Jessica Bruder

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Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance by Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge

air gap, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, computer vision, crowdsourcing, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Nomadland, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Robert Bork, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, Tim Cook: Apple, web of trust, WikiLeaks

SNOWDEN’S BOX SNOWDEN’S BOX Trust in the Age of Surveillance By Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge First published by Verso 2020 © Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge 2020 Parts of this book appeared originally under the same title in Harper’s Magazine, May 2017 All rights reserved The moral rights of the authors have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-343-4 ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-346-5 (US EBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-345-8 (UK EBK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bruder, Jessica, author. | Maharidge, Dale, author.

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SNOWDEN’S BOX SNOWDEN’S BOX Trust in the Age of Surveillance By Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge First published by Verso 2020 © Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge 2020 Parts of this book appeared originally under the same title in Harper’s Magazine, May 2017 All rights reserved The moral rights of the authors have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-343-4 ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-346-5 (US EBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-345-8 (UK EBK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bruder, Jessica, author. | Maharidge, Dale, author. Title: Snowden’s box : trust in the age of surveillance / By Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge. Description: First edition hardback. | London ; New York : Verso, 2020. | “Parts of this book appeared originally under the same title in Harper’s Magazine, May 17, 2017”—T.p verso. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019038432 | ISBN 9781788733434 (hardback) | ISBN 9781788733465 (ebk) | ISBN 9781788733458 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Snowden, Edward J., 1983– | Electronic surveillance—United States. | Confidential communications—United States. | Journalism—Political aspects—United States—History—21st century.

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It’s what lets people come together in any kind of cooperative action, from social movements to marriages and markets. When shared between members of a civic-minded community, trust is the one thing that can keep state power in check — unless, of course, we allow ourselves to be manipulated by fear and, in the silence that follows, grow apart from one another. — Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge 1. Winter Nights Dale Maharidge It was a frigid winter, and the Manhattan loft was cold — very cold. Something was wrong with the gas line, and there was no heat. In a corner, surrounding the bed, sheets had been hung from cords to form a de facto tent with a small electric heater running inside.

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Boeing 747, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, company town, crowdsourcing, fulfillment center, full employment, game design, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, Mars Rover, new economy, Nomadland, off grid, off-the-grid, payday loans, Pepto Bismol, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, six sigma, supply-chain management, traumatic brain injury, union organizing, urban sprawl, Wayback Machine, white picket fence, Y2K

U.S. most unequal: “Inequality Update,” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, November 2016, https://www.oecd.org/social/OECD2016-Income-Inequality-Update.pdf. 248. Comparing nations’ inequality: http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SI.POV.GINI/rankings. 248. Octopus in a coconut: https://www.facebook.com/LADbible/videos/2969897786390725. ALSO BY JESSICA BRUDER Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man Photographs by Jessica Bruder. Photograph page 34 courtesy of Linda May. Copyright © 2017 by Jessica Bruder All rights reserved First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110. For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W.

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Nomadland SURVIVING AMERICA IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY JESSICA BRUDER W. W. NORTON & COMPANY INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923 NEW YORK LONDON For Dale “There’s a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in.” —LEONARD COHEN “The capitalists don’t want anyone living off their economic grid.” —ANONYMOUS COMMENTER, AZDAILYSUN.COM CONTENTS FOREWORD Part One 1. The Squeeze Inn 2. The End 3. Surviving America 4. Escape Plan Part Two 5. Amazon Town 6. The Gathering Place 7. The Rubber Tramp Rendezvous 8. Halen 9. Some Unbeetable Experiences Part Three 10.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

These quotes are from our interviews. Part VI: The Owners of the New Machine Age 1. “Companies do not care” Douglas Schifter, Facebook post, February 5, 2018. 2. He was proud Ginia Bellafante, “A Driver’s Suicide Reveals the Dark Side of the Gig Economy,” New York Times, February 6, 2018. 3. With his large frame Jessica Bruder, “Driven to Despair,” New York, May 2018. The Great Comet Returns 1. Closed for Business signs “Retail Trade Employment: Before, During, and After the Pandemic,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, Beyond the Numbers, vol. 11, no. 4 (April 2022). 2. By the end of the ’00s According to Forbes in 2007, “The high-tech hub of San Jose leads the list of Forbes 400 members per capita.”

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By the end of the ’00s According to Forbes in 2007, “The high-tech hub of San Jose leads the list of Forbes 400 members per capita.” San Francisco was second. 3. France’s interior minister “French Government Vows to Shut Down Uber,” Deutsche Welle, June 26, 2015. 4. “We are facing extinction” Douglas Schifter, Black Car News, quoted in Jessica Bruder, “Driven to Despair.” The New Tech Titans 1. “We’re going to see our already record-high inequality” This and many subsequent quotes are taken from an interview I conducted with the then presidential candidate in 2018. 2. Mass production of self-driving “Ease the Transition to Self-Driving Vehicles,” Yang2020.com. 3.

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At Amazon, even before the ALU’s historic victory I attended a handful of events Smalls headlined to talk about the labor movement, and spoke with him about organizing at Amazon in Los Angeles. The quotes about Amazon Go stores are taken from an event at Stories bookstore in LA. 8. He published the post to his Facebook page Jessica Bruder, ”Driven to Despair,” New York, May 2018. 9. But like the Luddites By the end of the next year, the city had enacted a cap on the number of Uber and Lyft drivers that could operate in the city, extending a lifeline to Schifter’s taxi-driving peers. Afterword 1. On the one hand, the answer is no Aaron Benanav, Automation and the Future of Work (London and New York: Verso, 2020). 2.

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, business logic, call centre, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive load, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death from overwork, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Chrome, Greyball, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social software, SoftBank, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, Tim Cook: Apple, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, urban planning, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

True to his word, he made my book a priority at all hours of the day and night as deadlines neared. He is more than a talented editor—he is a great friend. I’m also grateful to David Lyon, Annette Burfoot, and David Murakami Wood, who first gave me confidence to pursue sociological work. And to Ruth Donsky, my first teacher. To Natasha Singer, Anne L. Washington, Tom Igoe, and Jessica Bruder, whose brilliance and kindness were deeply encouraging to me as I wrote this book. To Labor Tech, a group of scholars organized by Winifred Poster, who, along with Michael Palm, offered generous feedback on my manuscript. To Frank Pasquale, who has a rare ability to detect and draw intellectual connections across different fields of research and to connect scholars accordingly.

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Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Elia Zureik, “Theorizing Surveillance: The Case of the Workplace,” in Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination, ed. David Lyon (London, UK: Routledge, 2002): 31–56; Alex Rosenblat and Luke Stark, “Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries: A Case Study of Uber’s Drivers,” International Journal of Communication 10, no. 27 (2016): 3772, http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/4892. 15. Jessica Bruder, “These Workers Have a New Demand: Stop Watching Us,” The Nation, May 27, 2015, www.thenation.com/article/these-workers-have-new-demand-stop-watching-us/; Monique Girard and David Stark, “Distributing Intelligence and Organizing Diversity in New Media Projects,” Environment and Planning A 34, no. 11 (2002): 1927–1949; Rosenblat and Stark, “Algorithmic Labor,” 3772. 16.

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

Shipler Precarious Lives: Job Insecurity and Well-Being in Rich Democracies, Arne Kalleberg The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences, Louis Uchitelle The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, Juliet Schor Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream, Benjamin Hunnicutt The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, Guy Standing Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, Arlie Hochschild The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, Steven Greenhouse The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work, Joanne B. Ciulla The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans, Beth Shulman Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, Jessica Bruder Where Bad Jobs Are Better: Retail Jobs Across Countries and Companies, Francoise Carre and Chris Tilly “We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now”: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages, Annelise Orleck On Wanda Stone Age Economics, Marshall Sahlins Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Robert Sapolsky Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir The Panopticon Writings, Jeremy Bentham Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work, Paul Babiak and Robert D.

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* Songs with a glockenspiel, songs with just a first name as the title, songs where someone yells “YEE-OW!,” etc. * I even get all the way through an Amazon-themed “I’m going to the picnic” one afternoon, from Advil to a Zero-tolerance policy about stealing. * For more about workamping, check out Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017). * Or I’m pretty sure that’s what he said—I can still only sort of decipher anything said through the megaphone. I confirm it later. * “Water spider” is another odd Amazonian job title. From the few days I spent in packing, I gather that it involves running around keeping stationary workers supplied with materials

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

Nearly everyone who has ever worked in an Amazon fulfillment center has a story about the moment they realized this. “America’s appetite for sex toys—indicated by the sheer number and variety of dildos and butt plugs passing through Amazon warehouses—is a subject of fascination to many workers,” wrote Jessica Bruder, who interviewed dozens of temporary Amazon workers for Nomadland, her chronicle of America’s surprisingly large population of itinerant temps. Because Tyler is a triumph of evolution who was protected and nurtured as an infant by an extended network of caring adults who tolerated in him, as is the case with all human babies, a period of neoteny longer than that of any other animal on Earth, he was able to acquire the intelligence and finesse required to reach into the (frequently overstuffed) bin and, based only on a name and the two-dimensional image he just glanced at, grab just the right item.

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“robot arms race”: Kim Bhasin and Patrick Clark, “How Amazon Triggered a Robot Arms Race,” Bloomberg News, June 29, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-29/how-amazon-triggered-a-robot-arms-race. “Amazon Prime effect”: Christopher Mims, “The Prime Effect: How Amazon’s Two-Day Shipping Is Disrupting Retail,” Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-prime-effect-how-amazons-2-day-shipping-is-disrupting-retail-1537448425. cover of Wired magazine: Jessica Bruder, “Meet the Immigrants Who Took On Amazon,” Wired, November 12, 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/meet-the-immigrants-who-took-on-amazon. Chapter 15: The Unbearable Complexity of Robotic Warehousing 350 pounds: Staten Island Advance, “A Peek Inside the New Amazon Fulfillment Center: The Robots,” YouTube, June 19, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

fired by an algorithm: Colin Lecher, “How Amazon Automatically Tracks and Fires Warehouse Workers for ‘Productivity,’” The Verge, April 25, 2019, https://theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516004/amazon-warehouse-fulfillment-centers-productivity-firing-terminations. somewhat higher-skilled jobs: “What Amazon Does to Wages,” The Economist, January 20, 2018. the CamperForce of retirees: Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017). almost designed to isolate employees: Emily Guendelsberger, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane (New York: Little, Brown, 2019), 52. the company deployed tried-and-true defenses: See discussion of failed 2014 unionizing effort by Amazon equipment maintenance and repair technicians in Delaware in Duhigg, “Is Amazon Unstoppable?”

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In Kentucky, an employee at an Amazon call center: Benjamin Romano, “Fired Amazon Employee with Crohn’s Disease Files Lawsuit over Lack of Bathroom Access,” The Seattle Times, February 2, 2019. “Associates are allowed to use the toilet whenever needed”: From Amazon’s written response to questions submitted by the author, July 13, 2020. a group of Somali American workers: Jessica Bruder, “Meet the Immigrants Who Took On Amazon,” Wired, November 12, 2019. a study of twenty-three Amazon warehouses by the Center for Investigative Reporting: Will Evans, “Behind the Smiles,” Reveal, November 25, 2019, https://revealnews.org/article/behind-the-smiles/. another in-depth report: “Packaging Pain: Workplace Injuries Inside Amazon’s Empire,” Amazon Packaging Pain, https://amazonpackagingpain.org/the-report.

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Google acquisitions: CB Insights, “The Google Acquisition Tracker,” available at cbinsights.com/. 124, Moreover, there aren’t … Decline in GDP and labor productivity growth rates: Aaron Benanav, Automation and the Future of Work (London: Verso, 2020), 31–32; Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005 (Verso: London, 2018 [2006]), 341. Richest .01 percent of Americans quintupling their share of national wealth: Howard R. Gold, “Never Mind the 1 Percent. Let’s Talk about the 0.01 Percent,” Chicago Booth Review (Winter 2017). 8. Inclusive Predators 126, Doug Schifter spent more … Jessica Bruder, “Driven to Despair,” New York Magazine, May 14, 2018; Ginia Bellafante, “A Driver’s Suicide Reveals the Dark Side of the Gig Economy,” New York Times, February 6, 2018. 126, He wanted his suicide … Schifter’s columns are available at drivingguild.org/doug-schifter-black-car-news-column-archive/.

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

The company says mobile shopping now accounts for more than 40 percent of its revenue and it’s growing by leaps and bounds.47 Every time we impulsively tap a purchase on our phones, someone is on the other end, filling a box with whatever we ordered before handing it to someone else to drop it on our doorstep. Amazon alone employs more than 613,000 warehouse workers worldwide, and adds about 100,000 more temp workers during peaks.48 Jessica Bruder, in Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, follows the lives of Amazon’s “CamperForce,” a large group of (mainly) retirees who can’t afford to retire, so they live in their RVs and other vehicles and find temporary work in the warehouses of “the everything store” during the holidays.

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

Amazon promised 1,476 full-time jobs In 2015, when Amazon announced it was hiring more workers in Chattanooga, the hourly wage on offer was $11.25, below the poverty line for a family of four. That meant that at least some of these workers would actually incur costs in the form of housing and other subsidies. See Jessica Bruder, “With 6,000 New Warehouse Jobs, What Is Amazon Really Delivering?,” Reuters, June 17, 2015, http://blogs.reuters.com/​great-debate/​2015/​06/​17/​with-6000-new-warehouse-jobs-what-is-amazon-really-delivering/. To ward off theft, employees were checked twice daily In December 2014, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a contract agency was not required to pay workers at Amazon warehouses for the time they spent undergoing a twice-daily security screening, a process workers claimed can take as long as twenty-five minutes.

Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World by Anthony Sattin

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, digital nomad, Donald Trump, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, invention of writing, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, Jessica Bruder, Khartoum Gordon, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nomadland, open borders, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, spinning jenny, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, traveling salesman

It also lets us glimpse – in the way they live lightly, more freely, in the way they have learned to adapt and to be nimble and flexible in their thoughts and actions, and in the balance they have maintained with the natural world – another way of living, the way that the ‘other’ branch of humankind has chosen to go since the days when we all hunted as a single pack in the generous gardens of the deep past. * For more on the ‘houseless’ in the United States I recommend Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland, the book behind the film. PART I The Balancing Act It will not last. All is change, all is ephemeral. John Stewart Paradise, 10,000 BCE Global population: perhaps 5 million1 Nomad population: most of that number Once upon a time we were all hunters and gatherers.

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

To what extent they were accounted for in this assessment was not made clear. 15 Terena Bell, ‘This bot judges how much you smile during your job interview’, Fast Company, 15 January 2019, https://www.fastcompany.com/90284772/this-bot-judges-how-much-you-smile-during-your-job-interview. 16 ‘Jane’ is a composite character. 17 Cogito Corporation, https://www.cogitocorp.com. 18 ‘Jack’ is also a composite character. 19 Ron Miller, ‘New Firm Combines Wearables And Data To Improve Decision Making’, TechCrunch, 24 February 2015, https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/24/new-firm-combines-wearables-and-data-to-improve-decision-making/. 20 Jessica Bruder, ‘These Workers Have a New Demand: Stop Watching Us’, The Nation, 27 May 2015, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/these-workers-have-new-demand-stop-watching-us/. 21 Ceylan Yeginsu, ‘If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know. (And Amazon Has a Patent for It.)’, New York Times, 1 February 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/01/technology/amazon-wristband-tracking-privacy.html. 22 James Bloodworth, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain (Atlantic Books, 2018). 23 Luke Tredinnick and Claire Laybats, ‘Workplace surveillance’, Business Information Review 36, no. 2 (2019), 50–2, https://doi.org/10.1177/0266382119853890. 24 Ivan Manokha, ‘New Means of Workplace Surveillance: From the Gaze of the Supervisor to the Digitalization of Employees’, Monthly Review, 1 February 2019, https://monthlyreview.org/2019/02/01/new-means-of-workplace-surveillance/. 25 Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. 26 Olivia Solon, ‘Big Brother isn’t just watching: workplace surveillance can track your every move’, Guardian, 6 November 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/06/workplace-surveillance-big-brother-technology. 27 Ibid. 28 Note that by ‘sales’ I am including trials.

The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier by Ian Urbina

9 dash line, Airbnb, British Empire, clean water, Costa Concordia, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Filipino sailors, forensic accounting, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global value chain, Global Witness, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, Jones Act, Julian Assange, Malacca Straits, Maui Hawaii, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, standardized shipping container, statistical arbitrage, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

They were often called seasteads: My full bibliography on seasteading is as follows: Jerome Fitzgerald, Sea-Steading: A Life of Hope and Freedom on the Last Viable Frontier (New York: iUniverse, 2006); “Homesteading the Ocean,” Spectrum, May 1, 2008; Oliver Burkeman, “Fantasy Islands,” Guardian, July 18, 2008; Patri Friedman and Wayne Gramlich, “Seasteading: A Practical Guide to Homesteading the High Seas,” Gramlich.net, 2009; Declan McCullagh, “The Next Frontier: ‘Seasteading’ the Oceans,” CNET News, Feb. 2, 2009; Alex Pell, “Welcome Aboard a Brand New Country,” Sunday Times, March 15, 2009; Brian Doherty, “20,000 Nations Above the Sea,” Reason, July 2009; Eamonn Fingleton, “The Great Escape,” Prospect, March 25, 2010; Brad Taylor, “Governing Seasteads: An Outline of the Options,” Seasteading Institute, Nov. 9, 2010; “Cities on the Ocean,” Economist, Dec. 3, 2011; Jessica Bruder, “A Start-Up Incubator That Floats,” New York Times, Dec. 14, 2011; Michael Posner, “Floating City Conceived as High-Tech Incubator,” Globe and Mail, Feb. 24, 2012; Josh Harkinson, “My Sunset Cruise with the Clever, Nutty, Techno-libertarian Seasteading Gurus,” Mother Jones, June 7, 2012; Stephen McGinty, “The Real Nowhere Men,” Scotsman, Sept. 8, 2012; Michelle Price, “Is the Sea the Next Frontier for High-Frequency Trading?