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/323/ Tasty Frictionless Convenience (Patreon)

Published:
2023-02-21 07:00:02
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

On the app economy.

[Patreon Exclusive]

Delivery apps have taken the world by storm, and the pandemic only deepened our dependence on them. What is the price of convenience – and is there anything wrong with wanting ease? Capitalist keep propping up these money-losing enterprises – why? And can they survive the end of cheap money?

Is the app economy just a battering ram against labour rights? Are delivery apps out to kill off traditional restaurants? And should we defend the petite bourgeoisie and independent bars and pubs?

And does the dream of freedom sold by apps to workers, of being your own boss, work as a legitimating ideology?

Reading:

Farewell to the servant economy, FT

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life, Adam Greenfield, Verso

Delivering Restaurants to Wall Street, Alex Park, Compact

5 Reasons Marxism Has Nothing To Offer Millennials, Austrian Economics Center

Links:

/59/ Übermenschen of Capital Pt. 3 ft. Leigh Phillips & Michal Rozworski

/311/ Reading Club: The Precariat

/172/ Three Articles: Elite Production (on Uber)

Files

Comments

Davka Smolah Collective

Regarding the ending question, I think a lot of tech investors sincerely bought into the technofeudalism thesis and thought that once they'd gotten a monopoly in any given market, they could sit back and extract monopoly rents.

Richard R

My main sense from the people I know who work in apps is that it's just a labor market residue, an alternative when you lose an actual job. They'll say they work for themselves, but only in a perfunctory, "Ah yeah, sure, whatever man" sort of way. As far as the capitalists, well, my experience is more limited. But the young VC I have met seem to mainly emphasize the fun and the power. It's not rational in the sense of thinking long-term, or even thinking about the disruption--it's utterly divorced from the market. It basically comes down to mystique, to glamour, to the raw opportunity to say you are dominating others, and the libidinal satisfaction that comes with that.

AlexMcK

As someone who's been employed by a restaurant as a delivery bicyclist and done the same job as a contractor for postmates, I am relieved to hear that phil's order history only contains virtuous prol options like fastfood and none of the frivolity of laptop class dinners

Elias B

Phil's arguments are all over the place in this episode. How are delivery apps just an increase in convenience vs previous flyer-based models when their existence depends on both cheap money and ignoring labour rights? Saying that these companies are only exploiting pre-existing loopholes vaguely blamed on the direction of capitalist development also makes no sense when Uber and Deliveroo are the companies who were the first to start exploiting these 'loopholes'; they're the battering rams pushing capitalist development in that direction. Finally it's quite strange to accept them being a consequence of cheap money but not of depressed wages; the fact that labour-intensive companies based on very high rates of exploitation cannot survive an upswing in wages (which forces companies to actually innovate to reduce labour use) is a basic Marxian point. The point about the app economy being locked in place as a result of lockdown (at the same time as these companies are becoming ever less viable in Europe because they've lost the right to consider employees as self-employed as he'd just pointed out) also doesn't seem to be based on anything other than vibes. He seems to want to have it both ways, defending his own use of the apps as just fine while their expansion is nebulously attributed to the 'laptop class'.

Joan Guenther

we have never used delivery apps because they are a pain to use not convenient impersonal and when the food arrives it’s dead food lots of restos in this city still answer the phone and take orders for delivery and we still phone for taxis because we like to listen to the drivers rant abt the devastation wreaked on the industry by Uber …

Shatner's Bassoon

My Lived Experience of the gig economy goes back to 2009 and those giddy days of the beginning of the end of the end of history ... I'd just graduated with a Master's degree in 20th century literature and philosophy and was, naturally, unemployed. One day in the job centre I came across an ad for "freelance work from home typists", and, touch-typing being my only marketable skill, I went for it. "It" turned out to be an online transcription service, as I suppose you'd call it. Customers wanting something transcribed would send their audio to this agency, and the agency would then distribute said audio to its army of typists sitting at home waiting for any work to be sent their way. The typist would type it up in a Word document and send it back to the agency, who would send it back to the customer. Customer pays agency, agency pays typist - 28p per minute of audio transcribed, if I remember rightly. There was no guarantee of work from day to day, and it was piecework, so, no work, no money. And of course we weren't employees of the agency at all - we had to register as self-employed, if we weren't already, and the agency then became a customer of ours, as it were. So anyway, this was the gig/app economy, zero hours contract, whatever you want to call it, avant la lettre. The Internet made this kind of business model possible and, I think, inevitable (in the absence of specific legislation against it), because the advantages for the capitalist are so obvious. Take my typing agency example. Fixed costs are next to nothing - no need to pay for office space for your typists to work in, computers for them to work on, software, IT support, etc. These costs are taken on by the workers themselves. Variable costs are also greatly reduced - no need for sick pay, holiday pay, pensions, no need to even pay the minimum wage. No danger of the workers unionising because they have no way of even coming into contact with each other. The cost savings of this kind of business model are so great, I imagine, that it would soon become the dominant and eventually only viable business model in any sector in which it takes root. It's the old coercive laws of competition, Capital Vol. 1, blah, blah, blah. Now, why did I share this story? Probably just because I wanted to disagree with Phil about the non-inevitable growth of the app/gig economy. I think it is inevitable, despite that particular ruling against Uber. But also, I suppose, to point out that the app economy isn't just Uber and Deliveroo and whatever other services we might come across as consumers. The typing agency I mention is just one example, but there must be countless others in countless other industries that you wouldn't even know existed if you didn't have the misfortune to work in them. My point being that it's probably a much more widespread phenomenon than we might think. As for my subjective experience of my Lived Experience in the gig economy – well, I'm still in it, although now I have own typing business, in which I don't exploit anyone except myself. I don't think that really counts as entrepreneurial zeal. Liberating? No. But strangely enough, no matter how bad the pay and conditions, etc, I still prefer working from home than doing the equivalent in some office somewhere, with all the attendant woes of commuting, limited breaks, constant physical surveillance, performance reviews, office politics, etc. etc. There is at least the illusion of some limited autonomy.

Andrea

I wouldn't be so sure about the end of cheap money. If it is def true that crucial changes in the international financial and commercial system have happened in the last few years, some economists (I don't remember where I read about it) say that when factoring in inflation, fed and ecb interest rate hikes do not actually compensate for the general increase in prices. Effectively money is still pretty cheap according to them. And especially, nothing compared to the Volcker shock some have compared the recent central banks increase in interest rates to.

Jonas Halléhn

You talked about the workers who work in the gig economy and their poor conditions. But it is so much more than just wages. There are hardly any unions in the gig economy. Another perspective I missed is how surveilled they are by others - all the time! The companies always see where the workers are. And as soon as they have picked up the food, the customer can see exactly where the order is. This creates incredible stress for the workers and there are many cases where they have collided with or been hit by cars. Surveillance capitalism at its finest! These are factors that make me unable to support such an industry, although it would be convenient to order home a pizza when I'm hangover...

Paul Brewer

Phil blew up in both this episode and the preceding one. Has he got anger management issues? More seriously, my impression is that the big appeal for joining the app economy as a worker is the chance to manage your own hours. If a better-paying job is not available, this option arises least gives one some control. I don’t think investors have the same rational justification. It’s more about waging an ideological war on the administrative state and an unfounded belief that sooner or later apps WILL make money.