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Comment by mrrrgn | Hacker News Reader

I think the point you're attempting to make, is that the people who let out their apartments via AirBnB and drive for Uber are entrepreneurs. This is a valid perspective, and can be argued well. My view is a little different however.

It seems to me, that the people who drive for Uber or let out their homes/apartments on AirBnB have no control over their destinies. If they are banned from the platform, their "business" is over.

What Uber and AirBnB have really achieved, is to replace management with an API: allocating work, evaluating performance, and firing people in automated fashion.

Those who utilize these platforms are something like contractors (though with less legal footing); not small business owners.

If this trend continues to the extreme, perhaps by 2050 most of the workforce will be managed by software. Imagine it, a nation of mechanical turks and task rabbits.

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Excellent points.

Those who utilize these platforms are something like contractors (though with less legal footing); not small business owners.

I don't differentiate between a small business owner and a contractor. When exchanging labor for money (which everyone does in one way or another), a savvy laborer will take on enough extra burden to maximize their share of the profit.

Yes, AirBnb and Uber have replaced management with an API, but so have ZipCar and VRBO and FlipKey and Relay Rides. This gives the laborer an unprecedented level of choice, which forces all of the parties involved to compete on, among other things, price. This competition drives up the profits for the laborer.

A nation of mechanical turks and task rabbits may not be a bad thing at all. Remember, labor exploitation occurs in environments when the owner of the means of production keeps an inordinate share of the profit. The APIs don't own the means of production, they're simply enabling people to turn assets they already have into the means of production. This effectively mobilizes a nation of entrepreneurs to capture markets they previously had no way to capture.

Huh?

Your definition of exploitation is ridiculously narrow. Mechanical turks and task rabbits are tenant farmers. The actual asset that they need to own and maintain isn't a means of production for the landlord, it's just another attribute to exploit.

The landlord controls the work assignments and because the API breaks work into tiny atomic units, the tenant is stuck trying to gobble up whatever task is available. There's no competitive force to drive up compensation... it's a race to the bottom, because the workers lose all of the advantages they have as employees. (ie. hiring an FTE is high friction)

This trend isn't mobilizing a nation of entrepreneurs, it's bringing back the 19th century trend of day labor for the lower classes -- except they don't even get a commitment to a day's pay!

My definition of exploitation comes from Marx:

Once Capitalists are able to pay the worker less than the value produced by the labor a surplus labor forms and this results in the capitalists' profit. This is what Marx meant by “surplus value,” which he saw as “an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labor-power by capital, or of the laborer by the capitalist.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_of_labour

A pure entrepreneur doesn't get exploited because he gets all the profits. A full employee (working in a profitable enterprise) gets fully exploited because he gets the pay he agreed to when he was hired regardless of the profit he generates.

The sweet spot for the modern worker, in my mind, is to keep as much of the profit as is possible by being as close to the entrepreneurial end of the spectrum as possible.

The point is, there's more money to be made running a burger cart than working at McDonald's, cleaning houses from clients on Craigslist than working for Molly Maid, fixing cars yourself than working at PepBoys.

The main barriers to entry for these workers is marketing, book keeping, and inventory management, and all three of those barriers are reduced because of automation and globalization.

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