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Why don't gig workers just work for themselves? Gig apps are basically trivial to engineer in 2020 until they get scaling problems, largely due to the contributions of the open source community. It would be nice if there were also open source tools for people's gig businesses, so they didn't have to sell their labor through a company extracting such a heavy rent.

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The whole idea of the so-called gig economy is that you have a huge platform that connects gig workers to clients. How could you replace that with one app for each worker? Would you install 200 taxi apps and start trying each of them when you want a cab? Or would you order an Uber?

And if you are envisioning an open-source platform, who will run it? Who will vet workers on it, even to the basic level that Uber does (e.g. Make sure they are real people, have a driver's license, and a functioning car)?

Reading through Charles Perrow's Complex Organizations I was intrigued and amused by his question: why does capital hire labour and not vice versa?

Unfortunately that's not an answer he pursues in the book, though others do, apparently.

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