Why Uber for X Can’t Possibly be the Future
Recently I finished a competitive and market analysis for a client looking to build a software product.
My research took me to many old and new Uber for Whatever companies. I went deep in the weeds to find out how these crowdworking apps dispatch folks, who uses them, and the economic impact on these workers for hire.
This amazing article from The Atlantic confirmed my suspicions: we are in the servant economy. We summon other humans via smartphone to do things we used to do ourselves (walk our dog, get a Big Mac, grab a dozen eggs), making our lives moderately more convenient, while our servants earn a couple of bucks for doing it.
I use Lyft to get home when it’s not safe to drive after a night out with friends. My personal chauffeur service keeps me out of jail, and that’s great. But I don’t know about some of these other “solutions.”
Somebody was once actually happy to give Squeegy money to dispatch car washers to our driveways or work parking lots. There are hundreds of startups with arguably clever made-up brand names tasking its crowd of freelancers to deliver us everything from a bottle of bourbon to weed to a bouquet of pansies.
But it can’t be the future of work.
Author and futurist Jaron Lanier got it right in 2013 in his book Who Owns the Future? He wrote about a concept called The Siren Servers, where our online economy is crafted by people handing over their lives (data) in exchange for free use of a service (Google, Facebook). Astronomical profits are grabbed by a very small group of people standing nearest the servers, leaving the rest of us with nothing — except a free account. And now the feeds are so crowded with paying clients marketing our own data back to us, organic reach is dead. So what’s our great deal?
Lanier says the only way this can work long-term is if we are paid for our contributions to the Internet. YouTube is/was an early example. When your content performed well, you got paid for it. This process is not scaling in 2019, and it’s to our detriment.
The future of work has to be inspired by this slogan: We Only Have Each Other.
The big banks, the siren servers, Wall Street and corporations did us all in. The biggest redistribution of wealth in human history has been going on since the 1980’s, pushing the dollars to the top of the food chain, to the already rich. We can count on 3 fingers the number of corporate officers who have gone to jail for their thievery. The middle class is an endangered species.
We are the servants of these big four institutions. Now we’re doubling down on servitude by schlepping things to people’s homes for not much?
We only have each other, for mutual reward. There is not an app for that…yet.
