Apploitation in a city of instaserfs
How the “sharing economy” has turned San Francisco into a dystopia for the working class
If you spend enough time in San Francisco, you’ll notice sharing economy workers everywhere. While you’re waiting to get some food, look for the most frantic person in the lineup and you can bet they’re working with an app. Some of them are colour-coded: workers in orange T-shirts are with Caviar, a food delivery app; those in green represent Instacart, an app for delivering groceries. The blue jackets riding Razor scooters are with Luxe—if you’re still driving yourself around this city, these app workers will park your car.
In the Bay Area, there are thousands of such people running through the aisles, fidgeting in line and racing against the clock. They spend most of their time in cars, where it can be harder to spot them. Oftentimes they’re double-parked in the bike lane, picking up a burrito from inside an adjacent restaurant or waiting for a passenger to come down from the apartment on top. If you look closely, you’ll see a placard in the window that says Uber or a glowing pink moustache indicating they drive around Lyft’s passengers. Last summer, I was one of them.
Oh, Canada! I’m writing you from Berkeley, California to warn you about this thing called “the sharing economy.” Since no one is really sharing anything, many of us prefer the term “the exploitation economy,” but due to its prevalence many in the Bay Area simply think of it as “the economy.” Whatever you want to call it, the basic idea is that customers can outsource all the work or chores they don’t want to do to somebody else in their area.
You can be chauffeured around the city while somebody picks up and launders your dirty underwear. You can have groceries delivered to your door and your bathroom given that deep clean that you don’t have time to do yourself. The best part is you can do it all on your phone! Sharing economy companies promise their customers all the luxuries of the rich and famous—and they can do that by taking advantage of the system and, in some cases, bending or simply avoiding labour laws.
I know this because I spent a month driving, shopping and in other ways serving the users of apps like Uber, Lyft, Postmates and Instacart. I recorded the whole thing for a podcast called Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything. Benjamen wanted to see what it was like to work for an app, but he didn’t want to do the work himself. In the spirit of the sharing economy, he convinced me to “partner” with him. There is so much ridiculous stuff I can’t get to in this short space that you should listen to my full adventures online at www.sharingeconomy.fail or by searching for “Instaserfs.”
I signed up for as many sharing economy jobs as I could, but they’re not really jobs. I was never an employee; I was a “partner,” or a “hero” or even a “ninja” depending on the app. Sharing economy companies are just middlemen, connecting independent contractors to customers. When I signed up to work with (not for) these apps, I was essentially starting my own ride-sharing/courier business.
As a freelance filmmaker, I knew the deal: being your own boss is a big responsibility. In the U.S., we independent contractors have to pay an additional self-employment tax and we have to find our own health insurance. We’re also not guaranteed a minimum wage. As sharing economy workers, we use our own cars, which means paying for our own gas and maintenance costs. We are on our own.
We do still have a boss. It just isn’t a person. It’s an algorithm.
https://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/monitor/apploitation-city-instaserfs?utm_content=buffer4dcc8&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
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