For money, I shelved books in college. Occasionally, patrons would approach me with questions, and I’d respond with something muttered or a gesture. Other than that, though, I was not a person. I was the walls. The work policy was: check in, do these four or five things, take a break at some point so management didn’t get chewed out. If you finish those four or five things before the end of your shift, find something else to do. If you didn’t, it didn’t matter. It’d get done by the next sucker. Cog in the machine, quotidian nightmare, Pale King tedium, whatever. I loved it, and I was lucky to have it. Getting paid to walk around and think.
My college girlfriend had a part-time job as well, but eventually decided she needed to supplement her income. She signed up for Fiverr, made herself available to transcribe whatever needed transcribing.
At one point late in the semester, my girlfriend was too feverish and exhausted to meet a certain deadline. I found myself at the transcription helm on her behalf, getting down everything I could in the hour-long meeting concerning some shit I can’t even remember. Around minute 25 or so, it became difficult to remember a time where I had felt like less of a person. Neither my name nor my girlfriend’s would appear anywhere on the garbled, half-assed corporate document. She’d get a direct deposit and it’d be on to the next thing.
Around minute 55, at the peak of my dissatisfaction, I fomented my gig-economy insurrection. At the end of one of the final sentences, I wrote “fart.”
Take that, assholes.
I could feel satisfied in that act of rebellion because ultimately those five bucks didn’t matter. It was an extra cup of coffee or two. But also because it wasn’t even my job. It was another level of mediation to labor that was already mediated in excess. I had put my name (symbolically, at least) on labor that was anonymous by design. Out of curiosity, I started an account and began browsing postings on Fiverr, even began responding to some. I had a bonafide tooth-fairy-isn’t-real-we-live-in-a-simulation moment when I saw someone offering to pay me to write positive Yelp reviews for places I’d never been, and even negative reviews for places that other places had it out for. Here was the faceless economy. It wasn’t free labor, but it was labor entirely divorced from the identity of the laborer. It seemed to be the logical conclusion of the disembodied work of my library job, with which I was becoming less and less enchanted in the wake of my burgeoning career as a freelance factotum.
But again: I wasn’t making a living doing the stuff. It was my privilege to toil in bullshit without necessity ever coming into the picture at all. By the time I graduated, I knew people who were full-time gig workers, TaskRabbiting and Favoring and Ubering until they made enough to pay rent and buy the stuff they needed. I didn’t want to pass judgment on how people got by in order to live the life they wanted to, and I might have at some point have found some romance in the utter itinerancy of such a living.
Now, however, I find it difficult to separate gig work’s being a necessity from its being a prerogative, its almost anarchic democracy from its requisite access to certain means (smartphone, vehicle, free time), the ostensible potential for contract-free autonomy from the depersonalization and alienation necessary to make that autonomy possible in the first place.
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