8 Machine Breaking for the Digital Age
Calls for a more moderate engagement with digital technologies tend to attract accusations of “Luddite!” This insult is inspired by Ned Ludd, a textile apprentice whose smashing of a machine in the late 1700s made him a symbol for workers fearful for their prospects in a time of rapid technological change. The lesson from history is supposed to be straightforward. You can moan all you like, but you can’t stop progress. The prefix “neo-” repurposes the insult for the Digital Revolution. The Luddites didn’t stop the Industrial Revolution; Neo-Luddites won’t stop the Digital Revolution.
Some historians offer a more sympathetic way to think about the Luddites.1 Rather than viewing them as ill-informed fantasists who failed to stop the Industrial Revolution, we can think of them as demanding a fairer share of the bounty of technological progress than that initially offered by those who built the factories and installed the power looms. Luddite machine breaking can be placed in a context that includes other forms of worker protest that led, in the end, to worker protections and entitlements. My aim here is certainly not to stop the Digital Revolution, but rather to influence how it unfolds. Decisions that we take now set powerful precedents for the Digital Age.
I’m not suggesting that anyone show up to one of Amazon’s vast data centers with a pickaxe. What’s called for is a more genteel form of digital machine breaking that makes use of market incentives. We’ve seen how Facebook benefits from the “billion times anything” principle. But even a small general decrease in enthusiasm about a company that is perceived as profiting unfairly can affect profits in ways that Facebook notices. We can communicate our displeasure to Facebook, Google, and the rest in ways that matter to them. We can take steps toward realizing the ideal of a genuinely social economy. We can engage in forms of protest that may lead to a more human Digital Age with a smaller—but still considerable—share of its economic returns going to those who own the machines.
See through the Digital Halo Effect!
We must do something about the halo effect enjoyed by some of the central actors in the corporate tech world. We treat the big tech companies differently from other corporate heavyweights. We have long experience of the kinds of moral shortcuts that oil and gas multinationals take in their accumulation of wealth. We tend to treat some of the leaders of the corporate tech world as accidental billionaires. The proclamations of tech pioneers that their purpose is to “make the world a better place” were well satirized in the HBO comedy Silicon Valley. In February 2017, Mark Zuckerberg published a 5,700-word letter addressed to the Facebook community entitled “Building a Global Community.” It was promptly dubbed the “Zuckerberg manifesto.”2 In it, Zuckerberg tells us “Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community.” He says of Facebook’s moral mission “the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.” Airbnb has rapidly acquired a market valuation greater than traditional hotel industry giants Hyatt, Marriott, and Hilton.3 This focus has not prevented an Airbnb insider expressing an aspiration to someday win the Nobel Peace Prize for “helping with cross-cultural understanding.”4 We credit some digital economy billionaires who are less voluble about being moral with a selfless desire to create beautiful things. Steve Jobs faced criticism for not giving much to charity.5 The digital halo effect gave him a pass. The Steve Jobs legend presents him as a Digital Age Michelangelo, the iPhone as his David. Jobs was all about the exquisite design and not about the money. Beautiful objects were his way of making “a dent in the Universe.”6
What should we make of these proclamations of moral or aesthetic ambitions? Moral proclamations come with implied costs. They suggest a willingness to accept the costs of promoting their ends. It’s easy to wish for a world in which no one is hungry. But a world without hunger is a moral goal for you only insofar as you are prepared to do something to achieve it. Another possibility is that the titans of tech are operating in ways that Milton Friedman would applaud. They are using moral language to cloak their real mission to maximize shareholder value.
A good test of the commitment of the titans of tech to the goal of making the world a better place is seeing how they act when the goal of making the world a better place conflicts with the goal of making money. The Zuckerberg manifesto acknowledges the challenge of fake news in the lead-up to the 2016 US election. Fake news colonized many Facebook newsfeeds. But the money Facebook makes from targeted advertising is unaffected by whether members are reading accurate reports on the gravity of the international refugee crisis or fake news reports of Pope Francis’s endorsement of Donald Trump’s presidential bid. If the desire to make money is paramount, then expect Facebook to avoid any measure that would reduce its user engagement. If this causes complaint and threats of government regulation, then the Friedman strategy of offering moral pronouncements to cloak actual indifference is available. One measure of relative importance Facebook places on its touted moral mission and its accumulation of profit are the measures it takes to avoid paying tax. An Observer editorial on the Zuckerberg manifesto identifies the gap between its moral proclamations and its actions: “Like other corporate giants, Facebook has done all in its power to minimize its tax bill, paying a fraction of what it owes the societies from which it draws its profits, undermining the very social infrastructure Zuckerberg claims to want to build.”7 The motive to make money seems to explain much of what the titans of tech do. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos didn’t start out as a book lover dreaming of new ways to spread the joy of reading who made the serendipitous discovery that a platform for selling books could be used to sell other things.8 He approached books much as Exxon Mobil approaches oil—as a commodity. If Bezos had expected more money out of fracking oil than selling discount copies of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, then he would have done that instead.
This is no critique of capitalism. Capitalist societies need businesses whose principal purpose is to make money for their shareholders. But it is important that we recognize that when they say they want to make the world a better place, they are diverting our attention from their real focus on profit. There are many organizations—for example, the United Nations and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—that can be credited with an authentic desire to make the world a better place. You might have doubts about the effectiveness of the UN or the IPCC at making the world a better place, but they seem a better bet if we want organizations that promote our moral interests than are tech companies that seek moral interests only to the extent that they do not conflict with the maximization of profit. When the titans of tech do as Bill Gates did and install themselves as chairs of charitable foundations we might take them at their word. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has a more serious interest in alleviating global poverty than Microsoft Corporation ever could.
It’s important that we not delay in our reassessment of the motives of the leaders of the digital economy.9 We should expect to see a vast increase in the profits of companies that hold data as they expand the reach of machine learning. Google and Facebook are like Standard Oil before the commercialization of the internal combustion engine. If you think that Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook are wealthy companies now, then you should expect to revise up that assessment when they begin to extend their reach in to areas that Robert Gordon identifies as strongly affected by the Second Industrial Revolution: food, clothing, housing, transportation, health, medicine, and working conditions but, thus far, relatively untouched by the digital revolution. Now is the time for the kinds of democratically inspired intervention that in the 1910s broke up Standard Oil. We should act before Google, Facebook, and Co. consign democratic institutions to the same trash can of history that contains Netscape and AltaVista.
We shouldn’t be tormented by fears that expecting Apple and Google to pay their taxes might kill the goose that laid the golden egg. The Russian oligarchs made the most of fortuitous locations in relation to the natural resources of the Soviet Union as it disintegrated and its component republics made halting moves toward free market capitalism. Page, Brin, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Co. found themselves in a similarly fortuitous location in relation to the wealth generated by the digital package. Amanda Schaffer writes about the influence of “great man” myth on our understanding of the Digital Revolution. She says “Rather than placing tech leaders on a pedestal, we should put their successes in context, acknowledging the role of government not only as a supporter of basic science but as a partner for new ventures.”10 Our current titans of tech are very intelligent and gifted individuals. But they are replaceable. They may sulk if we demand that they pay proper taxes, but they don’t have the option of taking their toys and going home.
We should also recognize that the frequency of the use of the term “tech billionaire” to describe those who we see as driving the digital economy is, to some extent, normalizing a very unequal distribution of the wealth generated by the digital package. There’s nothing about the digital package that requires that the founders of and early investors in technology companies become billionaires many times over and that many of the rest of us find our skills increasingly devalued. We should expect the Digital Age to contain big technology companies headed by some very rich men and women. But we could seek to revert to a quaint and retro conception of great wealth in which the founders of Facebook and Google are mere multimillionaires and not multibillionaires. Tech multimillionaires would have millions and millions of dollars, enough money to own mansions in nice parts of town and cottages in the country, and to buy first class air tickets to any grand slam tennis tournament, but they wouldn’t have enough money to compete with NASA in the space exploration business. This may seem like a fanciful vision of our collective future and perhaps it is. But the thing that makes it fanciful is a collective unwillingness to mess with our current political and fiscal arrangements, not some irresistible logic of the digital package.
Don’t Fall for Tech TINA!
TINA is an acronym for “There Is No Alternative.” It was a slogan promulgated in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher, the British Conservative Prime Minister that suggests a futility in resisting the dictates of the market. We may want the operations of railways to conform to our social priorities, continuing to service remote communities, but we are powerless to resist the directives of the market in determining whether and how such communities are served.
TINA illustrates the powerful effect of assumptions about how the world works on our collective consideration of alternatives. Once you decide to consider policies in market terms, some possibilities become difficult to see. Recognizing them requires you to question psychologically entrenched assumptions. There is a technological version of TINA that has the same constricting implications on our consideration of alternatives as Thatcher’s economic version. In tech TINA, some choices become irresistible outcomes of technological progress. We can hope to delay the inevitable. But such delays place us at a disadvantage with respect to the benefits of technological progress.
Tech TINA directs that we evaluate the work done by humans purely in terms of efficiency. Humans must produce more widgets more cheaply to be viewed as more efficient than machines. I have suggested that this omits some of the most important contributions of human workers. When we interact with human workers we interact with beings who have minds like ours. We don’t have to see this interaction as more valuable than the outcomes of the interaction—the meals delivered and the medicines dispensed. The number of meals delivered and the medicines dispensed may be the most important things. But we can still see humans as contributing something that is worth preserving. They contribute their distinctive mind labor.
We should beware of presentations of wealth inequality as inevitable consequences of the digital package. The industrial package offered choices including the path of Gilded Age America, the path of the 1930s Soviet Union, and the path of 1970s social democratic Sweden. The decisions we make now set powerful precedents. We might imagine Ukrainian victims of Stalin’s forced collectivization and industrialization accepting a Second Industrial Revolution version of tech TINA—their suffering, regrettable though it may be, was part of the price of industrialization. But it really wasn’t.
One way to resist tech TINA is to insist on dealing with comparatively inefficient humans whenever possible. In these times of economic austerity businesses are shedding staff. I have argued that this overlooks the value of human social contributions. There are ways to send market signals that you like interacting with humans in contexts in which the social goods that they generate are properly valued. If you are dealing with some corporation’s helpline to get help with one of its flawed products, then repeatedly pressing “0” on your touch-tone telephone might get you through to a human. When you seek out a human employee you aren’t necessarily seeking to date them. Humans are obligatorily gregarious animals who enjoy even the most fleeting pleasures of interacting with other human animals. Choose supermarket checkouts staffed by humans. The role of supermarket checkout worker in 2018 is no one’s dream job. But today’s version of that job could give way to a socially-enhanced version. Harrison Ford is well paid for injecting his humanity into his movies. We recognize the value of that humanity when we pay to see his movies. Socially enhanced supermarket checkout workers should have a similar expectation to be paid for exercises of their social skills. Customers should be prepared to pay just a bit more for goods sold to them by socially enhanced checkout workers.
There is no reason that socially enhanced sales assistants should not thrive in the social economies of the Digital Age. A socially enhanced sales assistant helps shoppers to choose products that are right for them based on their own and reported experiences of products. We have seen this separation in the restaurant business. When people visit a fast food shop they are typically motivated by efficiency. They want cheap cooked food. But when they visit a sit-down restaurant they are aware that they are paying for the social aspects of the job.
The workers that automating supermarkets are letting go may be told that the Digital Revolution will bring jobs more befitting of their moral status. That may be so—it’s difficult to predict the jobs that will emerge from the Digital Revolution. But in the meantime, we should accept that the fact that supermarket workers turn up to work indicates a preference for that job over no job. Supermarket checkout workers are not different from corporate lawyers and academic philosophers in being able to imagine possible jobs that are preferable to those they currently have. When you choose a checkout with a human worker you aren’t degrading him or her.
If You Can Cheat an Algorithm, Then Why Not?
We’ve seen the challenge from machine learning to human mind work. If your job is to identify malignant lesions in ultrasound images, then you are doomed. Machine learners will predictably do what you do to a much higher standard and more cheaply. Humans cannot win these competitions against machine learners. Other competitions pit people not against the machines themselves, but instead against the humans who own the machines and profit from their operation. You may not be able to outthink the machine. But perhaps you can outthink the machine’s owner.
Young people seem to be those who are getting the raw end of the deal as our society transitions to the Digital Age. They are told not to expect the easy employment and strong worker entitlements enjoyed by their parents. Young people can use their superior understanding of digital technologies to respond to this intergenerational injustice. They are not seeking to outthink the machines but instead to outthink their human elders who exercise a disproportionate control over digital technologies and acquire a disproportionate share of the wealth.
When parents seek to deny their children access to the liquor cabinet they can use a key to lock it. The children are unlikely to possess an understanding of the workings of the lock that exceeds that of their parents. But, as Mary Aiken notes, young people have a better understanding of the Internet than that of their parental would-be regulators.11 The same differential in technical understanding limits the older people who make laws that protect their claims on the wealth produced by the digital package. Younger people have an advantage here. They are digital natives who can make use of the digital package in ways that older people did not anticipate. They should feel empowered to exploit gaps in the regulations set by their elders.
Uncertainty about what is possible for the digital package by those who seek to make the rules means that these young people will often spot loopholes—behavior that those who made the rules might have banned were they to have been sufficiently imaginative to think of them. One such example is the peer-to-peer file sharing enabled by Napster. Suppose you want to distribute copyrighted material. You can’t store it on a central server. That server becomes the target of action by the lawyers charged with protecting the interests of its legally recognized owners. Peer-to-peer file sharing obviates the need for a central server to host pirated material. Pirated material lives on the many computers linked by file-sharing software.
It’s appropriate to feel bad about cheating other people. If a human sales assistant fails to charge you for an item, then it is appropriate to point out the error. You should think about the feeling of betrayal felt by a human being when she provides a service that you fail to pay for. When a poorly coded corporate webpage permits you to benefit in unanticipated ways, then why not make them pay the price for dispensing with human workers? The norms of human decency do not apply to our treatment of machines.
Of course, some distance behind the algorithms are human beings who are made worse off in the same kind of way that the human sales assistant who forgets to charge you. Milton Friedman argued that the pursuit of profit by businesses should conform to the “basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.”12 The coders of algorithms may typically seek to comply with the letter of the law. And so should aggrieved, technologically savvy young people. We should understand that when a new technological package is introduced there is considerable uncertainty about how laws and other “basic rules of society” apply to its novel ways of generating wealth. It often seems to be the case that the law is forced to play catch-up as the technologically aware discover new ways to access content that companies claim a proprietary interest in.
Work for Free for Oxfam, but Make Facebook Pay!
In chapter 3 I described Jaron Lanier’s plan to introduce micropayments. I suggested that our cluelessness about the digital package made these a difficult sell. Today’s technology companies benefit from the kinds of action that bring zero or negligible benefits prior to the Digital Revolution. When Fitbit asks you to choose between two innocuous options “I found this article helpful” and “I did not find this article helpful,” you should realize that it’s doing something different from what a human phone sales representative does when he asks you “How’s the weather with you?” That question is motivated by a fleeting feeling of curiosity about the weather in Wellington, New Zealand. Fitbit’s alternatives satisfy no feeling of curiosity. They are about gathering data. It’s rude to just ignore the inquiry of the human sales representative. It’s appropriate to ignore Fitbit’s inquiry. Fitbit expects to use your answers to make a better product for you. But you will be expected to pay what Fitbit considers to be the market value of those improvements. Tech giants have profited richly from our tendency to reflexively proffer requested information. Answer if you want to. But be similarly disposed to return petrol that you predict that you won’t need to the vending oil company free of charge. It’s hard for us to recognize the economic value of the contributions we make to tech companies when we grant them access to our digital exhaust. Lanier describes a redesign of the Net that would be required to implement a universal micropayments system. But we must change first. We must rein in our feelings of gratitude for the freedom to work the digital fields of our digital lords. When considered individually, micropayments are trivial. But they accumulate. We could subscribe to our own version of Facebook’s “billion times anything” principle. A thousand times anything may be enough to pay some of your rent. We will be incentivized to improve the quality of our online contributions if we see them as part of the way we make our livings. We can try to fast-forward our psychological and emotional adjustment to the digital package.
Paying closer attention to the digital package could enable the redirection of inner conspiracy theorists away from moon landing conspiracies toward the measures that technology companies use to separate us from our data. There has been much written about the user-unfriendly format of the terms and conditions for technology companies’ services. Why do technology companies ask us to assert and reassert that we have read the terms and conditions that apply to our use of their services when almost all of us predictably haven’t? The wall of words that greets those interested in any of Apple’s services isn’t designed to be read and internalized by its customers. This obfuscating legalese comes from a company that has an established record of providing information in a user-friendly way. When doctors elicit our consent to medical procedures they seek to make us understand the implications of our consent. They seek to acquaint us with the odds of success and the implications for us of the procedure’s failure. They certainly don’t present pages of small print and ask us to sign on the dotted line or click the “I accept” button. Imagine that Apple applied the same genius that helps iTunes customers find music that is just right for them to helping them to grasp all the implications of its terms and conditions agreements.
Don’t Fight the Last War!
There’s a famous line about generals always fighting the last war. France’s Maginot Line, laboriously constructed between 1929 to 1938 might have helped against a German army using the strategies and tactics of 1914. It was an inadequate response to the highly mobile German army of 1940.
We shouldn’t fall into the trap of building a Maginot Line to protect against the injustices of the Digital Revolution. It is a mistake to fight the injustices of the Digital Revolution with measures designed to respond to the injustices of the Industrial Age. The labor union is well adapted to the factories of the Industrial Age that brought workers to a single geographical location. Workers could organize on the factory floor and form picket lines outside of the factory gates. Labor unions are not particularly effective at responding to unfairness specific to the digital package.
Consider the example of Uber. We can be thankful for some of the things Uber has done. It has brought cheaper rides and flexible employment. We should nevertheless acknowledge the feelings of acute unfairness it has caused. Uber seems to divide up the wealth it generates in ways that don’t seem fair. It is a challenge to established ideas about distributive fairness.
Uber’s 2018 valuation of US $72 billion is good news for its investors.13 The news is not quite so good for Uber’s drivers—or, as Uber prefers—its “partners.” Investing in Uber may be a way to achieve great wealth, but partnering with it isn’t. Uber retains more than 20 percent of the money paid by passengers, leaving drivers to cover their own business-related expenses.
I think we can learn from the Digital Revolution that certain ways of challenging Uber’s share of the money paid by passengers and their reluctance to offer traditional worker protections to drivers are more likely to succeed than others. Those who think that Uber doesn’t pay its partners enough will do better if they offer suggestions in synch with the digital package than if they insist on the restoration of ideas about distributive fairness tied to the industrial package of technologies. What follows is one suggestion that seeks to turn the power of digital networks against Uber.
In chapter 7, I distinguished ideals from predictions. We may predict that an ideal is especially difficult to realize but consider it worth promoting. I think that the odds are heavily stacked against meaningful collective action on climate change. I nevertheless consider the ideal of a low carbon economy to be sufficiently important to be worth fighting for regardless of my pessimism about its realization. The brief defense of a worker platform that I set out below falls well short of counting as a plan. I offer a couple of tips about how to implement a plan, but nothing that I say should lead to a complacent optimism about the prospects for the disempowered partners of powerful digital platform businesses. Some people may find the ideal I present attractive. If so, they will have their work cut out for them.
One thing that Uber has taught us is that if a well-engineered platform business enters your industry and you confront it as an individual, you won’t do well. The platform will suck up almost all the additional wealth it helps to generate. Robert Reich says of the economy we are “barrelling toward”: “The euphemism is the ‘share’ economy. A more accurate term would be the ‘share-the-scraps’ economy.”14 A problem is that unions—the historically most important instruments of worker protection—find themselves wrong-footed by Uber’s exploitation of the digital package. Unions are a legacy of the Industrial Revolution purpose-built for the factory floor. Platform businesses call for new ways to organize workers. Workers are being directed away from expectations of jobs for life. They are joining a gig economy characterized by many temporary positions in which they are expected to act as independent contractors. Workers in the gig economy might drive for Uber in the morning, make deliveries for Taskrabbit in the afternoon, and spend the evening fitting out a spare room to be rented on Airbnb. The gig economy calls for worker platforms that mirror key features of the platform businesses that they are built to confront. Uber came into existence as a website and an app. And this is how a ride-sharing worker platform can originate. Uber’s profits grow as its user network grows. Worker platforms gain bargaining power as their worker networks expand.
Platform businesses feature low barriers to entry. It’s easy and free to sign up to Uber. That is a key feature of its success. Uber does not charge for access to its very valuable network in the way that the New York Times’s controversial paywall aspires to make users pay for access to its very valuable journalism. Uber wants its app to find its way onto your smartphone and wouldn’t dare charge even a modest fee for it. A ride-sharing worker platform should copy this feature. It should not charge membership dues. Like many platform businesses, it will originate as a website that invites membership very broadly. If the platform business it confronts operates internationally, then the membership of the worker platform must be international too. It shouldn’t begin in a particular city and then look to expand.15 There are Uber drivers in Rabat, Reno, Riyadh, and Rome. The Internet is there too. A worker platform that responds to Uber must be equally available to drivers in all those places. There are many differences between drivers in Rabat, Reno, Riyadh, and Rome, but if they are partners of Uber there is likely to a shared concern about how much of the money paid by passengers trickles down to them.
Platform businesses keep their overheads low. So should worker platforms. They might launch themselves on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter. There they would seek small sums of money sufficient to sustain a focused range of activities. Funding might come from angel investors. Here I mean genuinely “angel” investors, wealthy individuals worried about the effects of economic and technological dislocation on the bottom 90 percent, rather than those with narrow commercial interests in start-up businesses. Wealthy individuals with a genuine interest in the welfare of those who bear a disproportionate burden of the costs of digital innovation may be rare, but they do exist. Cynics may choose to view the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as a clever way to boost the value of Microsoft stock. Another possibility is that Bill Gates has some genuine interest in the well-being of the worst off. He is not engaging in the Friedman-esque strategy of using moral language to mask plans to boost shareholder value. The example of Gates demonstrates that, rare though they may be, beneficent billionaires can use their wealth to do a great deal good.
A worker platform represents the interests of workers most effectively by renouncing any interest in a piece of the action. There are many platform businesses seeking to monetize aspects of the way users interact with each other. The lack of any commercial interest should make the platform more appealing to workers. We expect politicians to be free of conflicting commercial interests. Workers should expect the same of a platform set up to represent them.
Low-overhead worker platforms must limit what they do. They cannot hope to do many of the things done by traditional unions. A ride-sharing worker platform will lack legal teams that can credibly threaten to take Uber to court. It cannot deal with individual complaints about ill treatment. Its central purpose is to get better deals for workers out of platform businesses.
Why should Uber listen to a ride-sharing worker platform? Historically this has been a big problem for unions. It’s difficult to argue for workers whose employer refuses to recognize you. Here again there are lessons from platform businesses. The value of a platform business lies principally in its network of users. And that is where the power of a worker platform lies. Uber won’t listen to a ride-sharing worker platform with ten members, but it should listen to one with ten thousand. A ride-sharing worker platform stands ready to talk to Uber—and to any incoming ride-sharing platform business that might offer drivers a better deal. It doesn’t rely on notions of fairness that are unlikely to get a sympathetic hearing from Uber founder Travis Kalanick, a self-proclaimed devotee of Ayn Rand.16 The worker platform can use the power of its network to appeal to Kalanick’s self-interest. It offers something of great value to an Uber competitor prepared to offer workers a better deal—its entire membership as partners for the new business. Drivers don’t need to fight Uber, instead they can subvert it.
Uber is certainly not the only ride-sharing business. It faces competition from Lyft in the US and BlaBlaCar in Europe, for example. Left to their own devices, businesses tend to conform to the ecological principle of competitive exclusion—they find different niches in the ride-sharing economy. Lyft places greater emphasis on community engagement. Uber owns the luxury car market. The interests of workers are best served when Uber and Lyft compete directly. A direct competitor is the ideal recipient of an ill-served worker network.
An emerging worker platform faces some of the same obstacles as a new platform business. It’s difficult for an emerging platform business to generate a critical mass of users. The value of a platform increases as the number of users increases. This makes it difficult for platform businesses to get started. A dating site with a million members is much more valuable than one with ten. The problem is how to get from ten to a million. Who wants to join a dating site with ten members? The growth strategy for an emerging worker platform is obvious. It knows exactly where to find its users. It parasitizes the membership of the platform business it seeks to confront. The common themes in driver complaints about Uber form the basis of its pitch.
A worker platform has low barriers to entry. But it requires some degree of commitment from its members. It shares this feature with platform businesses. You aren’t much use to Uber if you sign up, download its app, but never click on it. The ride-sharing worker platform needs something from its members too. Those members must show some interest in negotiations on their behalf. They must demonstrate some disposition to act on its advice and to switch partnership to a new ride-sharing platform that offers workers a better deal. They should feel confident that many members of their worker platform will join them in making the switch. Those who negotiate for better deals need to credibly claim to Uber and competing businesses that drivers will act on their advice. Uber can’t really complain. The facility with which it sheds unwanted partners suggests a reciprocal freedom to find preferable ride-sharing platform businesses.
Membership of one worker platform does not preclude membership of others or indeed of a traditional union. In the gig economy workers are told that they must be prepared to take on many roles. They would register with all the worker platforms that represent their various gigs.
There’s always the fear that an effective worker platform will merely intensify Kalanick’s desire to “take the dude out of the front seat” and have Uber transition to driverless cabs.17 But Kalanick is already strongly motivated to do that. His interest in margin expansion means that he resents any money paid to drivers. Uber could retain 80 percent of the money paid by passengers and drivers a mere 20 percent and drivers would still, from Kalanick’s perspective, with his interest in a driverless future, be getting too much. A worker platform could enable drivers to get more out of the remaining years of employment available to them. It also offers a model for those whose services are essentially social.
We’ve heard far too many stories about the billionaires made by the Digital Revolution. It’s time for a greater focus on how wealth can be spread around rather than allowed to pile up in the bank accounts of a few Internet-appointed masters of the universe. I have suggested one way in which this can occur that pays attention to the mechanics of digital wealth. It would be wrong to minimize the obstacles blocking the realization of worker platforms able to compete on a level footing with Uber and the like. We should not confuse predictions worth wagering on with ideals worth fighting for. The ideal of powerful worker platforms is worth fighting for even if we are pessimistic about its prospects.
Concluding Comments
The long view directs attention away from individuals and toward trends. This chapter redirects the book’s focus to individuals. We are not entirely powerless in respect of technological trends. There are steps we can take to humanize the Digital Age. We can adjust our attitudes and responses to digital technologies and the corporations marketing them. This chapter explored five ways to approach the Digital Age with an empowered uncertainty.