We Own Nothing

A recent rideshare experience confirmed that our digital hellscape is deepening, and that the things we pay for don't buy us much at all.

On a recent grey and wet February day in East Lansing, Michigan, I picked up a young woman named Olivia at her apartment building near the campus of Michigan State University. Olivia hopped in. As soon as we had exchanged polite hellos, she began talking a mile a minute.

“I am so glad you came to get me,” she said. “The other Lyft driver was supposed to get me but her service went out and it’s like the whole AT&T system, or something.”

I would later come to find out that the ‘or something’ was a roughly six hour outage across the AT&T network. During the outage, customers around the country had no access to the network at all. If you were on AT&T’s network and drove for Uber or Lyft or Grubhub or any other gig job, you would be forced to take the day off without any service. This is of course, not to mention the major imposition in this day and age of not having wireless or internet service for several hours. Most of us would be unable to do even basic tasks at our jobs without some ki…