A Driver’s Suicide Reveals the Dark Side of the Gig Economy (Published 2018)

Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber — Susan Fowler

As most of you know, I left Uber in December and joined Stripe in January. I've gotten a lot of questions over the past couple of months about why I left and what my time at Uber was like. It's a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in

High score, low pay: why the gig economy loves gamification

The long read: Using ratings, competitions and bonuses to incentivise workers isn’t new – but as I found when I became a Lyft driver, the gig economy is taking it to another level

The Joy of Becoming Worthless…except to each other — Douglas Rushkoff

My last piece, The Intentional Collapse, seems to have agitated a few people. I know it came off a bit dark. I talked about how the Uber wealthy believe the world as we know it is ending and that there won’t be enough essential resources to go around, so they need to take control of as much money and stuff and land as possible in order to position themselves for the end of days.

Automation is coming for the gig economy

A safety net for people who have fallen out of the formal labour market is being dismantled

“Adapt or give up and become an Uber driver”: Diplo has harsh words for music producers sceptical of AI

The producer praised AI's ability to provide him with the "best" vocal takes, before doubling down on his controversial opinion on X.

Death of a Software Developer

The software developer is a type of guy, and his decline will be cultural as well as economic

Death of a Software Developer

The software developer is a type of guy, and his decline will be cultural as well as economic

Death of a Software Developer

The software developer is a type of guy, and his decline will be cultural as well as economic

On Suicidality

Guest post by Sorbie Richner

Super pumped: the battle for Uber

"A New York Times technology correspondent presents the dramatic rise and fall of Uber, set against the rapid upheaval in Silicon Valley during the mobile era. In June 2017, Travis Kalanick, the hard-charging CEO of Uber, was ousted in a boardroom coup that capped a brutal year for the transportation giant. Uber had catapulted to the top of the tech world yet for many came to symbolize everything wrong with Silicon Valley. In the tradition of Brad Stone's Everything Store and John Carreyrou's Bad Blood, award-winning investigative reporter Mike Isaac's Super Pumped delivers a gripping account of Uber's rapid rise, its pitched battles with taxi unions and drivers, the company's toxic internal culture and the bare-knuckle tactics it devised to overcome obstacles in its quest for dominance. Based on hundreds of interviews with current and former Uber employees, along with previously unpublished documents, Super Pumped is a page-turning story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth and bad behavior, that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic twelve-month periods in American corporate history"--

If you think your profession is dying, it could soon be gone

Younger workers once foresaw the demise of horse-drawn carriages — but anticipating obsolescence can be self-fulfilling

The Enshittification of Work: Platform Decay and Labour Conditions in the Gig Economy

ABSTRACT This study investigates the mechanisms by which gig platforms degrade labour conditions over time, building on the concept of platform decay, or ‘enshittification’, initially developed in the context of social media platforms. In this article, we draw on 30 interviews with long‐term gig workers in the ride‐hail and grocery delivery sectors, offering insights into how these companies shift from offering attractive working conditions to exploiting labour as these services develop market power via network effects. We identify three mechanisms through which gig companies claw back value from workers over time: burden shifting (transferring operational costs to workers), feature addition and alteration (increasing the demands on workers), and market manipulation (reducing worker bargaining power). We then explore how workers respond to platform decay, finding that workers adopt three responses: effort recalibration , multi‐homing and navigating the changing conditions through what we term toxic resilience . This study contributes to the gig work literature by developing a framework to explain how working conditions in the gig economy improve or degrade over time. In doing so, this article provides a framework for organizing the growing constellation of labour research on gig workers.

I wanted to be Anthony Bourdain—until I met him.

CW: suicide, suicidal ideation, addiction

Construction worker killed in Baridhara crash: Teen was at the wheel, another charged in case

Mehedi Hasan (24), a construction worker was sitting on a footpath taking a rest when a speeding private car veered off the road and struck him. Mehedi was crushed under the car's wheels and died at the scene. Following the accident, people at the spot detained a teenager who was in the driver's seat. Police later took him into custody but released him after questioning.