Paul was a gig worker in the San Francisco Bay Area. Formerly a project manager in tech until several companies in a row laid him off, he started working entirely for platforms like Lyft, Uber and TaskRabbit. He managed to eke out a living, but the jobs posed a different problem.
‘Honestly, a lot of times, I go out and the person doesn’t even know my name, even though I introduced myself as Paul,’ he told me. ‘Instead, customers just point and say: “OK, yeah, just put it over there,” and then I drop off the stuff, and they just tap it. I think they see it as more of an – I think they see it as automation. They see you as just a system.’ He paused. ‘I have friends that tell me: “You’re essentially working as a vending machine.”’
[…]
It is this contradictory knot of ambivalence that brings people back, again and again, to find interactions on these platforms, whose billionaire owners have a continued interest in stoking the so-called loneliness crisis. Marketers know: ‘Sell the problem you solve, not the product.’ This aphorism captures their one-two punch: before consumers will buy your solution, they first have to be convinced that they need it. Perhaps that is why Meta’s own research teams studied Facebook’s impact on loneliness, only to conclude that the platform was a ‘net positive’. The New Yorker recently quoted the tech entrepreneur Avi Schiffmann, whose startup is creating an AI wearable device dubbed ‘Friend’, as saying: ‘I do think the loneliness crisis was created by technology, but I do think it will be fixed by technology.’ Just like the purveyors of ‘feminine hygiene’ products, educational toys or body deodorant, then, technologists both sell a widely touted crisis and profit from its solutions. They have become merchants of loneliness.
When we understand the problem as loneliness, then it might make sense to assert that all kinds of connections, even those with machines, might help. But when we understand the problem as depersonalisation, the mechanised relationship becomes a harder sell. Of course, technologists do their best, apparently recognising the widespread yearning to be seen; their solutions, however, invite even more data and technology to step in.They urge a strategy that is widely called ‘personalisation’, involving a process of ever more precise tailoring, in which data is harnessed by technology to analyse a person’s health history, how a person likes to drive, or even the content of someone’s sweat. ‘Personalised medicine’ and ‘personalised education’ – perhaps better called ‘customised’ – are each an effort to assess someone’s needs and produce recommendations tailored to the individual: akin to being seen, but by a machine.
… Somehow, we have found ourselves at a particularly absurd moment in the industrial timeline, when people are too busy for us while machines have all the time in the world.