10.02.11
The daily wonderment of Little Tommy
Little Tommy Friedman tries to come up with a new phrase for “innovations” that reduce people to penury. It won’t catch on and I’m not gonna repeat it. Doubtless it will wind up in the title of one of his next insta-books.
But he’s tagged onto the big world of Internet crowd-sourcing sites where hundreds of thousands of people work at largely pointless jobs, stuff that keeps the plutocracy and service economy humming a bit, but which pay pennies.
Friedman seems astonished at this progress in a world where most people don’t see any unless one counts the global destruction of making a living as improvement.
The new jobs and innovations have too often been described as disruptive technologies.
After well over a decade of seeing and hearing this poisonous pap come out of the Silicon Valley and tech industry it’s easy to redefine disruptive technology.
Disruptive technology is jargon for something invented that destroys your way to make a living by siphoning 99 percent of the profit into the hands of the “innovator.”
The most obvious recent example from the news is represented by Jeff Bezos and Amazon.
A great world discovery and invention was the vaccine for smallpox. Eradication of polio in the US through mass vaccination when I was a child was another fine leap forward. And if malaria is ever conquered, that will be another. (The first two, incidentally, did not result in fabulous riches for the creators. However the eventual benefits to the human condition are immeasurable — in a most grand way.)
Sending merchandise worldwide in days on the sweat shop labor of people toiling in unventilated warehouses for minimum payment and a trip to the emergency room is not progress. It’s exploiting desperation.
Mechanical Turk, another Bezos innovation in which hundreds of thousands of people work free-lance for virtually zero doing no-social-value process tasks, is nothing to be proud of either although it doubtless makes much money.
Matt Barrie, is the founder of freelancer.com, which today lists 2.8 million freelancers offering every service you can imagine. “The whole world is connecting up now at an incredibly rapid pace,??? says Barrie, and many of these people are coming to freelancer.com to offer their talents. Barrie says he describes this rising global army of freelancers the way he describes his own team: “They all have Ph.D.’s. They are poor, hungry and driven: P.H.D.???
Barrie offered me a few examples on his site right now: Someone is looking for a designer to design “a fully functioning dune buggy.??? Forty people are now bidding on the job at an average price of $268. Someone is looking for an architect to design “a car-washing cafe.??? Thirty-seven people are bidding on that job at an average price of $168. Someone is looking to produce “six formulations of chewing gum??? suitable for the Australian market. Two people are bidding at an average price of $375. When Barrie needed a five-word speech to accept a Webby Award, he offered $1,000 for the best idea. He got 2,730 entries and accepted “The Tech Boom Is Back.??? Someone looking for “a rap song to help Chinese students learn English??? has three bids averaging $157.
While the inane (“The Tech Boom is Back,” acceptance of a “Webby”) is commonplace in Friedman’s world of free-lance opportunity, one thing is going missing from the great global talent pool: The capacity to make life better. All the work being done is of virtually no benefit except to those who either put together the Internet aggregator or very large corporations using labor pools to drive compensations for menial service work in corporate nuisance industries to the lowest possible levels.
You can glean the free-lance crowd-sourcing jobs junk pile for days and literally not find one that improves the human condition even slightly. I’ve tried.
There was the job of checking your cable tv movies on demand menu for the presence of a few specific titles. Then there was the job, devised by a couple college professors, to test how scared you were by a series of mock terrorist attacks as shown on fictitious news broadcasts. There are the jobs at rewriting and uploading articles seeded with keywords for those wishing to game Google with spam blogs and sites. And the bottomless ocean of transcribing audio from mind-numbing corporate meetings and lectures, all for a couple thin dimes.
The list presented by Friedman today as evidence of busy hubbub is no exception, and painfully so.
In southern California, notably in Pasadena, the idea of someone designing a “car-washing cafe” through global free-lance work is unintentionally hilarious. There’s no shortage of them. One down the street from me offers shoe-shines, massage chairs and an outdoor lounge while you wait.
Ninety-nine percent of the labor employed in it also qualifies as sweat-shop work. Thanks to the decades long effort to curb unions and destroy the rights of workers no one can make any real living at it unless they pack themselves in at the lowest level of existence manageable, seven or so to an apartment.
Of course, very stupid people will believe that using Internet crowd-sourced free-lance work to design such a car wash is really something.
“How Did the Robot End Up With My Job?” is the title of Friedman’s Sunday column.
Friedman has been indistinguishable from a robot for some time. So he certainly knows.
The trick is in getting those few slots where the robots, as exemplified by Friedman, are richly rewarded.
Here’s Friedman getting hit with a pie in a famous incident, set to my Captain Beefheart imitation.