
Words Matter: How Tech Media Helped Write Gig Companies into Existence - doener
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3668606&utm_campaign=Johannes%20Klingebiel&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20newsletter
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raxxorrax
Well, journalists worked hard for their own precarious situation then.

To be fair, I don't think these companies were written into existence. I think
the hype helped, but the main draw was convenience to users and most of those
did't think about the larger repercussions and just wanted to save some money.

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somethoughts
The cycle is - hype up the new thing then expose the fraud about the old
thing. Often its different newspapers and journalists doing the hyping and the
exposing. Both are just trying to make money.

Some examples - Uber, Theranos, anything AI. Also happens in politics.

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darawk
Why is this on SSRN? This is not an academic paper...it's not doing science or
analysis, there is no data or statistics. It's just an opinion, and a facile,
meaningless one at that.

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renewiltord
It's a social science paper. Many of them are not quantitative. A lot of them
look like this.

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nostromo
If words matter, I'm not sure we should be calling this sort of academia
"science" at all.

Policy advocacy would be a better word.

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renewiltord
Well, this particular word is sort of overloaded due to legacy reasons, right?
For instance, strictly I would not consider most mathematical sciences
'science' \- not empirical. Likewise, non-empirical social sciences aren't
sciences in the science sense either.

But the word 'science' means something different from its meaning in 'social
science' just like 'Act of God' in your insurance paperwork does not mean a
supernatural being acting (it just means natural catastrophes and the like -
one kind of _force majeure_ ).

Altogether, I've chosen to just accept that "social science" is not "science"
in general.

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johnchristopher
What the... Tech reporting didn't enable the gig economy. Politicians were all
welcoming the deregulation of work laws and the coming of "everyone is a
freelancer now" pressure had been in the making for years.

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jasode
_> Here’s a question: If Uber or Instacart or Fiverr are really tech
companies, what technology have they created? It’s not the GPS or smartphones
they rely on to connect workers and consumers: GPS got started back in 1973
and the iPhone appeared in 2007 (and that, itself, was preceded by the
internet-connected BlackBerry). App-based service-delivery companies aren’t
developing silicon chips like Intel or AMD, creating consumer software like
Adobe, or making networking switches like Cisco. They don’t get money from
inventing new tech, but from venture capital and by taking a slice of every
transaction made by their contingent labor force._

Yes, I understand that the paper's author is only using a narrow definition of
"tech" to mean non-software non-programming products such as silicon or
lasers. It may irritate the author but if a word has enough _shared agreement_
by others, it won't matter if he disagrees with it -- because _others_ will
still use it.

To copy & paste a previous comment, I'll attempt to explain why _others_ think
of Uber as a _" tech company"_.

Others' viewpoint: Yes, virtually every company uses technology but not every
company is _birthed by technology_ :

\- the Uber founders (Travis K and Garrett C) were _software programmers_ ,
not taxicab owners.

\- the product they worked on was a _smartphone app_ instead of buying a car
with a taxi medallion and driving around for fares.

\- the type of investors that funded them (e.g. Benchmark Capital) were _VCs
that specialize in the tech sector_.

\- the type of companies Uber has acquired[1] so far are _tech focused_ (e.g.
machine learning, geospatial, etc).

Yes, 100-year-old banks always have ongoing modernization with evolving
technology (e.g. Citi and Chase have developed smartphone apps) but Uber's
_birth was programmers playing around with smartphones_.

Another example of the perception difference is eBay vs Sotheby's/Christie's.
eBay is typically called a _" tech company"_ but Sotheby's/Christie's are
called _" auction houses"_. If eBay brings together buyers & sellers in a
marketplace... and Sotheby's/Christie's also has an auctions marketplace...
why is _" tech company"_ more often attached to eBay rather than
Sotheby's/Christie's? (Both Sotheyby's & Christie's have websites for users to
place bids so they develop technology as well.) Probably because eBay was
_born on the internet by a software programmer_ named Pierre Omidyar.

I'm not saying you have to agree with all that but just trying to explain the
"hidden taxonomy" that some of the others (including the news media) use to
label certain companies as "tech company".

EDIT to reply: yes I agree that the _" What “tech” communities understand from
tech is high growth low capital businesses"_ ... is often included in the
mental taxonomy of "tech" but there are exceptions. Youtube/Amazon are
considered "tech companies" even though they are highly capital intensive.
Datacenters with petabytes of harddrives to store videos and logistics
warehouses consume a lot of capital.

[1] [https://acquiredby.co/uber-acquisitions/](https://acquiredby.co/uber-
acquisitions/)

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mrtksn
What “tech” communities understand from tech is high growth low capital
businesses.

What the author argues in the paragraph is that many of those business don’t
actually invent technology but only do business using internet technologies.

For example, somehow Uber is a tech startup but WeWork is not. Realistically,
they’re about the same from technology perspective but WeWork happens to have
capital intensive business model that is not suitable for the high growth that
is expected from “tech” companies despite that both essentially use the same
level of technology - software to organize a business model with an UI to
integrate the participants.

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Animats
_Yes, I understand that the paper 's author is only using a narrow definition
of "tech" to mean non-software non-programming products such as silicon or
lasers. It may irritate the author but if a word has enough shared agreement
by others, it won't matter if he disagrees with it -- because _others_ will
still use it._

Being identified as a "tech" company feeds into valuation. Uber, on the
merits, ought to have a negative valuation. They bought growth by spending
money from Softbank, funded by the Saudi sovereign wealth front. They
subsidize every ride with investor capital. There is no plausible scenario in
which the investors see a return on their investment.

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HissingMachine
Anyone with experience doing freelancing did know exactly what the "gig
economy" was behind the curtain, but media just didn't care, even if scores of
their own employees are part of this new, hot and awesome "gig economy"

