This post is not pleasant or uplifting so if you need that, move on. It is one person’s view of how things are developing\/could develop. Of course you are most welcome to disagree with it and create a better future for yourself and others!<\/p>\n
April 27th, 2014
\nVia: City Paper:<\/p>\n
Here is the future: nobody gets any job security. Nobody gets a fair wage while they have a job. Nobody gets a retirement fund or even any guarantee they\u2019ll be able to eat tomorrow. And almost everyone is doing everything they can just to get by\u2014and paying some substantial portion of their earnings to a pimp or \u201cplatform\u201d which controls the business they are in. And ain\u2019t life a grand adventure? Isn\u2019t it all so fun?<\/p>\n
Welcome to the Sharing Economy.<\/p>\n
This is the model of the new economy, where anyone with a car ought to be a Lyft contractor (your fare pays what he or she thinks is right but the company is tweeting out \u201cwe\u2019ve slashed prices 20 percent\u201d) and anyone with a house or apartment is renting it out on Air BnB and crashing at their boyfriend\u2019s parents\u2019 place.<\/p>\n
All of this came about by design. The world is arranged according to the people who arrange things\u2014the people who make money by this arrangement. We\u2019re in our fourth decade of this. The Times reported this week that the American middle class has been surpassed by Canada\u2019s.<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s much worse than the New York Times imagines. As Dean Baker points out, the middle classes in most other countries have increased their incomes while getting longer vacations. In the U.S.A.? Not so much.
\n\u2026
\nBut this life of hustle\u2014the idea that everything you do, every day, needs to turn a profit or you starve\u2014is familiar to anyone who lives or grew up in an inner city. In Salon today, D. Watkins points to the junkies putting on a fight-show for crack, and the lady who runs the candy\/cig shop out of her second floor window, lowering the product down in a pencil box tied to a rope of shoelaces.<\/p>\n
You\u2019ve seen the guys moving \u201cloosies\u201d and the guys selling the bags from the food pantry.<\/p>\n
They are fucked. And we are them.<\/p>\n