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posted by janrinok on Friday December 19 2014, @06:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the for-richer-for-poorer dept.

After Uber's success, nearly every pitch made by starry-eyed technologists “in Silicon Valley seemed to morph overnight into an ‘Uber for X’ startup" with various companies described now as “Uber for massages,” “Uber for alcohol,” and “Uber for laundry and dry cleaning,” among many, many other things. The conventional narrative is this: enabled by smartphones, enterprising young businesses are using technology to connect a vast market willing to pay for convenience with small businesses or people seeking flexible work. Now Leo Marini writes that the Uber narrative ignores another vital ingredient, without which this new economy would fall apart: inequality.

"There are only two requirements for an on-demand service economy to work, and neither is an iPhone," says Marini. "First, the market being addressed needs to be big enough to scale—food, laundry, taxi rides. Without that, it’s just a concierge service for the rich rather than a disruptive paradigm shift, as a venture capitalist might say. Second, and perhaps more importantly, there needs to be a large enough labor class willing to work at wages that customers consider affordable and that the middlemen consider worthwhile for their profit margins." There is no denying the seductive nature of convenience—or the cold logic of businesses that create new jobs, whatever quality they may be concludes Marini. "All that modern technology has done is make it easier, through omnipresent smartphones, to amass a fleet of increasingly desperate jobseekers eager to take whatever work they can get."

 
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  • (Score: 2) by CRCulver on Friday December 19 2014, @09:50PM

    by CRCulver (4390) on Friday December 19 2014, @09:50PM (#127600) Homepage

    I honestly do not see how anyone could do computer programming for freelance job sites and afford a computer and Internet connection to do the work for the pay that's offered.

    I do translation and interpretation on a freelance basis and do OK (my clients are willing to pay more or less the going rate of the first world), but when I signed up for those sites I was amazed at how little programming and graphic design jobs paid, and how any call for applications would quickly get dozens of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis signing up to work for peanuts. I too wondered how they could afford to even keep a computer and internet connection, but then I discovered that there are office spaces opening up in the Indian subcontinent which subcontract this freelance work to local people. The people you think you're hiring keep a cut for themselves, but they just provide the computer, the internet connection, and a chair and desk to someone else. Apparently Dhaka in Bangladesh has dozens of such offices now.

    It's not even just a Subcontinent thing anymore; I'm based in Romania, and in my town one of these working spaces for graphic design recently opened (though judging from the middle class salaries paid there, they work on a long-term basis with clients instead of one-off exploitive jobs to the lowest bidder).

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