The business model

It all goes out the window once you have to treat people as employees just because they're doing all the work for you.

A San Francisco-based driver for smartphone-based ride-hailing service Uber is an employee, not a contractor, according to a ruling by the California Labor Commission.

The ruling, filed on Tuesday in state court in San Francisco, was the latest in a host of legal and regulatory challenges facing Uber and other highly valued start-ups in the United States and other countries.

The commission said Uber is "involved in every aspect of the operation."

Classifying Uber drivers as employees opens the company up to considerably higher costs, including Social Security, workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance. That could affect its valuation, currently above $40 billion, and the valuation of other companies that rely on large networks of individuals to provide rides, clean houses and other services.

Uber, of course, insists that it's merely an app.  All these drivers are just using the service as independent contractors. Other than that, the company doesn't have anything to do with them or their business.

Uber has landed in hot water before for tracking the movements of passengers without their permission. But what about tracking its own drivers? Obviously, the company needs to do that in order to know where drivers are in real time so that it can supply rides. According to the Wall Street Journal, though, this past weekend in Hangzhou, Uber found another use for that GPS data: scaring drivers into staying away from a protest over its service:

In two short messages sent to Uber drivers in Hangzhou and circulated online—verified with Uber in China by The Wall Street Journal—Uber urged its drivers not to go the scene and instructed those already there to leave immediately. Uber said it would use GPS to identify drivers that had refused to leave the location and cancel its contracts with them. The messages said Uber’s actions were designed to “maintain social order.”

Well.. okay.. sure. Somebody's got to "maintain social order." What better use can you think of for an app, really? 

Disruption!

Looks like what we have here is an entrepreneur who tried to disrupt an infernal local government monopoly on tow truckin'. But those danged regulators had to go and break his free market spirit.

A former City of New Orleans tow truck driver has been arrested after an investigation into a woman's claim that she had to pay him a $200 bribe to avoid having her car towed from the French Quarter.

Reffel Gordon, 51, was booked Tuesday with public bribery, filing false public records and malfeasance in office over an incident that reportedly took place last summer. According to Gordon's arrest report, a woman filed a bribery complaint with the Office of the Inspector General after an encounter with Gordon last June 12.

No different from what Uber does.  Next time maybe make an app first. 

"Taylorism within"

People pretty much sign up to be put in cages.

With all this biofeedback now available on our phones, the act of walking, living and breathing can—at least to the “datasexuals” who embrace it—be an ongoing project with limitless potential for improvement. But might such potential also lead to a kind of “Taylorism within”? Applying scientific management to twentieth century business created a workforce optimized for maximum efficiency. Likewise, life-tracking is encouraging us to internalize this dream by optimizing ourselves. Rather than a tool for liberation, we’re using the tech, in other words, to tune our lives for maximum “productivity.”

Perhaps none of this should seem surprising for a consumer society that drives on anxiety. If bad breath had to be invented as a disease mouthwash would help to cure a century ago, now the Quantified Self movement suggests we must live in permanent beta, to aim not just at maintaining ourselves but to become “better than well.” And so, Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done and websites like Lifehacker help to turn our lives into a series of sanctioned tasks and goals, where one must carry a “Surprise Journal” to find areas for self-improvement in one’s life, and sleep comes in the form of “power” naps.

Compete! Compete with your friends, compete with yourself.  Tell yourself you're becoming "better than well" if you must. But this is really all about becoming a more perfectly actualized consumer and a more easily manipulated and intimidated subject. 

We’re living in an entrepreneurial model of humanity, a vision of human beings as start-ups, where unfitness or obesity are viewed as “bugs” to be fixed rather than as products of an economy based on long hours and precarious work. Daily exercise has always been an individual responsibility, but sharing our biofeedback via social media encourages people to compete like businesses, vying for better health scores with the personal data that makes us special. (Flex boasts that it reflects “your stats, not any average Joe’s.”) Here we can all be Superman—“Join over 141,000 other people who want to discover their inner superhero,” urges website Superheroyou—while, back in the complex, unquantifiable real world, we often struggle to maintain control over the most basic facts of our finances and job prospects.

And people are agreeing to participate in this.

Data use regulation

Get ready to see that term. It's the new pragmatic approach to privacy protections coming out of the tech industry and carried forth by our reasonable technocratic wise men.   

Craig Mundie is a longtime Microsoft technologist and member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which recently released a set of new recommendations for the use of big data, wrote. In July, Mundie wrote in Foreign Affairs that use regulations are a “pragmatic” solution to the “data exhaust” generated by new products and services. But such a label shifts critical focus away from technology companies that define and control the space we have for “pragmatic” decisions. Technology companies have designed products to produce a data exhaust, often deliberately. Unreadable privacy notices and the inconvenient choice mechanisms were created by the very companies that want to encourage data sharing. Technologists designed systems to make privacy impossible, and now they say it is “pragmatic” to accept their legal proposal to solve the privacy problem.

The idea is, instead of restricting the kinds of information companies can collect on you (because that would be against freedom), we wait to see how they're using it first and then restrict what we don't like (provided we even know about it) a little bit at a time.  Sound good?

Ok but also remember that restricting those uses is kind of a problem too because you run into that whole "corporations are people" with free speech rights thing. 

Use regulations offer no real protection, because businesses themselves get to choose what uses are appropriate. Worse yet, companies misusing data will have a huge legal loophole—the First Amendment. Companies have long argued that privacy rules are a form of censorship, and thus limits on use will be an abridgement of their free expression rights. The only workable situation for this problem is to require companies to contractually waive their First Amendment rights with respect to personal data.

Well Ok. But what are the odds that companies would sign onto such a waiver? Not good, I'm guessing.  Maybe we should put it in the terms of service.  Everybody just clicks through that stuff anyway. 

Heathers

The new bosses are always just a worse version of the old bosses.  Somehow we keep not figuring that out.

The theme is familiar to anyone who’s tried to join a country club or high-school clique. It’s not supposed to make sense. The Culture can’t really be written about; it has to be experienced. You are expected to conform to the rules of The Culture before you are allowed to demonstrate your actual worth. What wearing a suit really indicates is—I am not making this up—non-conformity, one of the gravest of sins. For extra excitement, the rules are unwritten and ever-changing, and you will never be told how you screwed up.

Clothing is the least of it. Your entire lifestyle and outside interests are under examination, as is your “commitment”. Say you’re asked out for coffee on short notice, which you decline because you’re busy. Is that a “ding”? Did that lose you the job? Who knows? Maybe it did. You’re still trying to figure out what they mean by “wowing” them. Should you ask? Maybe you’ll seem desperate if you ask. Oh, shit!

Again Max Levchin: “PayPal once rejected a candidate who aced all the engineering tests because for fun, the guy said that he liked to play hoops. That single sentence lost him the job.”

The obscurity and arbitrariness are very much by design, and is why explainer posts are supposed to be so valuable. Having engineered an unfair situation, insiders then offer secret guides to winning it.

Once upon a time, young go-getter douchebags wore suits to job interviews.  But that was "disrupted" by  a new kind of "culture fit" involving young go-getter douchebags who do not wear suits to job interviews.  And the difference is... what, exactly?

Well, mostly nothing of course, except nowadays the pressure to conform to the company culture can extend deep into the employee's personal and social life.  This happens for various reasons some having to do with popular fashion others having to do with the way technology has eroded personal privacy. 

But there comes a point where we have to decide where the boss's purview over our individual lifestyle choices ends. And we're pushing  the line in an uncomfortable direction. 

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that requiring family-owned corporations to pay for insurance coverage for contraception under the Affordable Care Act violated a federal law protecting religious freedom. It was, a dissent said, “a decision of startling breadth.”

The 5-to-4 ruling, which applied to two companies owned by Christian families, opened the door to many challenges from corporations over laws that they claim violate their religious liberty.

It's bad enough if failing the "culture fit" test means the company doesn't like to have coffee or play hoops with you. But sometimes it's also the company doesn't care for your unapproved fucking activities.  And, see, that's much more of an obvious downer but it's really the same principle at work. 

The iDrop

 The most powerful nine people in the United States:

But during April's oral arguments on the cases, the justices broadcast their own lack of technological expertise. Antonin Scalia didn't realize HBO was cable. During a line of questioning involving Dropbox and iCloud, Sonia Sotomayor referred to "the iDrop." And Stephen Breyer said that he wasn't sure if he owned an iPhone, "because I can never get into it because of the password."

Shell game economy

Here's a good quick article about the rise of the so-called "sharing economy" where, we are told, technology has made it possible for us to monetize our private time and space faster and for a more accessible customer base. 

The bulk of the press on this phenomenon tells us that people are "taking advantage" of the opporutunity to breathe the fresh thrills of personal entrepreneurship.  But it only takes a few moments' serious reflection to understand that this isn't necessarily a sign of a healthy economy. 

A huge precondition for the sharing economy has been a depressed labor market, in which lots of people are trying to fill holes in their income by monetizing their stuff and their labor in creative ways. In many cases, people join the sharing economy because they've recently lost a full-time job and are piecing together income from several part-time gigs to replace it. In a few cases, it's because the pricing structure of the sharing economy made their old jobs less profitable. (Like full-time taxi drivers who have switched to Lyft or Uber.) In almost every case, what compels people to open up their homes and cars to complete strangers is money, not trust.

What the emergence of the "sharing economy" really tells us is that a lot of people are struggling enough to need a second job.  In the case of Airbnb, people are in fact taking in boarders to make ends meet.  For some reason, these developments meet mostly praise in the press. 

Technocratic Capitalism

The technological threat to privacy, and therefore freedom of thought itself, is bigger than just the question of whether or not the NSA is spying on you. Of course it's disturbing that the police are able to watch you as closely and perpetually as they are. But this is actually bigger than just that.

But what good are these steps to counter the much more disturbing trend whereby our personal information – rather than money – becomes the chief way in which we pay for services – and soon, perhaps, everyday objects – that we use?

No laws and tools will protect citizens who, inspired by the empowerment fairy tales of Silicon Valley, are rushing to become data entrepreneurs, always on the lookout for new, quicker, more profitable ways to monetise their own data – be it information about their shopping or copies of their genome. These citizens want tools for disclosing their data, not guarding it. Now that every piece of data, no matter how trivial, is also an asset in disguise, they just need to find the right buyer. Or the buyer might find them, offering to create a convenient service paid for by their data – which seems to be Google’s model with Gmail, its email service.

What eludes Mr Snowden – along with most of his detractors and supporters – is that we might be living through a transformation in how capitalism works, with personal data emerging as an alternative payment regime. The benefits to consumers are already obvious; the potential costs to citizens are not. As markets in personal information proliferate, so do the externalities – with democracy the main victim.

End of history

Sooner or later we'll wake up to what a tremendous con the "disruptors" are running.  Well... probably later we will. In the meantime, yay unfettered capitalism!

When SF Weekly, a San Francisco newspaper, asked an executive at Uber, an upmarket taxi app, about a protest by Uber drivers concerned by recent firings, he responded that a “driver contracting with Uber is not a bona fide employee” so that “firing, in this case, amounts to deactivating a driver’s account because he’s received low ratings from passengers.” At TaskRabbit, a company that connects those who need their errands run with those who need the money to run them, the “task rabbits” cannot easily communicate with each other. Who knows what trouble they could cause on discovering the subversive Wikipedia page about trade unions?

Or take Airbnb’s resident cosmopolitan, Mr Chesky. Asked how the sharing economy would treat people who “don’t want to be brands”, he did not mince words. “Some people will choose to be anonymous their whole life. That’s OK. But if you don’t opt into this online identity, you’ll have less access to services. The rest of us build a history. We build a brand online.” The power model behind the sharing economy is more Michel Foucault than Joseph Stalin: no one forces you to be part of it – but you may have little choice anyway.

A new UN, indeed: the erosion of full-time employment, the disappearance of healthcare and insurance benefits, the assault on unions and the transformation of workers into always-on self-employed entrepreneurs who must think like brands. The sharing economy amplifies the worst excesses of the dominant economic model: it is neoliberalism on steroids.

Learned helplessness

This morning's New York Times Business section presents us with this essay about the diminishing skills of the average American handyman.

“In an earlier generation, we lost our connection to the land, and now we are losing our connection to the machinery we depend on,” says Michael Hout, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “People who work with their hands,” he went on, “are doing things today that we call service jobs, in restaurants and laundries, or in medical technology and the like.” 

That’s one explanation for the decline in traditional craftsmanship. Lack of interest is another. The big money is in fields like finance. Starting in the 1980s, skill in finance grew in stature, and, as depicted in the news media and the movies, became a more appealing source of income.

By last year, Wall Street traders, bankers and those who deal in real estate generated 21 percent of the national income, double their share in the 1950s. And Warren E. Buffett, the amiable financier, became a homespun folk hero, without the tools and overalls. 

“Young people grow up without developing the skills to fix things around the house,” says Richard T. Curtin, director of the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers. “They know about computers, of course, but they don’t know how to build them.”

All of this is quite true. The article, which I recommend, looks at all manner of contributing factors to this phenomenon from the decline of the manufacturing economy, to the disappearance of vocational education.

But one factor the essay doesn't touch on happens to be the subject of a separate story just a few pages over.  How can we expect American consumers to care about acquiring the skills necessary to maintain and repair the electronics they own when the manufacturer expressly discourages them from doing so? 

It isn’t surprising that Apple, the epitome of the closed organization and overlord of the iPhone’s tightly controlled software ecosystem, would design screws that, in effect, serve as locks. And one can see how it would be in Apple’s interest to make it hard for users to extend the life of older models — it’s a way to encourage the purchase of the newest, greatest Apple stuff. 

It's worth mentioning that this sort of thing happens on the software side as well. The new internet being imposed on us by Hollywood and the telecom industry is becoming a much more hands-off instrument than ever before where users are expected to become consumers rather than producers and sharers of content.  This trend has all sorts of interesting consequences but chief among them could be a new kind of learned helplessness with regard to online publishing.  And so Americans could lose yet another powerful tool, a powerful free speech tool, in the same way so many of us have lost the use of our hammers and screwdrivers.

Sophisticating up the Serpas Signal

Somebody should build us one of these.

Kill Switch

Either Western democracies believe in free speech or they don't. Looks like we're coming down on the side of don't right now.

New Scary Danger

As someone who does it fairly regularly, my personal experience doesn't indicate that texting while driving is any different from changing the radio station or eating potato chips or herding kittens or mixing a cocktail or arguing with listening carefully to a spouse or swatting at spiders or any of the numerous activities one may engage in while driving.

But it's a new, scary, technology and OMG "our children" might do it so I guess we have to make a stupid law.