that area by working for those
companies, don't those employees then map to them effectively becoming live
in-servants of the entire group living within the respective areas of
operations?

You know what live in-servants used to get called in some circumstances?

If you have an immediate answer to that question, you might want to think
about whatever answer you immediately had at hand for a bit and how it got
there.

And if not, you might want to think very hard about which message you've
failed to notice here.

~~~
jessaustin
This is an ambitious rhetorical style. Most of us are probably going to fail
your test and not realize it. Some of us will realize that the test itself is
a heads-you-win-tails-we-lose pointless exercise anyway. If you are seeking to
persuade, you could be more explicit.

~~~
ABCLAW
Slaves.

He's talking about slaves.

~~~
thedailymail
I was guessing "serfs."

------
solidsnack9000
With the conclusion, the author seems to present a good argument for the new
platforms being more of an effect than a cause, but not see it. If "The
inequalities of capitalist economies are not exactly news." and it was only in
"...the short-lived narrowing of economic fortunes wrapped around the Second
World War..." that we saw a different structure, maybe these platforms are
merely the outcome of the social forces they could never be expected to
control.

 _The inequalities of capitalist economies are not exactly news. As my
colleague Esther Bloom pointed out, “For centuries, a woman’s social status
was clear-cut: either she had a maid or she was one.” Domestic servants—to
walk the dog, do the laundry, clean the house, get groceries—were a fixture of
life in America well into the 20th century. In the short-lived narrowing of
economic fortunes wrapped around the Second World War that created what
Americans think of as “the middle class,” servants became far less common,
even as dual-income families became more the norm and the hours Americans
worked lengthened.

What the combined efforts of the Uber-for-X companies created is a new form of
servant, one distributed through complex markets to thousands of different
people. It was Uber, after all, that launched with the idea of becoming
“everyone’s private driver,” a chauffeur for all.

An unkind summary, then, of the past half decade of the consumer internet:
Venture capitalists have subsidized the creation of platforms for low-paying
work that deliver on-demand servant services to rich people, while subjecting
all parties to increased surveillance.

These platforms may unlock new potentials within our cities and lives. They’ve
definitely generated huge fortunes for a very small number of people. But
mostly, they’ve served to make our lives marginally more convenient than they
were before. Like so many other parts of the world tech has built, the
societal trade-off, when fully calculated, seems as likely to fall in the red
as in the black._

------
3xblah
"An unkind summary, then, of the past half decade of the consumer internet:
Venture capitalists have subsidized the creation of platforms for low-paying
work that deliver on-demand servant services to rich people, while subjecting
all parties to increased surveillance."

"Unkind"? How would we make it less "unkind"?

Half-decade?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyLackey.com](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyLackey.com)

~~~
eevilspock
One day my friends and I were walking in downtown Seattle. Looking up we saw a
huge billboard that simply said, "MyLackey.com". What an asinine, tone-deaf,
elitist, heartless yet honest name we thought[1].

Later we learned one of the founders was Brian McGarvey, someone we had worked
with in a prior startup. His idea was to take Kozmo.com[2] up a notch. It
exemplified the dot-com boom, and now Facebook, Uber, and much of Silicon
Valley then and today: get rich quick, fuck humanity.

\---

[1] Much the same way Trump's election is America being honest with itself.

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com)

------
dotcoma
Venture capitalists have subsidized the creation of platforms for low-paying
work that deliver on-demand servant services to rich people, while subjecting
all parties to increased surveillance.

Spot on.

------
tabtab
Based on that chart, I should have invested in _Gone Inc._

------
zeroname
_" An unkind summary, then, of the past half decade of the consumer internet:
Venture capitalists have subsidized the creation of platforms for low-paying
work that deliver on-demand servant services to rich people, while subjecting
all parties to increased surveillance."_

The whole "rich vs poor divide" angle is nonsense. Like the article admits,
all of these services were available before, but now they have the form of an
app. The money goes to develop and advertise the whole show (creating jobs),
but also to subsidize the labor. In effect, these services are more affordable
than before. Uber is cheaper than a Taxi. Having your groceries delivered can
be cheaper than doing it yourself, even if you earn small.

All that venture capital comes _from the rich_ and goes into the pockets of
_those who aren 't rich_. It's dumb money, the same kind that made pets.com (a
ludicrous business) go to a 100 million dollar market cap. As soon as that
capital dries up, these shops will close down, or raise prices. They will
never make their money back, because nobody will be able to maintain a
monopoly on a service that almost anyone can perform. That's also why the
labor itself will stay cheap, no matter who the middleman is. It's not like
these jobs were highly lucrative before all these capitalists walked in.

~~~
peterwwillis
Uber wasn't available before Uber. Taxis were available, but those are _very_
different things. It really is a job platform designed to take advantage of
people who need multiple jobs, and surprise surprise, there's a slew of 'em
here. It simply wouldn't work in a country that did not have such huge wealth
disparity.

~~~
zeroname
Taxis aren't very different things at all. That's why in many countries, Uber
has been banned. They're regarded as taxis circumventing taxi regulations.

> It really is a job platform designed to take advantage of people who need
> multiple jobs, and surprise surprise, there's a slew of 'em here.

Any job offer is taking advantage of the fact that people aren't magical self-
sufficient entities. There's nothing wrong with offering a job, nobody is
forcing anyone to take it.

> It simply wouldn't work in a country that did not have such huge wealth
> disparity.

Wealth disparity has nothing to do with it. Uber prices are set by supply and
demand. In some countries, Uber may need to pay more to attract drivers - and
raise prices as a result.

~~~
peterwwillis
See, this is the problem, nobody understands what Uber is.

It's a platform for turning random unskilled people with cars into a cheap,
temporary, on-demand labor force. You don't have to invest in a vehicle fleet,
you don't have to train anyone, you don't have to pay for medallions. You just
grab a random yo-yo with a vehicle and a clean driving record and they start
making you cash.

You can't do that with a Taxi. For a Taxi there's a huge capital, personnel,
and operational investment. To become a NYC Taxi driver, you need:

An application, an $84 licensing fee, a $75 fingerprinting fee, criminal
background check, $15 copy of state driving record, no outstanding traffic or
parking tickets or child support payments (??), a medical examination [you pay
for], a $26 drug test, a six-hour $50 defensive driving course, attend taxi
school (24 to 80 hours, $125 to $325), $25 English written and spoken
proficiency test (optional $20 prep test), and a $60 wheelchair accessible
vehicle training course. For the license you may have to memorize lots of
information about your municipality. Only half of license test takers pass.
You can join a company and earn 2/3 your fare per day minus fuel costs, or
rent a cab for ~$100/day plus fuel. If passengers pay by card you may pay up
to 10% in fees. You may have to carry general liability even if your cab
company insures you.

Or you can become an Uber driver if you have a new car, insurance, and a clean
record.

To make money with a Taxi, you need to drive around 10-12 hours 5 days a week,
ideally at peak hours. The base rate is around $10 an hour, but if you get
good you can make double that. Tips can make up to 40% of income. Based on
this, you can make minimum wage or higher.

With Uber, you drive when you want. But you can't drive an unlimited amount.
So if you're doing this to support a family, you have to drive both Uber and
Lyft and maybe work another job or two on the side. It's expected that this
won't be your only job. You have to already be investing tens of thousands of
dollars in a vehicle, and also already have other income.

This kind of driver never existed before. Someone who is partially wealthy,
but needs more cash, but doesn't have time to go job-hunting and find part
time work. Someone who never would have driven for a Taxi company, but will
take their own car and time to make odd trips around the city for hours at a
time. A non-Taxi driver who will do Taxi-like things.

So what's new is the Uber driver herself. She only exists now because she was
formerly lower-middle class, and now she needs 3 jobs to support herself. It's
the platform designed for the widening wage gap. And it is horrifying that
that's where our economy is now: a slow, steady erosion of economic security
for more and more of the country.

~~~
zeroname
> You just grab a random yo-yo with a vehicle and a clean driving record and
> they start making you cash.

Uber has been losing money ever since its inception, so it's clearly not
making them so much cash.

> For a Taxi there's a huge capital, personnel, and operational investment.

Maybe in the U.S. with all its regulation.

> To become a NYC Taxi driver, you need...

Who cares? Taxis aren't all the same worldwide, they're still taxis. An
unregulated/unlicensed taxi is still a taxi.

> You have to already be investing tens of thousands of dollars in a vehicle,
> and also already have other income.

If it's really such a sucker's game, people can just stop doing it.

> So what's new is the Uber driver herself. She only exists now because she
> was formerly lower-middle class, and now she needs 3 jobs to support
> herself.

If she needs three jobs to support herself maybe she'll prefer having the
choice of working for Uber over not having it. Her situation is neither Uber's
fault nor responsibility.

------
abvdasker
Mark my words, this is one of those tech articles that in 10 years will seem
laughably outdated (not that anyone will remember this article in 10 years).
It creates a false equivalency between the services that existed before and
those that exist through the so-called "gig economy".

But this part of the ending really bothered me:

> Venture capitalists have subsidized the creation of platforms for low-paying
> work ... while subjecting all parties to increased surveillance.

In general, there has been a remarkable lack of privacy or security violations
by the so-alled "gig economy" companies. The author seems to be conflating the
previous generation of information-only companies like Facebook and Google
with gig economy companies like Uber. For all its ills, Uber does not get
enough credit for the fact that it does not sell or otherwise distribute the
customer's data for money. Instead it provides a service in exchange for pay.
The information customers provide to Uber stays with Uber, which cannot be
said of Facebook, Instagram, Google, LinkedIn or just about any other
information-only tech company.

That the author chooses to end his article with a factually ignorant statement
about surveillance reveals a how devoid of substance the rest of the article
turns out to be.

