Internet Subsistence Farming

• Subsistence farming was a way of life on the Eastern Shore in Virginia.
  

  Mason/Holland family photograph. From neh.gov

My ancestors spun looms at home or dug potatoes or peet in Ireland. In this country, they either worked their small family farms in Virginia or Kentucky or they ran a small tavern and inn on the wrong side of the tracks, where the whole family worked, serving the rail workers and traveling salesmen in Corry, Pennsylvania. One grandfather took care of horses and then cars at the Hotel Quebec.

Today, I often think that while a century or even two centuries separates us from our ancestors, we're not really substantively different. I still have to spin my Internet loom late into the night to write news copy for websites or translate articles or books; my aunt prepares book indexes; my brother fixes people's websites and servers.  How different is it taking care of somebody's horse or car and taking care of somebody's web site or server? How different is working your fingers on a loom to spin thread or typing on a keyboard to spin words? My great uncle Ray died from a mule kick to the head on the family farm. When the power was knocked out for two weeks during Hurricane Sandy, I wondered what we would do if it stretched weeks -- our family farm of computers and a router burned out in the blackout were all we had to sustain us. A FEMA worker asked me if I had lost any "tools for work". "My router," I explained.

I've seen the nonprofit and news industry, where I used to readily find jobs, shrink to a fraction of its size. I don't whine about this because I've always adapted and done other kinds of consulting and of course translation. But I don't glamourize the new "work at home" online businesses and Internet-ized "sharing" businesses involving homes and cars and errands because I see they are never going to be a decent living. Only some people with already pre-existing assets are going to benefit, and the managers of them benefit most of all, with a huge discrepancy between their lifestyle and that of their Internet minions. Shouldn't all those Occupy Wall Streeters who couch-surf care more about this 1%?

Whimsley has had a very interesting discussion challenging the whole unregulated -- and unethical  -- area of the Air BnB type of Internet-ized services and has even written an open letter challenging Timothy Wu who was touting them at the New York Times.

Peer-to-Peer Hucksterism is exactly the right title for this blog. Whimsley is more of a socialist or "progressive" than I am, certainly, so he approaches the problem of the Silicon Valley hustle from the perspective of the regulated social state -- what horrifies him more than the collectivization of private property involved in these entrepreneurial escapades is that the democratic state cannot properly control them so that people are not harmed. I agree regulation is needed, and I don't mind if the Taxi and Limousine Commission, which people regard as crooked because it charges huge fees for medallions, is the entity to regulate -- and therefore ban -- Uber. Uber was unconscionable during Sandy, gouging prices for rides like common Russian mafia karservisy. Disgraceful.

Paul Carr has a really great series of articles calling out these Internet thugs in Uber and the other businesses here, here and here.  He calls out their Randian "Atlas Shrugs" attitude -- one blog is delightfully called "Asshole Shrugs". Myself, I call out their technocommunism. I don't favour Randianism at all, I just think the Leninist NEP that these entrepreneurs are hawking isn't an improvement over traditional free enterprise in a marketplace that in fact doesn't have to be over-regulated to still be under the rule of law and the courts. That's what bothers Whimsley as well.

Now comes Tomio Geron at Forbes touting "AirBnb and the Unstoppable Rise of the Share Economy". The comments are filled with predictable snots who tell others to be disrupted and die while they make their fortunes, and Brazilian third-world sharers who sneer that those who can't accept sharing must "adapt". Ho hum, this is an old story played out in the Russian Revolution and lots of other revolutions.

So here's my intervention at Forbes:

Look, we are not glamorous, we Internet subsistence farmers, and trying to pretend that the jobs that are going away for good are going to be replaced by our Internet subsistence farming doesn’t impress us.

I might make my income each month by translating something online from Russian for somebody in Vladivostok or an international agency in another country, or copy-editing somebody’s film script within an hour turn-around, or re-renting my Second Life servers and selling digital furniture for avatars, or taking in revenue from Google from my blog ads. The Future is Here! the Future is Now! Except, the future is unevenly distributed. Whoop-de-doo. I’m poor.

I don’t have a car; I live in New York. I can’t rent out part of my apartment — I’d lose my lease in a building where the landlord zealously polices sublets and enforces them by video camera surveillance and electronic card-entry to the building with cards that can only be issued to paying tenants and approved residents. This Air bnb stuff is not a plan for the third world; hell, it’s not even a plan for Rochester, MN or Rochester, NY. It’s *just* a plan for sunny California where hipsters have houses in Malibu and Prius cars that they can chop up, collectivize and let the new oligarchs sell for them under this technocommunist regime. The rest of us are going to be scratching in the digital dust.

We can’t be unionized even by the freelancers’ unions — they require letters from employers, and what, I’m supposed to get 100 letters a month from people I did two pages of translation for or 20 minutes of errands picking up an item they need or re-renting 1024 square meters of Second Life server space for US $1.50 a month? Please. I’m all for micropayments and Mechanical Turks, but you need to look at the nature of the work and jobs on all these task rabbity sites — they are very, very marginal and the only people who really make decent wages are *coders*. Once again we are seeing geeks pretend that they are making a Better World.

I’m not complaining — I chose my Internet subsistence farming after the nonprofit I worked for failed with loss of funding after 9/11; I chose it after my conventional media companies downsized because the Internet killed them. I could be working at Home Depot and have health insurance; instead, I chose this. It’s all good.

The most disturbing thing about this new collective farm where we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us, however, are these new oligarchs who make billions why we make 17 cents from somebody maybe clicking on a belly fat ad.

Hey, when they’re ready to get out of the way and let their systems be run by robots and in fact people like us, and get the tycoons and VCs out of the way, maybe we can believe in their revolution. I don’t think that will happen any time soon. Collectivization isn’t going to work in the virtual world any better than it did in real life. I’m for free enterprise. That’s not what this Brave New Internet World is. It’s “capitalism for me, communism for thee”. It’s not just.

***

Then there's one person who thinks that the resistance to the "sharing economy" is about traditional "phobia" in America against communism and socialism and that technological advances will make this go away.

Nonsense. There’s a good reason for the ‘phobia’ about socialism and communism in America — a lot of the people among the immigrant populations know first hand about the horrors of mass murder under communism and suppression of entrepreneurialism and human rights under socialism. So they came here. They are telling the truth about communism — she isn't.

In fact, the worst aspects of the collectivization we knew in real life are in these digital services — the lack of accountability, the lack of transparency, the ability of a few to exploit the labour of many fervent collectivized believers who don’t have union benefits or retirement plans but just get to chop up their personal property into more and more time or space slivers.

Work on the Internet collective farm is not everything that it has cracked up to be. Write when you get work.

Some of the commenters at Forbes point out to the reputation management aspect and the "curation" or -- once again, the customer service state which would have to supervise that "curation" by the lovely commuuuuunity.

Here's the problem with having collective brow-beating to manage the collective. Group-think kicks in and fanboyz and the "community managers" -- not elected or accountable, but just corporate drones  -- then become harsher and harsher trying to maintain order. We've all seen this in the virtual worlds and the game worlds -- this is going to be awful to watch as it leeches out into real life! Ugh...

Imagine if someone doesn't think the thread count on your Egyptian sheets or the view from your urban window is as wonderful as they thought seeing the picture, and they downrate you. Now you've gone from having a thrilling and fun sort of Internet hobby like that B 'n B you always dreamed of, to having some Internet dickwad threaten your livelihood because they arbitrarily leave a bad comment. You have nowhere to go for adjudication or fairness because the company will not care or have the resources to manage these things. It will be like "Rate my Professor" on steroids. Your only hope, like on Amazon or ebay, is that after enough sales, you could right the bad rep some thin-skinned nerd has given you.

The worst thing I saw at the beginning of Air BnB was that when a woman wanted to protest the horrible thing that happened to her, where lowlifes who rented her place set up a meth lab and stole and wrecked her stuff, was that Robert Scoble told her she was whining and to shut up -- the company was just getting its next round of VC cash and this was more important to nurture than responding to the complaints of one disgruntled customer. The company at first ignored her. She had to shout and shout and scream and put up with the nastiness of the Internet boys on TechCrunch and such until she finally started to get normal mainstream press attention and the company had to turn around on her case and make it good. They did, to their credit, but you got a sense of just how hard it is to challenge these Silicon Valley favourites and their horrid fanboyz with high traffic and views in the tech blogosphere. It was impossible to be heard above the noise when I tried to criticize Uber in New York -- I was hated on and drowned out on TechCrunch. It took Paul Carr from the alternative Pando Daily to get heard with these same kinds of obvious concerns anyone would have.

Meanwhile, without a car or a rentable apartment what assets do I have to rent out timeshares on? Would anyone like a dilapidated pepper plant half-eaten by a cat to grace their home temporarily and give it that lived-in look? How about a shelf of do-gooder and idealistic books that will make you seem intellectual? Say, need two well-mannered and drug-free teenagers that wash their own dishes and actually pick up their rooms? Okay just kidding.