Then plague hit the working class so brutally that remaining survivors found themselves suddenly in demand. Wages rocketed – and the result was a new class of Englishman with money to spend on beer. At this point,  English drinking culture began to formalise. As Robert Tombs puts it: “Brewing became more commercialised, with taverns and alehouses for drinking and playing games…The English pub was born.”

Pub culture has much evolved since the 1370s. It has gone, over my lifetime from dark, smoke-filled places mostly populated by men and serving food grudgingly if at all, to light, family-friendly establishments leaning often enthusiastically into the “gastro” of “gastropub”. The days of chewy scampi in a plastic basket are long behind us.

This has been part of a massive revolution in how we eat, prompted by the torrent of new foods and culinary influences that flooded Britain along with globalisation. It was a central part of the 1990s bounce in British culture, away from a brown-tinged past into something lighter, louder and more highly seasoned. The Cool Britannia aesthetic that captured the mood of Tony Blair’s landslide victory in 1997 came with a new attitude to eating. Cool Britannia food was cosmopolitan, sociable, bon vivant and hyper-consumerist, always avid for new experiences and new ways to monetise the world’s cultural riches. Trendy artists opened fancy eateries where rockstars hung out.

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Cool Britannia gastronomy also brought a new template for foodie superstardom. Wow the chattering classes with your restaurant; get rave reviews in the weekend papers; turn celebrity chef status into a TV programme and bestselling recipe book. Finally, spin off into a lifestyle brand. Think of Jamie Oliver or Michel Roux, who parlayed good food and telegenic media presence into empires of courses, books, designer kitchen installations, pots, pans and of course physical restaurants.

Now the hospitality industry launched by one pandemic nearly 700 years ago may be killed by another in the 21^st century. An estimated 10,000 British eating, drinking and entertainment establishments closed their doors permanently in 2020. I’ve watched the pandemic rip through village pub after village pub in my area. Many eating and drinking establishments will never come back, from celebrity-chef establishments such as Roux at Parliament Square to ancient hostelries such as the Lamb and Flag pub in Oxford, founded in 1566 and once a haunt of Tolkien.

But take heart: the internet has a proposal for keeping food culture going despite this devastation…after a fashion. The new watchword is “cloud kitchens”: food preparation sites without waiters, tables or wine list, that cater exclusively to the delivery market. For a cloud kitchen, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have a buzzing dining room with a famous food critic lurking in the corner. All you need is a strong online presence, a friendly influencer to help with marketing, and a busy pickup point with a queue of couriers whizzing freshly-prepared meals off to people’s homes.

Without the need to cater for diners in-person, cloud kitchens can make savings on frills such as décor, front of house staff, or expensive premises in the right location. Some cloud kitchen franchises provide ordering software and delivery driver liaison, and even a supply chain, recipes and training.

This approach also allows a food brand owner to turn a kitchen from a crack team of experts into a multi-purpose assembly line. For, unlike a restaurant with a menu and reputation for a particular style of food, a cloud kitchen will often cater simultaneously for multiple brands. They can share cold storage, kitchen space and cooks — a considerable economy of scale. I might order a gourmet cheeseburger from one company on while you order dim sum from another, only for both meals to be prepared by the same worker.

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One industry commentator, hailing the “delivery-first future” of food, advises restaurants to forget physical dining as a business model altogether — but to make sure their cloud-kitchen startup includes a social media influencer as co-founder. In other words, unlike a Michael Roux or Jamie Oliver, the new virtualised foodie culture doesn’t even need a celebrity chef — just a celebrity.

In a sense this is another step in the Cool Britannia detachment of food from places, traditions and households. Jamie, Carluccio’s, Ottolenghi and their ilk took homespun, evocative and culturally rich ethnic and domestic foodways and turned them in to lifestyle brands. Only now the pandemic is driving us from the age of globalisation to the age of virtualisation, and we’re embracing Zoom for meetings and swapping the high street for Amazon and Asos. So why not do the same with food, by taking restaurants virtual?

We’d do well to look before we leap. By definition, cooking can’t be completely virtual, so you’d have to apply something like the Uber model. That is, a business structure that separates staff from creative concept and service brokerage, while sucking value from the former to the latter.

And just as Uber poses a threat to self-employed London cabbies, the Uberisation of takeaway poses a threat to artisan cooks, loading the dice in favour of people who work with ideas — at the expense of people who labour in the physical world. Jamie Oliver left school with two GCSEs and worked his way up through restaurant kitchens before getting his TV break. But because the cloud kitchen model separates the creative work of recipe design, and the marketing power of the “influencer”, from the actual cooking done by staff in a kitchen, it’s hard to see it training and launching a new crop of cookery superstars.

There’s all the difference in the world between cooking for family or friends, and commercial catering in a restaurant. Cool Britannia foodie culture was about mining the emotional associations of cooking, to sell commercial catering. By the time Covid brought the hammer down, this ecosystem of TV chefs, chain restaurants and lifestyle spinoffs was on its way to exhaustion: Carluccio’s was struggling even before the pandemic struck, as was Jamie’s Italian. But even as these giants foundered on failing pizza chains and overpriced chopping boards, they never abandoned the social aspect of food.

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We might have mocked David Cameron for his “kitchen suppers”, but at least the idea was still people eating together in a physical place. In contrast, the Uberised food culture incubating in the corpse of Cool Britannia seems calculated to foster not conviviality (however smugly Cameroonish its attitude) but loneliness.

The Very Online Right is fond of declaring: “I will not live in the pod. I will not eat bugs”, referring to the semi-ironic myth that The Elite are gaslighting us all into tiny single-occupier dwellings where we will all live on insect protein. I don’t think this is literally true, but taken as a lurid metaphor, the meme describes cloud-kitchen food culture to a T. It’s a culinary and logistical vision optimised for total social atomisation, in which the only food available is made with (quite possibly disgusting) ingredients over which you have zero control.

Boris has promised that restaurants will be allowed to open again sometime in the next few months. When they do, we’ll discover how deep the fear of air- or surface-borne viruses has taken root in our collective mind over the last year of near-total lockdown. It’s possible that Britain’s surviving hostelries will open their doors again, and set their pans sizzling, only for Britain to stay home with Uber Eats and Twitter.

Let’s hope not. The Supreme Court (and taxi companies) are pushing back against Uber, and likewise the Uberisation of food is only inevitable if we allow it to happen. If we’re to resist the siren song of takeaway noodles in front of a screen (with or without a crispy insect garnish) we’ll all need to make a conscious effort to remember the art of eating socially.

I think we’ll manage. Food cultures run deep, and stir strong emotions. Communal eating reflects a deep human need to share, and to be together. I still use recipes my grandmother taught me 25 years ago. And I cannot wait to see the world for lunch again.

Thus, when Obama utilised “big data” and social media to win an election it was a hugely sophisticated, progressive thing; but when Trump did the same, it was a sign that Orange Man Bad was in cahoots with Sinister Putin to exploit the bottomless stupidity of the unwashed masses.

With Biden hiring former Facebook execs and current Big Tech mega bosses to his transition team, and around 98% of Internet company donations during the last election flowing into Democrat coffers, I cannot shake the suspicion that we may now see an administration which is quite friendly to Silicon Valley.

Meanwhile, America’s fascination with ultra-wealth means that the genre of puff pieces on tech billionaires and “unicorns” (startups valued at $1 billion or more) will continue to thrive in venues such as Fast Company, Fortune and Forbes, where “journalists” will continue to perform their valuable function as court stenographers for the charismatic founders building our shining future one app at a time.

And yet, despite all the useless stuff out there, we do from time to time get truly insightful takes on the world of tech. I still remember reading about grown men crying at their desks in The New York Times’  2015 expose of Amazon, and was fascinated by The Inventor, the documentary tracing the rise and fall of doomed-from-the-start blood test startup Theranos.

A few years ago, Dan Lyons’s Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start Up Bubble made a splash, as did Antonio Garcia Martinez’s Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley. For my money, however, the best take on Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley, the sitcom created by Mike Judge of Beavis and Butthead fame; its six seasons track the fortunes of the not terribly likeable founders of Pied Piper as they seek to protect their invention from a pretentious, megalomaniacal tech oligarch who is surrounded by unctuous boot-lickers. It is ruthless in its selection of targets and frequently hilarious in its ridiculing of Bay Area absurdities.

A more recent report from the tech interior, Uncanny Valley, is Anna Wiener’s memoir of several years spent working for startups in Silicon Valley. It is rich in detail about everyday life in startup land, but it is low on the high-grade weirdness of the sort some of tech’s more colourful CEOs can provide. Wiener always remains an outsider looking in; she did not, in the end, work for very interesting startups, never got close to any of the truly strange, charismatic/messianic types that gravitate to this environment, and, remarkably, fails to find any humour in the absurdities and grotesques of Silicon Valley.

Reeves Wiedeman’s Billion Dollar Loser, by contrast, is rich in high grade weirdness. One of those super dense examples of American journalism in which a magazine features writer talks to hundreds of people and then condenses all those voices into 300 or so pages of tightly packed narrative, the book tells the tale of the rise and quasi-fall of Adam Neumann, founder and erstwhile CEO of WeWork, the real estate leasing firm that somehow managed to pass itself off as a startup unicorn to rival the likes of Uber, and which by early 2019 was valued at $47 billion, despite never having made a profit, and having no proprietary technology of any significance.

Neumann’s is at first an almost too perfect immigrant-made-good-in-America story. Born to Israeli parents who split up while he was young, he was raised by his mother and had a highly peripatetic childhood, including a stint spent living on a kibbutz. After serving in the Israeli navy, he follows his super model sister Adi Neumann to the US at age 22, where he almost immediately sets about looking for the idea that will make him rich. His first — baby clothes with knee pads — is terrible, yet he has a knack for persuading people to believe in him and before long he has parlayed this into a luxury brand called “Egg Baby”. This is but a prelude to the main act, however, which is co-founding WeWork in New York with Miguel McKelvey, owner of an ESL website called “English, baby!“

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WeWork is a better idea. Neumann and McKelvey set about opening coworking office spaces where they hope cool, hip knowledge workers will rent a desk and work on their world-changing ideas all day, while getting to know each other and participating in a creative community. It is, however, not a new idea. In fact, coworking spaces were pioneered by a UK firm called Regus (est. 1989); Regus went bankrupt in 2003 but returned in rebranded form as IWG and by the end of 2014 was bringing in $2 billion in revenue from 2,000 locations.

WeWork, it is true, had better design and branding, but coolness does not a different business model make. Wiedeman details Neumann’s attempts to find ways to fuse his real estate leasing business with technology, but these efforts are never integral to the business. In fact, when WeWork was founded its first CTO was a teenage boy not yet out of high school who went by the name of “Joey Cables”.

The fact that he is owner of a New York real estate leasing business does not, however, prevent Neuman from going full Silicon Valley CEO-guru in the grandiose yet vague utopian vision he pitches to employees and investors, or in the culture he builds, or the eccentric, New Age style-beliefs he adheres to. Having been introduced to the Kabbalah by his fiancé, Rebekah Paltrow (cousin of Gwyneth), Neumann goes all in for the ancient Jewish mystical tradition.

Only the version he adopts is the Hollywoodised Kabbalah, which was founded not in the 12^th century by Jewish rabbis, but in the 1960s by Philip Berg, an insurance salesman from Brooklyn, who sold candles to his followers with names such as Sexual Energy and Dialling God and later attracted those such as of Madonna and Demi Moore to his highly profitable esoteric operation.

Neumann drinks deep of this “spiritual technology” but in addition to raising his consciousness he also meets lots of wealthy people who become WeWork’s early backers. He also encourages WeWork employees to study the Kabbalah, and, according to Wiedemann, uses it as a “…guide to running an organization with devoted adherents”. Meanwhile he rambles on about “superpowers”, describes his life’s work as to “prepare for the the arrival of the messiah”, and treats WeWork as though it is not so much a machine for getting rich, as a vehicle for the spiritual transformation of the human race.

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WeWork, Neumann insists, is not a real estate leasing company but rather a “physical social network” à la Facebook or a “platform” à la Uber. He also establishes WeLive, to lease apartments designed to foster a more communal style of living, and WeGrow, a private school dedicated to “progressive” ideas. Towards the end of the book Neumann is even meeting with Elon Musk to suggest that they collaborate on establishing communities on Mars; the firm’s mission? To “Elevate the world’s consciousness”.

Neumann, clearly, is one of the great bullshitters of the age. According to Liedeman, WeWork employees described Neumann as having an “aura”, which they compared to the “reality distortion field” that an Apple employee “…once described as emanating from Steve Jobs, convincing anyone within its radius that the impossible was not only plausible, but exactly what they were going to do”.

This reality distortion field serves Neumann well for a long time, as he is able to deploy it not only to persuade millennials at the start of their careers to work for low wages, but also to get hard-headed Venture Capital types to pour money into his “unicorn”. It goes into hyper drive when he encounters Masayoshi Son, the founder of Japanese technology conglomerate SoftBank, who runs a mammoth VC fund and dreams of a 300-year plan that might culminate with SoftBank becoming a “telepathy company” rather than a mere technology company.

Indeed, it all goes wrong for Neumann when he is forced to engage with people outside of his reality distortion field. When he is unable to talk any more private investors into giving him more money, he is forced to go public and WeWork submits an investor pitch to the federal government’s Securities and Exchange Commission, which exposes just how much money the company is losing and that it is in fact a real estate leasing company after all. Confronted with bad press, Neumann embarks upon a speaking tour of investors, but his reality distortion field does not work on those predisposed to scepticism. From that point his downfall is swift, he barely lasts a month before he stands down as CEO and WeWork’s evaluation is revised drastically downwards.

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Billion Dollar Loser is a fascinating book, and even though, or perhaps especially because Neumann never developed a “killer app”, his story represents the apotheosis of Silicon Valley as idea, as pure myth. Whereas Anna Wiener saw life at the unglamorous ground level in companies that actually had technology to sell, Neumann, by combining mimesis with his own charisma and appeals to investor greed, was able to create an imaginary reality that, rather like Tlon in Borges’ famous short story, left the world of fiction and, for a moment, threatened to supersede reality.

Reading about this period of madness that gulled so many, I feel grateful that we live in a society where prestige and power is attained through business rather than war or religion.

Had Neumann lived in a different time, where the incentives were different, who knows what he might have achieved? He certainly has some of the traits of a demagogue or cult leader. Meanwhile, there are far more skilled, and more ruthless, empire builders out there; we are fortunate that their energies are channeled into manipulating our desires and insecurities for profit and selling us shiny toys. It could be so much worse.

We can all agree that slavery is morally abhorrent. But Hawley’s legislative focus, however admirable, is somewhat myopic: he and other policymakers also need to focus attention on other forms of labour exploitation occurring right under their collective noses in America’s “gig economy”, in which benefits and protections that were key components of our employment laws for many decades are now being rapidly unwound.

No company better exemplifies this trend than Uber. The company’s exploitation of workers is symptomatic of the rise of what author Albena Azmanova has called “precarity capitalism” in her new book, Capitalism on Edge, a condition that Professor James Galbraith has described as “a minority ensconced in a diminishing set of safe career paths or sufficient wealth not to bother worrying about [economic insecurity], and a majority living in persistent anxiety over the costs of health, housing, education, the quality of public services and other formerly ordinary attributes of middle-class life.”

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What makes this trend particularly galling is that the main economic drivers of this transition to 21^st-century serfdom fancy themselves as enlightened, socially “woke” corporations, but in fact embrace employment practices worthy of the 19th century Gilded Age.

The company uses retrograde tactics to circumvent existing labour law via the “independent contractor” loophole, which allows them to deny their work force traditional employee benefits, such as healthcare, sick leave and holiday pay, themselves the products of many decades of hard-earned reform. And even with these 19^th century work practices, Uber still can’t generate positive cash flow, let alone sustain profitability. There’s no reason why a company with this kind of business model should exist.

In a genuinely independent contractor relationship, the quid pro quo is higher pay as an offset towards the lack of paid benefits. But companies such as Uber don’t operate this way: drivers earn around $9-$10 per an hour, and they can’t expand revenues because they haven’t got the ability to set their own prices or unilaterally expand their customer base. That’s left in the hands of Uber’s management. So, the only option drivers have is to drive more hours.

But when a driver is making less than the minimum wage, driving more hours considerably impinges on one’s alleged work-time flexibility. It also adversely impacts the ability to generate sufficient earnings to afford decent benefits, such as adequate health insurance (which is not a public good in the US), let alone enjoy any kind of leisure that the alleged “flexible” working hours purportedly facilitate. Out of economic necessity, all “free time” is effectively commercialised.

The much vaunted “independence” allegedly derived from Uber’s model, therefore, is more apparent than real: as the National Labor Relations Board report notes, Uber’s so-called “entrepreneurs” have “no control over how they deliver rides… are ‘supervised’ by semi-automated and algorithmic systems that track their acceptance rates, time on trips, speed, customer ratings, and other factors, and drivers can be ‘deactivated’ based on these factors”.

It’s a modern day version of Jeremy Bentham’s “panopticon”, a disciplinary concept which was originally brought to life in the form of a central observation tower placed within a circle of prison cells. Uber has now taken the idea one stage further, importing the concept into their workforce via 21^st century surveillance technology.

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In many respects, Congress is lagging the courts, which are moving quickly to rectify loopholes that have allowed the employment conditions at companies like Uber to become a form of indentured servitude. A California superior court judge recently denied injunctive relief to both Uber and Lyft. This means that they will be forced to comply with earlier rulings, and a California state statute, which mandated them to reclassify their workers as employees, rather than “independent contractors” (although the California Court of Appeal has recently pushed back the original 20 August deadline to October while it considers Uber’s full appeal). The original court decision also confirms a similar ruling made by a New York federal judge last month.

These are also consistent with a growing number of decisions in other countries, such as the UK, where Uber is now appealing a lower court ruling that its drivers should be classified as employees “entitled to employment protections such as a minimum wage and holiday pay”, and in Canada, where the country’s Supreme Court has recently ruled that Uber drivers were entitled to sue for traditional benefits and vacation pay. In spite of the Canadian Supreme Court decision, Uber is still trying to keep its Canadian drivers from joining or starting class-action lawsuits against the company in the hope that the drivers will be intimidated by the contract to avoid seeking legal remedies, even though Uber legally cannot prevent them from pursuing class action lawsuits.

What is key about the judgments is that they comprehensively demolish the myths championed by gig economy employers like Uber’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, confirming what many of us already knew: any concept of independence is nonsensical, given the massive imbalance in the relationship. Indeed, the UK Court of Appeals went even further, characterising Uber’s description of the work relationship as “a sham”, because the company exercises full control over its employees but attempts to escape the reciprocal obligations of that relationship by designating them as independent contractors.

The legal side accords with economic reality: the fact is that the existing business models of companies such as Uber were unsustainable by any measure, even before their now exploitive labour practices were challenged in the courts. Uber continues to lose a lot of money, only surviving by virtue of an ongoing high IPO bubble that has infused it with cash to staunch the red ink. It’s a form of “Ponzi finance,” a condition that the economist Hyman Minsky defined as “the cash flows from operations [being insufficient] to fulfill either the repayment of principle or the interest due on outstanding debts by their cash flows from operations”.

Minsky’s definition fits Uber perfectly. Over the past four and a half years, Uber has lost $23.2 billion and the company has higher operating costs than the taxi companies it is seeking to displace. In other words, without illegal exploitation models, the rate of financial losses would far exceed their ability to raise cash from the credulous finance and investment world. That IPO bubble also sustains the stock price, which has turned Uber’s upper management into millionaires.

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None of this seems to matter much to Khosrowshahi. In a piece for the New York Times, the Uber CEO decried the lack of flexibility in current labour law which he claimed denies workers the freedoms to choose the way they work and when they do it. He went on to argue that the pay versus benefits argument was a “false choice” and that “our current employment system is outdated and unfair”.

In reality, the trade-offs between traditional employment and the gig style labour practices that Khosrowshahi lauds in his article are gradually disappearing. Covid-19 has created a situation in which many of the extolled benefits of the gig economy, such as working from home or choosing one’s hours of employment, are gradually being imported into a multiplicity of jobs, without subverting the protections and benefits afforded by traditional employment practices.

It is true that many of these jobs will ultimately revert to office environments. But a recent report from the Stanford Institute for Policy Research persuasively argues that working from home and other such features of the gig economy are likely to be expanded in other businesses that are not reliant on a medieval labour model to sustain profitability.

Ultimately, Uber hopes to render the debate on their employment practices moot: management’s long-term goal is to use their “contractors” to establish a consumer base, while they work to perfect the robotic technology that ultimately enables the company to replace their workforce with self-driving cars. That is their only plausible path to profitability (assuming of course, that their self-driving cars eventually develop the capacity to recognise a pedestrian, so that they don’t kill them).

Courts around the world have started to close the loopholes exploited by companies such as Uber. But that’s not enough: governments must build on those judgments, eliminate the loopholes, and thereby reaffirm the rights and protections for gig economy workers built up over decades. If Uber threatens to cease operations, fine. Much as we prevent sweatshops or exploitive child labour, no business that sustains serf labour practices should be allowed to operate in a civilized society just for the sake of fattening the pockets of a few.

Amazon warehouse workers are called ‘Associates’. When they are dismissed they are not sacked, fired or made redundant, but instead ‘released’. Budding Uber drivers are greeted during their ‘onboarding’ (hiring) by a hipster in jeans and t-shirt who talks in the language of a ubiquitous ‘hustle porn’ Instagram post that fetishises excessive overworking. Deliveroo couriers are referred to patronisingly as ‘Roos’ by management.

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John Steinbeck said that socialism never took root in the United States because the American dream encouraged the poor to consider themselves not as a downtrodden proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Gig employers appear to be attempting to pull a similar trick on their employees – sorry, ‘partners’. “We’re here to make money. If your wheels aren’t turning, you aren’t earning”, I was told by an enthusiastic Uber employee when I drove for the company back in 2017.

I worked as a cab driver – or as an ‘entrepreneur’, if you are to believe Uber’s rhetoric – for around three months while researching my book Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain. I also interviewed my fellow drivers as well as couriers who worked for gig employers such as Deliveroo and CitySprint.

One thing that became strikingly apparent was the vast chasm between the rhetoric espoused by companies and the reality endured by those who worked for them. Despite being categorised as self-employed contractors – and as a consequence losing the right to sick pay, annual leave and the minimum wage – Uber tightly controlled much of what we did on the job. “You can’t pick and choose which jobs you do,” we were told during our induction.

There were even restrictions on the subjects we were allowed to talk about with the passengers in the back of the car. Politics, religion and sport were strictly off-limits. If an Uber driver’s customer service rating fell below 4.7 stars, they would be summoned into Uber’s headquarters for a dressing down and potentially ‘deactivated’ – another euphemism for losing your job.

We were induced to take up the job with Uber on the alluring basis of autonomy. “Always wanted to be your own boss and set your own times? This is your chance!” reads the marketing on Uber’s website. And there were positives about the Uber experience. We had the autonomy to log in and out of the Uber app at a time of our own choosing.

Moreover, the Uber algorithm was less capricious and tyrannical than a human line manager. At the very least, Uber’s algorithm was not going to stop you from earning enough to eat simply because it took a personal disliking to you.

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Uber isn’t the only company operating in the gig economy of course. Callum Cant’s new book, Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy documents life as one of the food delivery company’s 15,000 UK couriers. As of 2018, there were around five million self-employed people in the United Kingdom, many of whom work in the booming gig economy.

Cant’s book resembles my own in many ways, not least because the author unflinchingly documents the methods used by gig employers to keep workers impoverished and under tight control and supervision. Making consumers aware of what really goes on when they order a taxi or food is an important task. As Cant writes, the reality of the gig economy is an economic landscape where “the worker takes all the risk”, while the company he or she works for “get all the reward”.

In the case of platforms such as Uber and Deliveroo, workers shoulder the cost of doing the job – the car, the petrol, the cost of time taken off through injury or ill health – while the companies themselves avoid the usual burdens associated with having employees. These are passed onto the workers themselves but also to the taxpayer. One Deliveroo courier I interviewed took time off with a ligament injury and ended up signing on for housing benefit because he was not entitled to sick pay.

The biggest difference between my own book and Cant’s, however, is that readers of my book tend to come away depressed after reading it, whereas Cant strikes a more optimistic tone. This is partly a consequence of gig workers making substantial progress in organising themselves (predominantly through the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain) since I wrote my book back in 2016-17. As Cant writes:

“This is not just a sob story about workers being exploited in bad conditions by bosses who get rich off their work, it’s about how workers have squared up and fought back”.

Indeed, several fashionable shibboleths are demolished very effectively in Cant’s book, from the notion that trade unions are irrelevant to those toiling away in the flexible economy, to the idea that migrant workers can’t be unionised.

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The book focuses predominantly on London and Brighton, where Deliveroo couriers used WhatsApp group chats to organise workers against exploitative piece-work and a local oversupply of labour which was driving down wages. Initially Deliveroo couriers in London protested against collusion between border enforcement agencies and Deliveroo managers, but the dispute quickly escalated as the company made changes to its payment structure. As Cant writes,

“The system would be changed from a flat hourly rate (£7) with a bonus per completed delivery (£1) plus an additional petrol bonus for moped riders, to a fee-per-delivery piece-wage (£3.75) with no hourly rate. If there were no orders, workers would earn no money.”

This prompted a wave of strike action among Deliveroo’s couriers.

Cant does get carried away. “Deliveroo workers have launched a militant struggle for a better world,” he writes. This is true as far as it goes, but Cant seems to define a better world strictly as one in which socialism has triumphed.

This is quite a philosophical jump, not least because contemporary socialism is spectacularly ill-defined, even by its adherents. “Fundamentally, the socialism movement relies on two parts,” Cant writes. “The first is the struggle of the working class against exploitation, and the second is a critique of capitalism and a socialist programme.”

But what is the socialist programme in 2019? For Cant, socialism entails the lofty idea of workers’ democratic control of every workplace. Yet socialism also requires a centralised plan if markets are to be eliminated. Herein lies the fundamental contradiction at socialism’s heart. As I wrote earlier this year for UnHerd:

“you cannot advocate central planning on the one hand and workplace democracy on the other. As soon as workers rebel against the state’s central plan, their democratic rights are stripped from them”.

I won’t dwell on this aspect of Cant’s work, because the book contains many important lessons about fighting back against exploitative gig employers. My own book was written to lift the lid on an underreported aspect of working-class life in Britain when gig practices – at least in their current guise – were relatively new.

We’ve moved on since then. We are now at a point where workers whom we were told had no time for trade unions –predominantly migrants and students – are getting organised and fighting back. Anyone who cares about social justice, whether you share Cant’s politics or not, should be cheering them on.

Fortunately, we made an early call. Many who made a similar decision later on found themselves at the mercy of Uber, facing huge price hikes. Apparently, the Uber algorithm, more sensitive than the local cab company to the fluctuations of supply and demand, sent prices through the roof. A similar power cut in March 2018 meant that stranded commuters were faced with Uber price surges of up to 500%.

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Amongst the most disturbing lessons that my father attempted to teach me as a child was that something is worth what someone is prepared to pay for it. There is no such thing as intrinsic value, he maintained. Value is simply a function of supply and demand.

Well, I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now. For the kindly Muslim taxi driver that took us home, the algorithm was pretty simple: the job was worth his time plus his costs plus a reasonable profit. Our misfortune was not something to be exploited by a profit-maximising algorithm. And I thank him for that.

Now it may have been entirely incidental that our cab driver was a person of faith. And I absolutely do not put his behaviour down to the fact that, as a believer, he was a better person than those greedy, pagan executives over at Uber. But what I did wonder, as we trundled down the M1, was whether we had been the beneficiaries of a world-view in which things do, in fact, have intrinsic value.

The Uber algorithms, perfectly embodying the spirit of market forces, make all value beholden to fluctuations of supply and demand. Here, nothing is fixed. Everything is relative. It’s a metaphysics, of sorts. Or perhaps – because it’s so wholeheartedly materialist – an anti-metaphysics. Capitalism represents the triumph of the immanent – that there is nothing to human value except the ebb and flow of human behaviour. Value is not rooted in anything transcendent, beyond the continual drift of human desire.

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When will Uber feel the techlash?

By Marshall Steinbaum

This is why, at a philosophical level at least, capitalism and religious belief are fundamentally enemies. The former is inherently relativistic and free-floating, the latter rooted in a view of the world where there are immutable and stable values.

I mention this little story only because it sits neatly alongside a movement that seems to be gathering force, especially in the US, in which conservatives – and often religious conservatives – are ousting socialists as some of the most thoughtful critics of capitalism. Last year Peter Kolozi, an academic at the City University of New York, published a timely historical survey of the long tradition of anti-capitalism within US conservatism. To those who have become used to conservatives being capitalism’s most high-profile cheerleaders, this notion may seem odd. But there is no necessary connection between conservatism and capitalism: indeed, there is a strong case that they are antithetical. And that case is re-emerging.

For instance, as Kolozi points out, conservatism in the post-Bellum American South looked suspiciously upon capitalism as a northern phenomenon that threatened the traditional structures of community life. This was a version of conservatism that sought to maintain a form of life built upon racial privilege. And most of us are glad it was destroyed.

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But the South’s experience of capital’s power to destroy traditional community structures – for good or ill – formed an important part of the traditional conservative tradition (often known as paleo-conservatism) and its attitude towards capitalism.

As Kolizi explains, this tradition came to be obscured by the Cold War. Given the threat posed by communism, anti-capitalist conservatives threw in their lot with free-market conservatives, united against a common enemy. But the end of the Cold War, the 2008 financial crash, worries about globalisation, and the collapse of faith in the market’s ability to sustain community life – often code for church and family – has exposed old divisions within the conservative family. Thus people like Fox news presenter and Trump supporter Tucker Carlson are beginning to say things like this: “Market capitalism is not a religion. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families isn’t worth having.” Damning the “mercenaries” of the capitalist class, Carlson called for:

“a fair country. A decent country. A cohesive country. A country whose leaders don’t accelerate the forces of change purely for their own profit and amusement.”

This could almost have been Bernie Sanders.

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Why won't Remainers talk about family?

By Giles Fraser

The conservative case against capitalism is built on three basic differences between the two ideologies.

First, the obvious point. Conservatives like to conserve. By contrast, capitalism is the most powerful change-agent the world has ever seen. Karl Marx had it right when he explained capitalism in the opening chapter of The Communist Manifesto:

“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.

To those who are capitalism’s most vigorous moral proponents, this is its virtue: creative destruction. When what is being destroyed is a society of racial superiority, as with the American South, that is a good thing. But when what is being destroyed is a whole infrastructure of mutual care and support – family, unions, church, stable communities – then we might think very differently.

The second difference is the one alluded to in my taxi story: capitalism’s anti-metaphysics – or, to use Marx’s expression, the profanation of the holy. It is not incidental that religion has played an important role within the conservative tradition. For religious belief locates value beyond the to-ing and fro-ing of human desire, beyond human subjectivity. God is the fixed point around which human value turns.

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But hang on, weren’t the religious right of the Regan era, for instance, capitalism’s biggest fans? Yes, but this was more to do with their pathological hatred of Soviet Communism and its programmatic atheism. During the Cold war, the Christian Right imagined that their enemies’ enemy – capitalism – to be their friend. The new style anti-capitalist conservative of the Carlson variety believes this alliance to have been short-sighted.

Third, anti-capitalist conservatives maintain that the moral life is a communal and necessarily rooted activity. They put particular value on loyalty to place and kin as necessary constituents of moral formation and of human flourishing.

In this regard, they have begun to whisper to each other that the global reach of multi-national capitalism is undermining the very basis of moral existence and human happiness. Capitalism severs people from their roots, treating human labour as just another commodity to be moved around the world at the service of supply and demand.

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These new-look conservatives have a totally different feel to the ones that progressives have been used to dealing with. Take someone like Kentucky farmer and contemporary poet Wendell Berry. Radically committed to the environment, a lyricist of human rootedness, implacably hostile to technology, broadly Christian, in many ways he feels more Left than Right, yet his moral vision fits more comfortably within the old tradition of Southern Agrarians than it does within that of the progressives.

Or take American writer Rod Dreher, more obviously on the Right, yet whose Benedict Option advises a withdrawal from the values of capitalism:

“what has been missing from capitalism for a long time is any sense of morality, care for neighbor and community, and love for the “other” that Christianity absolutely demands, but that this current iteration of capitalism says is foolish.”

The US TV Series American Gods is premised upon the idea of a war between the old Gods of religion and the new gods of technology and celebrity and finance. This is the war that a new generation of American Conservatives have now joined. J. D. Vance, for example, the Conservative author of Hillbilly Elegy, was baptised a Catholic last week. Agreeing with Carlson, he has asked: “What happens when the companies that drive the market economy — and all of its benefits — don’t care about the American nation’s social fabric?”

Even Vance, a venture capitalist, is wobbling in his faith in the redemptive potential of corporate finance. I suspect that is why he has chosen the old gods over the new.

Ironically, it is progressives – the Clintons, for example – who continue to look to the gods of finance to drive us all towards the sunny uplands of a bright new world. Historically, it is liberalism that was formed alongside capitalism, and liberalism – especially classical liberalism – that shares the same basic assumptions about the freedom of the individual. That is why, for instance, woke liberalism and Silicon Valley capitalism sit so neatly together. And why, to the bafflement of many on the traditional Left, the case against capitalism is now being made more forcibly from the Right.

Then, with impeccable timing, on Tuesday, 14 May, the National Labor Relations Board released a month-old letter finding that Uber drivers are not legally employed by the company and are therefore ineligible for federal protection for collective bargaining. The company’s fortunes turned on a dime, the share price was in free-fall no more, and as of this writing, its value is above where it began. Tens of billions of dollars hinged on that favourable regulatory decision.

Back in 2012, when Facebook’s IPO started badly, there was an epidemic of hand-wringing about the gullibility of financial markets in valuing big-name tech stocks. But the situation was easily remedied – $1 billion was all it took to shut down the competition from upstart Instagram and seal Facebook’s domination of worldwide social media, to the tune of over $50 billion a year of revenue.

Coming hot on the heels of global euphoria about the liberating power of social media in the Arab Spring, Facebook looked like that rarest of species, the company that does well by doing good. With the floatation the public was offered a piece of the action.

But the value in Facebook turned out not to come from global emancipation but from its opposite – global dominance of the social networking market. It is a service that claims to foster human connection and interaction, but for a price – and that price is one that users, and governments, are increasingly unwilling to pay. There seems to be a disconnect between Facebook’s value to investors and its value to society – they push and pull in different directions. Uber is in a similar place now.

Uber, like Facebook, experienced a long train of popular congratulation as the globally disruptive innovator shaking the dust out of urban taxi markets. It offered to revolutionise local transportation, and investors couldn’t wait to get involved. Uber raised $11.5 billion through nearly 20 funding rounds, ultimately valuing the company at $68 billion.

But a reckoning is coming. As indeed it is for Facebook.

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By Carl Miller

The “techlash” is highlighting the degree to which tech’s business models consist of running roughshod over everyone else’s privacy, security, democracy, environment, and livelihoods, and cashing out in spectacular Wall Street fashion before the public truly understands what hit them and how much autonomy they’ve lost.

Uber is no different – though its model has its own peculiar quirks. The platform’s value depends on its ability to charge what it wants to riders, whilst paying as little as possible to its drivers. It classifies the drivers as independent contractors, so as to escape adhering to labour standards, avoid contributing to social insurance, and enabling it to offload the cost of capacity it doesn’t use. It relies on there being as many drivers logged on at peak times as possible – for customer convenience – without having to pay for their availability. The drivers bear the risk of a quiet night.

Uber, and other gig economy ‘platforms’ have been celebrated as creating venues for individual entrepreneurship, a new path for upward mobility. In the case of Uber this seems a stretch. The driver may differentiate the service offered by providing riders with bottles of water, ambient music, good conversation, or no conversation, according to tastes, but the most they can hope for is a higher rating, which does not automatically translate into more rides and revenue. Rather, high ratings are needed to maintain Uber’s strict minimum to stay on the platform. It’s more like the scores of Roman scribes, dutifully copying down set texts, being told that they are the authors of history – Uber drivers control very little of their individual “enterprises”.

Alex Rosenblat’s book Uberland details how Uber’s business model works: bonus-based driver compensation directs drivers to work where and when Uber needs them, whilst penalising them for time spent logged into any other ridesharing platform. The bonus-based pay schedule closes off any other opportunities they might have: if they log-off before they earn the bonus, then the whole shift will turn out not to have been worthwhile. Even with the bonus they just barely break even.

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Uber has, for the most part, escaped regulatory intervention to force re-classification of drivers as its own employees, which would compel them to absorb some of the risks that drivers currently bear. Just recently, both the Department of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board issued opinions highly favourable to gig economy platforms, holding that such platforms don’t exercise sufficient control over drivers to qualify as their employers.

The NLRB’s general counsel stated: “The drivers had… complete control of their cars and work schedules, together with freedom to choose login locations and to work for competitors of Uber.”

As Rosenblat and other scholars’ work has shown, this statement is empirically false – the fact that Uber drivers can operate outside the bounds of what its compensation system incentivises is a dead letter if they can’t make a living by doing so. The UK Court of Appeals also found that the categorisation of drivers as independent contractors engages a “high degree of fiction”.

Meanwhile, the company has also challenged its drivers’ right to collective bargaining even outside federal protection. When Seattle tried to grant Uber workers that power, the city was sued by the Chamber of Commerce at Uber’s behest. It argued that such a union of independent contractors would violate the US antitrust laws.

The federal antitrust agencies weighed in on Uber’s side, and a federal appeals court agreed. As a result, the ordinance was amended to exclude collective bargaining over wages. But Uber continues to claim that the whole concept of driver collective bargaining on any matter violates the federal antitrust laws.

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By Peter Franklin

The irony seems lost on Uber that while it has used antitrust regulation against its drivers, it has managed to avoid any antitrust scrutiny on its own account, even as it fixes prices and wages for these supposedly independent businesses. A private class action against Uber on those grounds was set to go to trial in New York in 2016, but the company successfully sent the case to arbitration, where it hasn’t been heard from since.

No public enforcer has yet alleged that Uber’s non-employment of its drivers constitutes grounds for price-fixing antitrust liability. In fact, if anything, antitrust enforcers have viewed Uber’s business model as introducing much needed competition into urban taxi markets, and have encouraged local officials not to question it. So, between lax labour law and lax antitrust, Uber is able to operate a business model that depends on controlling drivers without being responsible to them as an employer.

In this way, Uber’s profitability hinges on continued regulatory forbearance, as the market response to the NLRB letter showed. Far from being an innovative company challenging comfortable monopolies hiding behind state power, Uber is itself dependent on government regulators for its continued success. The intricacies of labour law and antitrust law, developed in a time before the platform economy, continue to be debated. But at the heart of the controversy is the question of who should have the power to determine drivers’ working conditions – the government, through employment law, drivers themselves, through union participation, or – as now – Uber.

But even with the deferential treatment it receives from regulators, Uber is operating at an enormous loss and has no immediate way of reversing the hemorrhage. Given its cheap ride strategy, it doesn’t generate enough operating revenue to both pay drivers enough to stay on the platform in the long run and generate a return for shareholders. It is already trying to increase the prices its habitual customers are used to, but that has not yet come near to solving its basic cashflow problem.

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The fact that it has enjoyed privileged access to investors and their wealth is also a big part of the company’s success at acquiring market share at the expense of legacy taxi companies. At least so far, these investors have viewed Uber’s aggressive pricing and the trampling of local regulations as likely to pay off in the long run, with a dominant market share and significant pricing power, or through the ability to phase drivers out entirely and move to full automation.

For most of the big-name tech IPOs, the companies aren’t looking primarily to raise cash. That’s because the public equity market has transformed from a source of capital with which to finance investment, expansion, and growth, into a means by which insider shareholders can diversify their risk: an IPO gives founders and early venture capital backers the big exit they have been waiting for, and a way to cash-in before the true costs of the business model catch up with them.

That dynamic is certainly at play in Uber’s case: should regulators go the other way on the employee/contractor categorisation – which the UK Supreme Court may well do if Uber loses its appeal – then it is useful to have already cleared a way out for investors. In the meantime, investors can take advantage of market optimism (and well-timed letters of support from the US regulators). Unusually, Uber also actually needs the money. In the real world, as opposed to in the purely digital realm, the runway to world dominance is a little rougher, though no less assured as long as investors are willing to strap down for the bumpy ride.

But even though it needs the money, Uber has not been willing to cede control, nor has it had to. The typical Silicon Valley IPO retains total control over operations among the insiders through a dual-class share structure: the insiders retain full voting power in their ‘old’ stock, and the ‘new’ stock they sell on the public markets comes with no voting rights. No matter how much of the company is ultimately made available to the public, no outside investors can ever challenge the founders’ control over their company. The company is still run in the interests of shareholders – and often at odds with the interests of society – but it is a sub-set of privileged, insider shareholders, whose interests are even less aligned with the average public-facing pension fund and institutional shareholder.

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By Charles Arthur

For as long as it remains in need of infusions of cash, Uber’s management and core group of founders may not be able to maintain the complete independence enjoyed by other tech behemoths such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Otherwise, it would need to raise fares, potentially curtail its geographic coverage, and lower its world-bestriding ambitions for autonomous vehicles. It probably has not yet tested the patience of late-coming partners such as Softbank and the Saudi Arabian Investment Authority, if only because these investors aren’t necessarily seeking the highest return, but rather American companies where they can stash their wealth. Others might not be so forgiving.

Uber’s long-term viability as a going concern will depend on whether the regulatory rope-a-dope it has played to date is permitted to continue. The recent backlash in the form of drivers’ strikes and policy-makers worried about the ability of gig economy platforms to exercise control while evading responsibility may also start to put pressure on the company. Perhaps they will finally constrict the legal grey area where it has been permitted to grow with a great deal of deference and little in the way of limits.

But in the meantime, the IPO has simply confirmed that the real Silicon Valley business model is the concentration of wealth and power at the top. And it reminds us there are few protections for those who rely on the permission of powerful gatekeepers to earn a living.

One possible culprit is the rise of the so-called ‘gig economy’. In her new book, Gigged: The Gig Economy, the End of the Job and the Future of Work, tech journalist Sarah Kessler uncovers how despite early claims that the flexibility of short-term “gigs” would make workers happier, they bring ‘liberation’ from a traditional safety net, reliable work hours, and even, in many cases, anything close to a livable wage.

While ‘freelancers’ have existed since the invention of money, the ‘gig economy’ kicked off with Uber. The taxi company used AI scheduling and mobile apps to connect passengers to independent drivers. It was distinct from existing freelance marketplaces in its focus on a lower-skill task, and its control over things such as pricing and marketing that, in higher-skill markets, were mostly handled by freelancers themselves.

After Uber truly took off in around 2013, droves of startups mimicked the model – Instacart was the Uber of grocery shopping, Taskrabbit was the Uber of housework.

Kessler has been reporting on the gig economy nearly from the beginning, starting as a blogger for Mashable in 2011, and more recently as an editor at Quartz. When we met recently to discuss the book, she said she was initially encouraged to write it as an immersive first-person narrative – an update of Barbarah Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed in which she would try to live for a year on wages earned through the gig economy.

But she realised that her own background as a well-educated white Midwesterner would make that viewpoint far too narrow. So we get just a few glimpses of Kessler trying her hand at things like the banally authoritarian ‘personality test’ administered to would-be contract housecleaners (“If a $100 bill is laid out on a table without a note, do you take it?”).

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Instead, Kessler focuses on the workers living out the reality of the gig economy’s promise. She spent years following them, and captures them as fascinating, complex figures: an Uber driver who would later agitate for a strike against the company; a Canadian woman who masters the micro-drudgery of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk; a computer programmer who tires of the corporate world and goes freelance; and an activist hoping to bring gig opportunities to the rural poor.

Alongside her intimate portraits of these workers’ lives, Kessler picks apart the founding mythology of the gig economy. Companies like Uber consistently emphasise workers’ supposed love of ‘flexibility’, especially to deflect hard questions about pay and fairness. That sort of glad-handing has roots going back at least to the Kelly Girls of the 1950s – temporary office workers who were described by their services as “bored with strictly keeping house.” The was that they didn’t need to be paid or treated well because they were just pampered homebodies, working purely for fun.

That wasn’t true back then – Kessler finds a contemporary study showing that 75% of temp workers in the early 1960s were primarily motivated by a need to earn money. And it’s not true now. While workers today of course value “flexibility” – who doesn’t? – surveys show that all things being equal, they’d rather have a reliable full-time job.

An even broader version of the ‘flexibility’ mantra came from Uber founder, Travis Kalanick. Kalanick (before getting unceremoniously booted from his own company in 2017) was fond of saying that his platform offered “turnkey entrepreneurship”.

“Uber totally sold its job on this idea that it was a path to the American Dream,” Kessler told me. “That it was going to really significantly improve your life status and you’d be running your own business.” That rhetoric, along with tactics like $200 bonuses for drivers who recruited friends to join the platform, helped Uber successfully sign up tens of thousands of drivers around the world.

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One of those drivers was Mamdooh Husein, better known as “Abe,” whose tale is easily the most compelling, weird, and enlightening Kessler tells. We meet Abe as a 28-year-old waiter, whose spartan life in Kansas City makes him long for more. That longing makes him an easy mark for scams including a pyramid scheme called GIN, which promises him wealth and freedom (in exchange for a few small upfront payments). He is badly stung, in an experience that initially makes him sceptical of Uber’s very similar promises – though deep in debt, he eventually signs on.

For Abe and many other gig workers, the promise of ‘entrepreneurship’ is a deceptive one. Like many other drivers, Abe is initially enthusiastic about Uber, but winds up frustrated by falling pay and unexpected expenses. While the company promised that drivers like him could earn up to $90,000 a year, those calculations didn’t include little things like gasoline, car insurance, and maintenance – all of which drivers footed the bill for. For some Uber drivers, expenses can cut income by as much as half.

Describing their workers as ‘entrepreneurs,’ while downplaying the fact that businesses have expenses, seems to have been a conscious strategy by Uber and other gig platforms. The sense that it’s all a long con is even more acute in a handful of cases where startups encouraged workers to buy supplies from the companies themselves. In one case Kessler describes, a cleaning company offered $150 kits full of supplies to contract workers – which it seems unlikely were sold at a loss. Uber for a time offered subprime leasing deals through a subsidiary, and used the app to pitch them to drivers (though in typical fashion, Uber somehow managed to lose money on this company-store scheme).

Just as damning is Kessler’s finding that on-demand technology itself, loudly promoted for making work more flexible and services more nimble, was often used to create employee-like relationships with a veneer of plausible deniability. Instead of human managers giving direct instructions, which would make them more likely to be classified as employees, gig workers are trained by online videos, scheduled by algorithms, and evaluated by ‘star’ ratings issued by customers themselves.

Those star-rating systems have become standard issue not just for gig apps, but for everything from product reviews on Amazon to restaurant directories like Yelp. But the fact that they’re applied to individuals, rather than companies or products, is emblematic of the larger issue here – it helps companies offload risks that come with having employees.

If a worker employed by a company gives sub-par service, they might be fired, but they’re equally likely to get more training or a chance to improve. On gig platforms, workers who get bad ratings can simply be removed from the platform – often, as Kessler describes, with no explanation, warning, or recourse.

The rise of the gig economy, of course, happened in a broader context that made workers ripe for such exploitation. When Uber arrived, unemployment in the US was still over 7%. At the same time, the recession set off sustained cuts to American education at all levels – cuts which hit the most marginalised communities hardest.

That educational gap is clear in the story of Terrence Davenport. Kessler highlights Davenport’s years-long effort, with help from a well-meaning nonprofit, to connect his poor, rural Arkansas hometown, through the internet, to the gig economy. For most remote work – research, data entry, and customer service – Davenport’s students wind up competing with workers abroad who can afford to charge much less for the same work.

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At the same time, few of the programme participants have even the basic education for online jobs, such as social media management, that require strong language skills. After several years of heartbreaking struggle in which very few participants found even temporary work, the programme was shut down.

Abe eventually came to regard Uber as yet another scam, and started a campaign to pressure the company to improve its treatment of drivers. At the time, some news outlets reported the action as an inspiring blow struck for the little guy, but Kessler’s thorough reporting reveals it as something more complicated. The small strikes Abe organises have essentially no effect, so he – as Kessler finds out through an email he shows her – offers Uber a deal: for a payment of $10,000, he’ll stop organising.

Uber doesn’t bite, but Kessler is rightly troubled by this willingness to trade collective power for personal gain. In her effort to understand it, she concludes Abe “had felt powerless for most of his life” and violently resented that feeling. But he had few models for change aside from self-help scammers – and a bit later, President Donald Trump.

By the end of Gigged, Kessler tells us that Abe has managed to put together the down payment on a rental property. An American optimist to the core, he thinks this will inevitably lead to a future career as a real estate tycoon, making him enthusiastic about Trump’s (since-fulfilled) plans to cut taxes and regulations on the corporations and the wealthy. “When you’re rich,” Abe told Kessler, “You can do things nobody else can do. You’re truly free.”

Abe’s story suggests the gig economy is deeply implicated not just in inequality, but in a disturbing subtext of supposedly ‘populist’ Trumpist ideology. The broad shift away from employment and towards relationships in which workers are treated as second-class citizens drives home the idea that being rich is the only security. It also teaches the lesson that being entirely self-centered – exploiting the weak, blackmailing the strong, and devil take your fellow man – is a great way to get there.

The nature of the platforms reinforces this antisocial spirit, to the benefit of the gig companies. Workers don’t interact in a workplace, and can’t communicate with or even identify one another through the platforms, making organising for change much more difficult. Even skilled workers aren’t immune – Kessler reports on emerging AI systems that can coordinate teams of freelancers to complete complex projects, such as long business documents, without direct human supervision. That could expand companies’ protection from employment lawsuits, applying the same kinds of pressure to high-skilled workers that are already faced by drivers, cleaners, and couriers.

How do we reverse those trends? Technology can be turned to better ends. Platforms similar to Uber, but built without profit in mind, could form the basis for a new kind of worker cooperative, preserving gig flexibility while ensuring fairer pay (and likely leveraging that as a selling point).

Another bright spot Kessler finds is that there is actually a profit motive for some companies to provide good jobs that don’t require college degrees. That’s particularly true of those, like Starbucks and Costco, that emphasise high-quality service, and want to avoid high turnover and training costs. For consumers interested in voting with their dollars, she suggests using licensed taxis, or hiring a housecleaner directly instead of through an app.

But the logic of the market alone won’t restore worker dignity, or mass faith in responsible leadership. European and UK  legislators have increasingly shown a willingness to reinforce traditional labour relationships, but there’s much less stomach for it in in America.

Some states have pushed for more worker-friendly rules, but others, including Texas, have actually prevented cities from regulating gig platforms. Rather than making Uber more like a regular job, though, Kessler argues that laws need to adjust to the new reality of flexible labour – for the US, she suggests that portable benefits and more fine-grained employment categories might help, though she acknowledges those have their own issues. She also touches on more radical proposals like Universal Basic Income, a streamlined welfare system beloved of Silicon Valley itself.

Kessler’s book makes it more clear than ever that some solution to the fragmenting of traditional employment is direly needed.  That the shortcomings of flexible labour have become so clear, at a moment when the US is so politically ill-prepared to act, may yet prove a tragedy of historic proportions.

Two weeks later, it was discovered that Google’s YouTube Kids app, touted as a safer destination than the main site, was displaying disturbing conspiracy videos to children. That same day, Facebook admitted that Cambridge Analytica had improperly harvested the data of what turned out to be millions of its users, and an Uber self-driving car struck and killed a 49-year-old woman in Tempe, Arizona.

These seemingly unrelated incidents share a root cause. In each case, an automated system, ultimately designed to help generate huge profits by displacing human workers, failed in a crucial way and caused significant harm. In that common failure, they all point to cracks in the foundational conceit of the digital economy: the dream of ‘scaling’.

As far back as the mid-nineties, technologists including Bill Gates himself were predicting that artificial intelligence and “big data” would enable digital companies to grow in unprecedented ways. Those dreams are coming to fruition, as Facebook, Amazon and similar companies reach more customers with more personalised experiences than any companies that came before them, while using fewer people and far less physical infrastructure to do it. This vision has made digital companies immensely valuable and forced the old guard to play catch-up, while genuinely making life better for millions of customers, users – and above all, shareholders.

But the instances where these systems fail – often what engineers refer to as “edge cases”  – have proven deeply troubling to the public and regulators. And technological solutions may not be achievable before the broader idea of digital scaling itself is undermined, along with a global economy whose future is increasingly premised on it.

Henry Ford, building on Frederick Winslow Taylor’s early 20^th century drive for scientific management, built a dynasty on the drive to industrial scale. By producing a uniform product using semi-skilled workers doing repetitive tasks, he flooded the world with affordable cars. Scaling in the digital era is something almost entirely different – it requires no factory floor, and almost no workers, because its products are largely intangible and its distribution systems are automated.

The most exemplary companies, in fact, produce no physical product at all, acting as mere intermediaries between buyers and sellers, drivers and passengers, content creators and eager eyeballs. Adding another customer or user costs a digital company nearly nothing – just a bit more bandwidth and data storage. In exchange, each user is a new chance to harvest data, which in turn is used to better serve (read: more precisely target) other users. Growth also means ‘network effects’, such as the compounding benefit to social media users of being on the same platform as everyone else. Those effects can ultimately add up to de facto, winner-take-all monopolies, in which the harvesting of gargantuan profits is nearly effortless.

It can take years for this model to come to fruition, though, which is why tech companies are often valued at huge multiples of their present profits – and with little connection to the size of their workforce. Instagram only had 13 employees when it was acquired for $1 billion by Facebook in 2012. Facebook itself, in December of last year, had a reported 25,105 employees and a $550 billion market value, while Exxon Mobil at around the same time had 69,000 employees and a market cap of $319 billion.

The gap is even more striking when comparing companies’ physical footprints. WalMart, slightly more recently, had $160 billion in hard assets on a $300 billion market valuation, while Facebook had just $9 billion in hard assets at a $500 billion valuation.

That makes Facebook, according to the stock market, nearly five times more valuable than Exxon per employee, and nearly 30 times more valuable than WalMart per dollar of machinery, real estate, and physical product. Such numbers have for years provoked intense anxiety about how society will cope when all the jobs are automated away, but for investors, they’re deeply compelling. Of the ten most valuable public companies in the world today, at least six depend substantially on data-driven, automated scaling.

These are no longer just speculative, long-term bets. Facebook and Google have become like malfunctioning ATMs, spewing advertising profits into the hands of giddy investors. Amazon, long a punchline of unprofitability, has now made money every quarter since mid-2015, including a gobsmacking $1.9 billion profit in the last quarter of 2017.

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But those long bets – including the ones that already seem to be paying off – could blow up dramatically if the dream of automated scaling itself goes south. This has already happened in individual cases, such as when the startup Theranos couldn’t deliver on its promise to automate and streamline medical testing. After providing unreliable test results that may have endangered patients, the company, valued at as much as $9 billion, imploded.

A similar fate could easily await Uber, which has been operating at a massive financial loss for years. Investors have continued to feed it cash largely on the premise that the company will become as wildly profitable as Amazon once it masters the technology of self-driving cars and eliminates the cost of drivers. Founder Travis Kalanick has described autonomous driving as an “existential” priority for the company.

But success in that effort is looking increasingly distant. After the Arizona crash, Uber chose to suspend its testing program, and new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi canceled a planned visit to the testing site. Then the Arizona government, which had taken a hands-off approach to regulating autonomous vehicles, itself suspended Uber’s right to test there.

But both Uber and Theranos are individual companies premised on solving major, novel technical challenges. More fundamentally worrying is the prospect that automated systems that seem to already be working may have major hidden flaws.

That possibility is illustrated, above all, by Facebook’s current catastrophe. The site has kept users and advertisers happy for more than a decade, but after the Cambridge Analytica revelations, governments around the world called for investigations, users called on one another to #deletefacebook, and the company’s market value sunk by as much as $95 billion dollars – more than the entire value of Starbucks.

The outrage was driven by a laundry list of perceived fouls – the fact that user data was leaked, the discovery of just how much of it was collected, the fact that it might have helped elect Donald Trump, and perhaps the very idea that political actors could use highly detailed personal data to sway public opinion. But Cambridge Analytica also may have simply been the straw that broke the camel’s back, after months of reports of the insidious spread of ‘fake news’ and Russian manipulation through Facebook.

Those problems hinge on Facebook’s various uses of automation, including news feeds and ad sales processes that only inconsistently involve actual human judgment. Content-suggestion algorithms, which place a premium on user attention, have been shown to systematically amplify shocking and extreme material, including fabricated or misleading news. Facebook’s lightly-screened ad sales process allowed Russia-linked buyers to spend as much as $150,000 to try and influence US politics, and made it possible to run racially discriminatory housing ads – both illegal.

Facebook has taken some steps to address these issues, including identity checks for political ads and fact-checking for news. Those efforts, which haven’t yet proven successful, depend on adding much more human judgment to Facebook’s operation. That necessity could prove very costly for Facebook, as shown by how it and other social media companies already screen for violent, obscene, or illegal content. In 2014, it was estimated that there were over 100,000 content screeners working for various companies worldwide – many times the number of Facebook employees. Those content screeners have to make sometimes subtle judgments, for instance between someone articulating a fantasy (acceptable) and someone actually trying to buy or sell sex (illegal).

Silicon Valley domination

Google, Amazon, Facebook: It's time to smash Silicon Valley monopolies

By Nigel Cameron

Sharing platforms such as Facebook use humans to screen extreme content precisely because automated systems are bad at making those types of judgments. One way of understanding those limitations is by dividing artificial intelligence systems into two categories – ‘limited’ and ‘general’. A limited AI works in a closed, often numerically-readable environment, such as a chess board. Computers excel in these contexts, as they’re able to crunch numbers at a scale humans can’t touch. Business applications of limited AI are so widespread we may not even think of them as AI – Expedia’s algorithm for collecting and ranking available flights, for instance. Uber’s routing software, which essentially moves cars around a fixed map like game pieces, also fits the definition of a ‘limited’ AI.

Platforms such as Facebook and Amazon have worked to turn more complex challenges into this sort of quantifiable and contained problem. Digital ad targetting systems, for instance, reduce individuals to as few as 50 data points about demographics or taste – a process called matrix factorisation which simplifies the complexity of human motivation into the barest sketch.

But these companies haven’t been nearly as successful in automating the detection of malicious actors, fake news stories, hate speech, or terrifyingly violent children’s cartoons. Successfully making such judgments involves variables, such as tone and context, that aren’t currently easy to reduce to machine-readable numbers.

Further reading

Can journalism survive the onslaught of social media?

By Emily Bell

Algorithmic systems, for instance, can quickly recognise a nude image or sexual language, but they can’t always distinguish between pornography and a discussion of gay culture. In media, making these subtler distinctions has long been the province of human intermediaries, such as newspaper editors. Facebook and Google would love for machines to take over those roles, not only to keep profit margins high but to avoid regulation as media outlets. That would require a quantum technological leap: the creation of something at least approaching what’s known as a ‘general’ artificial intelligence.

General AI is the stuff of sci-fi dreams, from C-3PO to Skynet, capable of performing any intellectual task a human can and then some. If regulators or the public successfully pressure YouTube to begin drawing distinctions between Alex Jones’ feverish conspiracies and distraught Yemeni refugees lambasting Saudi intervention, automated systems to effectively do so would require a command of human geopolitics, emotions, standards of fact, humor, and moral values, just for a start.

Some of these capabilities are under development, including emotional judgment. But there is wide disagreement about the potential for linking those discrete capabilities into something capable of actual human-like decision-making. It could be many decades away. It might even be outright impossible – after all, we still only vaguely understand how our own minds work.

Efforts are now underway to automate not just driving, media distribution, and medical diagnosis, but also legal aid, elder care, and many other tasks. But while it may be easy to automate some core aspects, these endeavours all include elements that are well beyond the ability of current or near-future technology to tackle, and which can arise unexpectedly and demand quick reaction.

The last few months have shown that companies pursuing a path to automation at scale are willing to use real people, and even entire societies, as guinea pigs as they test the limits of their technology. Their experiments are becoming more risky, not less, as their reach expands. More regulations like Europe’s new data privacy act might be on the horizon, introducing the possibility of constricting regulation that will limit platforms from reaping the greatest possible profit. But if those profits are premised on stripping away human supervision and waiting for the machines to fail, that might be for the best.

Big tech's big secret

In big tech, users aren’t customers. They’re what’s for sale.

By David Z Morris

In this final instalment of our interview with Jacob Rees-Mogg it was to this subject area – of technology and the power of the giant tech firms that we (briefly) turned.

If Messrs Bezos, Cook and Zuckerberg etc are interested in the Moggster’s opinions we have one piece of good news and one piece of bad news:

• Answering Charlotte Pickles’ questions he showed no interest in action to cut the market share of any of these big firms.
• The bad news for them is he wants to end their special status. They must all bear the same legal responsibilities as, eg, other cab companies if (yes, we’re looking at you Uber) if they organise journeys for people from A to B. Equally online publishers, says JRM, shouldn’t escape the regime that newspapers must abide by, if online tech companies do publish (or ‘platform’) stories (after this week it’s no longer quite clear what, eg, Facebook’s plan is re news).

The two previous instalments of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s interview with UnHerd – covering our core themes – can be read by clicking on the links below. And if you want to really get to grips with the huge year that 2017 was for the California-headquarted economic and technological super companies do read a 15 point briefing from our tech editor, Nigel Cameron. “Big tech’s tipping point year” was published yesterday.

PART 1 OF OUR INTERVIEW WITH JACOB REES-MOGG

MPs should not vote against the party manifesto, says Jacob Rees-Mogg: I vote for foreign aid budget even though it's "idiotic"

By Jacob Rees-Mogg

PART 2 OF OUR INTERVIEW WITH JACOB REES-MOGG

Jacob Rees-Mogg backs Trump's tax cuts but warns him against protectionism

By Jacob Rees-Mogg

Transport for London’s (TFL) decision to rescind Uber’s license to operate as a cab firm in London came as a shock to almost everyone on Friday. It discombobulated those people who wondered why a technology company – Uber has always claimed to be merely an app rather than a taxi firm – had a cab license in the first place. But it also surprised those of us who had come to assume Uber had grown too powerful to be challenged by regulatory authorities.

TFL have sanctioned Uber, which has around 40,000 drivers in London, for its apparent failure to satisfy public safety concerns. The Mayor of London Sadiq Khan (pictured above) has backed the move by TFL, while Uber has already launched an appeal against the decision and launched a petition (which has so far gathered over 500,000 signatures).

The decision has polarised opinion not only because a Labour mayor is in City Hall and some critics see this as a political move engineered by Sadiq Khan (though they seem reluctant to present any hard evidence to support the claim). But also because it seems to go against the prevailing tide: Uber has for the most part been given an easy ride by global regulators. There have been exceptions of course, such as in Italy where the app has been banned outright; but Uber’s model of ‘disruption’ has functioned quite successfully on the basis that the authorities will invariably back down if you stand your ground.

The decision to ban Uber from London will, I imagine, be overturned on appeal. For all the current hysteria on the part of Uber fans, this will result in an improved transport system for everyone. The broader case for or against Uber is a moot point in this respect: unless one believes in a completely unregulated transport system, there must come a point when the existing rules are enforced. I have not heard a persuasive argument as to why Uber should be exempt from rules which others must adhere to.

But even critics of Uber such as myself can admit that the decision to prohibit Uber from operating in London has potentially deleterious consequences. The livelihoods of 40,000 people, many of whom are already struggling financially, are under threat. This is another layer of insecurity heaped onto an already precarious existence. Many Uber drivers have taken out eye-watering finance deals on hybrid cars – deals which they assumed they could pay off by putting hours in on the road. The blasé dismissal of this precarity – ‘they ought to just get another job’ – by some liberal critics of Uber leaves a decidedly bad taste in the mouth.

But widespread reverence for Uber among affluent Londoners misunderstands the extreme model of capitalism on which the company is built. It is a business model that functions by offloading traditional business risk onto its drivers. It does so by promulgating the fiction that its drivers aren’t really its drivers at all, but are instead a mosaic of individual business people. By this move alone Uber avoids paying VAT[1. ‘Uber faces challenge on paying VAT’, Financial Times, 20 May 2017]; but it also dodges the tab for things like holiday pay and the minimum wage.

Uber’s aim, in the words of its former CEO Travis Kalanick, is to make transportation “as reliable as running water”[2. ‘Transportation that is as reliable as running water’, Uber Blog, 4 September 2015]. In order to do so, Uber requires a fleet of drivers constantly circling around London at all times. The result is that you, as a rider, can whip out your phone, fire up the app and summon a driver whose car will appear within seconds. This is why Uber puts no cap on the number of drivers it recruits (and foolishly, TFL hasn’t either).

In doing so Uber makes out that it can expand the market in perpetuity. More drivers can compete for cheaper fares while simultaneously making more money. The theory is based on the fact that drivers are tapping into unmet ‘liquidity’, as the jargon calls it. By dropping the price of a ride far below that of traditional cab companies, Uber is able to tap into all the pent-up demand which is out there.

Leaving aside whether or not it is desirable to add tens of thousands of extra cars to London’s roads, the problem with Uber’s polyanna business model is that it is built on junk economics. And I suspect the company knows it – Kalanick himself is a proponent of the cod-philosophy of Ayn Rand. There is of course truth to the theory of liquidity – but only up to a point. Once the supply of drivers had risen beyond a certain level, a system built on a point of liquidity that Uber could only ever estimate (how is it possible to know how many untapped future taxi passengers there are?) is liable to produce a huge amount of waste. At some point the number of drivers on the road invariably outstrips demand, especially in a city with a reasonably priced public transport system such as London.

In practical terms, this means choked up and congested roads as thousands of drivers criss-cross London waiting for the ping to sound on an app. This is a prerequisite of any system which truly aims to be ‘as reliable as running water’. When you switch the tap on at home, there must be something sitting in the pipe or the tank. When you request an Uber, someone has to be waiting in a car for you. Because drivers are not entitled to a minimum wage or other safeguards – and because they are incurring costs while they drive around – they shoulder the waste inherent to such a system. This is why almost any Uber driver you speak to will tell you that their earnings have gone down in recent years. Notably, Uber has also not published data on hourly earnings of its London-based drivers.

Were Uber drivers genuinely autonomous there might be an argument to be had here over the balance of rights versus freedoms. But for all the company’s rhetoric about ‘freedom’ and ‘autonomy’, Uber tightly controls the behaviour of its drivers. I drove for Uber for three months earlier this year. At one of my ‘Onboarding’ sessions (the training session Uber gives you before it sends you out on the road) I was informed that I was not allowed to “pick and choose” which jobs I accepted. “The reason you’re online is to accept any job that’s given to you,” the instructor warned us. I was also told that if my driver rating slipped below 4.6 I would be hauled into the office for a dressing down.

The reality was some distance from the slick PR about ‘being your own boss’. The whole thing felt like a giant con, and it is high time those with an interest in fair play stood up to Uber and its crew of Randian ‘disrupters’.

Do I care, then, about the fate of Uber and its 40,000 drivers in London? Yes, because protectionism is ultimately bad for all of us. It stands in the way of productivity growth – the very lifeblood of wealthy societies.

Transport for London’s reasons for refusing to grant the licence are unconvincing. It cites Uber’s approach to reporting crime and obtaining medical certificates – matters which surely would be easy enough to solve through talking to the company. According to Uber, the issues quoted by Transport for London were never raised in discussions – it claims that a series of meetings prior to last week’s announcement were cancelled.

The decision looks rather more a case of a public body stepping in on behalf of two vociferous vested interests: left-wing unions and drivers of black cabs. Uber has been squashed because it is a threat to existing labour. We have become used to industries falling to the disruptors but this, it seems, was a disruption too far. You don’t have to support all of Uber’s employment practices to be concerned at the implications for the future of other innovations which powerful interests might find inconvenient.

That Uber has worked in the interests of the consumer is hard to deny. In a study of 21 US cities, in all but two Uber was found to have undercut existing taxi services. In Its 2016 survey ‘Mapping the World Prices’, Deutsche Bank found a knock-on effect of reducing fares charged by existing taxis – by 30% in the case of New York. As for the suggestion that passengers are paying for their cheap rides through reduced safety it doesn’t stand up to the evidence. In New York complaints against taxi drivers saw an overall reduction after Uber began services in the city. That suggests, if anything, that the coming of Uber forced existing taxi companies to improve driving standards and the civility of their drivers.

But has it all come at the expense of taxi-drivers themselves? Inevitably when industries are disrupted someone gets hurt. An Oxford University study of taxi-drivers in US cities in 2015 found that the earnings of drivers employed by taxi firms fell by 10% in the wake of Uber. Yet this was matched by a 10% rise in the earning of self-employed drivers – which include Uber drivers. This came in spite of 50% rise in the number of self-employed drivers. Uber hadn’t damaged the existing taxi industry to anything like the extent it had created new opportunities for taxi-drivers. The overall effect of Uber was to grow the taxi industry substantially. Through lower fares and a more efficient system for summoning a cab, Uber has enabled the taxi sector to win passengers from other modes of transport, be it public transport or the private car. It has also persuaded people that a night out is affordable where previously they might have stayed at home.

Urban planners won’t be pleased to think that Uber is diverting passengers away from buses and metro systems, but if it is helping to dissuade people from driving their own cars around cities that is surely a good thing. Our cities struggle hard enough to cope with cars, but more particularly in finding somewhere for them to park while their occupants are at work, shopping or at the theatre. If, as many cities are trying to do, we are going to reduce the number of parking spaces in urban areas we are going to need a far more innovative and budget-priced taxi sector – of which Uber is surely part.

On one issue, I do sympathise with existing taxi firms. They are not on a level playing field with Uber, thanks to the huge costs of buying their licences. In New York, for example, a taxi firm might pay $700,000 for a licence, while Uber pays nothing. Metropolitan authorities have been using taxi licenses as a form of taxation, which Uber has cleverly managed to find a way around. Surely, however, that doesn’t justify banning Uber from operating – it just demands that governments review their taxation structures so as to capture the activities of Uber in the same way as traditional taxi services.

As for the charge that Uber drivers don’t get paid holidays, sick pay and so on, it strikes at the wider issue of the gig economy. For the worker there has long been a trade-off between employment and self-employment: security and regular hours on the one hand and flexibility and (often) the chance of higher earnings on the other. Many Uber drivers are attracted to the business because flexibility is vital for them. They are doing it to supplement earnings from other employment or business. Last year, Uber lost an employment tribunal case in London brought by two drivers over their legal status as self-employed contractors. Yet many other value the freedom to choose their working hours.

As the Oxford University study showed, the net effect of Uber has been to increase the earnings available from taxi work, by more effectively matching demand with supply. Go to any railway station or city centre taxi rank and it is the same: lines of taxis waiting for a fare, often in vain. By enabling passengers to hail a cab online, Uber has reduced that slack time. That is how societies grow rich: by increasing productivity. London’s move against Uber, by contrast, is making its own little contribution to economic stagnation.

The case against Uber

London takes a stand against Uber and its "extreme capitalism"

By James Bloodworth