Lauren Smiley about The Shut-In Economy
“In the new world of on-demand everything, you’re either pampered, isolated royalty — or you’re a 21st century servant.”

Click-bait false dichotomy aside, this is an interesting area to think about. Is the future of work looks like a bunch of APIs for people?

I can image it being quite dystopian: install an app, answer some questions about your abilities, qualifications, schedule, etc. and poof your time is auto-magically assigned to be spent in the most efficient way (most cost-efficient way for the API-hubs companies, that is).

Extreme optimization also may look like little additions to your daily life: The App nudges you to buy extra ice-cream on your way home; when you are on a red light, another drone App user comes up to you and takes the ice-cream. She’s going home herself but is making a small detour to deliver that ice-cream to the one that ordered it. That order was placed automatically too, after analyzing customer’s biometric and social graph data (ML model says: though breakup) and coming to a conclusion that to maximize LTV, this purchase was needed. It also may lead to a need for a fitness programme purchase later, but again, that’s just LTV maximizing, nothing personal.

Ok, back to our totally different world and the article at hand.

The luxuries usually afforded to one-percenters now stretch to the urban upper-middle class, or so the technology industry cheers.

There’s a study saying

Around the world, increases in wealth have produced an unintended consequence: a rising sense of time scarcity. We provide evidence that using money to buy time can provide a buffer against this time famine, thereby promoting happiness.

There’s also the gender angle:

That’s the other side of this, the gender one. The errands being served up by the on-demand economy — cooking, cleaning, laundry, groceries, runs to the post office — all were all once, and in many places still are, the jobs of stay-at-home mothers. Even now, when women outnumber men in the formal workplace, they continue to bear the brunt of that invisible domestic work, often for many, many hours a week. So women — those who can afford it, at least — have the most to win from passing that load on to somebody else.

I usually pre-order food to work, and sometimes hire a cleaning service — it saves a lot of time indeed, and, as I start to have less free time, I increasingly value it. I’m thinking of outsourcing making my breakfast and dinner too.