‘The Internet’s destroying work — and turning the old middle class into the new proletariat’
13th July 2013
Read it. Salon, of course; Yet Another Reactionary ‘Progressive’ Hand-Wringer.
Fancy Hands founder Ted Roden told me that his company often provides “a better opportunity than is offered locally. For example, a number of people have left jobs at gas stations and Domino’s pizza to work with us full-time because (they’ve told me), the work is better and the pay is better. One even visited us at the office and brought gifts … It’s actually a surprisingly good deal for them.”
That may well be true, but at this stage it’s difficult to get reliable numbers on what the average wages for Fancy Hands or Task Rabbit contractors are. What we can be reasonably sure of, however, is that these services are perfect examples of what Lilly Irani, a researcher at the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and her co-author Six Silberman have described as “the fragmentation of labor into hyper-temporary jobs … an intensification of decades-old US trends toward part-time, contingent work for employer flexibility and cost-cutting.”
One of the most characteristic tropes of left ‘journalism’ these days, and indeed lefty ‘intellectual’ concern in general, is the ‘That may very well be true, but…’ formula. The obvious point of view is ‘these mental midgets just think they’re happy, it takes a well-educated socially-aware terribly-concerned politically-correct liberal like myself to perceive how truly miserable they really are’. This concern for people who are too stupid to be properly concerned for themselves is signature, and the visible expression of the congenital ‘progressive’ itch to stick one’s nose into everybody else’s business, which in turn is a specific expression of the general Liberal Fascist conviction that We The Anointed know best how YOU ought to conduct YOUR life.