3: Working on Your Own: Precarious Labor in the Gig Economy

In 2022, everyone can work extra. We can log-on to Amazon's Mechanical Turk to help translate a document. We can join TaskRabbit to earn side money building people's Ikea furniture. We can register for a rideshare company to work as a cabdriver in our spare time. We can rent out a spare room on Airbnb. We can rent our pools using Swimply. We can deliver food for DoorDash. We can make how-to videos and publish them on YouTube. We can even rent our cars to others when we aren't using them using Turo. All these opportunities are made available through companies that profess not to be hotels, cab companies, or temp agencies, but rather call themselves technology companies. The opportunities to earn extra money¹ are endless, but that is also the problem. When anyone can be a cabdriver, no one can earn a living as a cabdriver. Digital feudalism creates a system where we need to earn more money to sustain our expanding needs, but as more people need to work more, the jobs we do pay less.