#labor

My read on this is: the startup economy is undergoing a structural transformation here. Startups are substituting compute for labor at an increasing rate. I still remain optimistic that this is going to result in a lot more companies doing a lot more things, but so far it hasn't happened. But companies' claims that they can get by with way fewer people in the age of AI does seem to be true.

So no, they didn’t really want you to bring your whole self to work. They wanted you to bring the parts that were useful to them, for exactly as long as it was useful to them. The “whole self” thing was just the price of admission in a seller’s market. Now that it’s a buyer’s market, they’d prefer you just shut up and (use AI to write) code. The irony is that employees who actually believe in what they’re building tend to build better things. These executives may have just taught an entire generation of workers that the relationship is purely transactional. When the labor market tightens again—and it will—they might find that lesson stuck.

In other words, the 1099 economy is almost perfectly calibrated to serve the needs of fast-moving start-ups — lower costs, less liability, the ability to grow and shrink the labor pool quickly — but is it good for the people doing the work?

The ironic thing is that Cesar Chavez was a Christian activist, basing his civil rights rallies upon Jesus’ example of achieving social justice through non-violence, and as such, is an iconic hero to Mexican Americans. The Right is up in arms on Twitter, threatening to switch to Bing as revenge against Google for honoring a Christian activist on Easter.