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Comment by twobyfour | Hacker News Reader

And contracting in a high-paying field like software development is one thing. Contracting for low-skill labor through a marketplace like Uber, TaskRabbit, Handy, etc. provides even less opportunity for any sort of career development.

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Exactly. I'm doing quite well, but I notice that the people remodelling my house make only half my hourly rate. One of them got injured on his motorbike and turns out not to have a disability insurance, because that insurance is way too expensive in his line of work.

I feel an odd magnetic sway towards the future envisioned in Neil Stephenson's "Snow Crash" where the gig-economy IS the economy.

What could be more alluring, living in a shipping container in one of the shanty slums most of Snow Crash's people live in or being one of the lucky few to live in a corporate enclave?

I'm just glad we're going to have the opportunity to live in a cyber-punk dystopia!!!

The best kind of dystopia! Better than a fascist totalitarian surveillance state dystopia, anyway. Or at least it is for the people that can hack the cyber-stuff to get at the sweet cyber-juice inside.

I can't wait to get my first neuro-implant, and to crash my first 747 filled with telephone books into my brain.

I just started reading Snow Crash, really loving it.

Read The Diamond Age afterward. It's not exactly a sequel, but all indications seem to show that it takes place in the same world, a couple decades later.

Approx 80-100 years according to Wikipedia [1]. Though no source is cited.

The world of Snow Crash, where a few corporations own the entire world with a very tiny government, is also the basis of the book Jennifer Government [2] by Max Barry.

I found that book a bit easier to read. Diamond Age, I can't get through it yet. Cryptonomicon, also by Neil Stephenson is on my list, as well as Neuromancer by Gibson.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age#Snow_Crash

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government

Soon to be a TV series...

http://deadline.com/2017/09/ringworld-lazarus-snow-crash-ama...

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