There was a moment in the discussion — the one occasioned by Anthropic's rumored two-trillion-dollar valuation, by Nvidia's five-hundred-billion-dollar wager, by Zuckerberg's manifesto with its familiar cadence of inevitability — when a speaker offered what he plainly considered the settled empirical fact of the matter. The drivers, he said, toggle back and forth between being a driver for Amazon and being a driver for Uber. They like the flexible working arrangements. I have been turning that sentence over for days now, here where the tide goes out and the flats confess their whole private architecture to anyone willing to muddy his shoes, and I find I cannot let it stand as the observation it pretends to be. It is not an observation.
It is a verdict dressed in the clothing of a description, and the disguise is so good that the man wearing it may not know he is a judge.
Grant him the fact. The toggling is real. The drivers do move between the two apps, and they do speak, when asked, of freedom. I accept every word of it. And that is precisely where the interesting work begins, because the fact is true and the conclusion drawn from it is false.
Consider what the man is actually looking at. He sees a worker who has installed two applications on one telephone, who accepts a delivery from the first and, in the dead hour that follows, accepts a fare from the second, and he calls this arrangement flexibility, as though the word described a gift the worker had been given rather than a maneuver the worker had been forced to invent. But watch the same scene with the mud on your shoes. A man who holds two jobs does not hold two jobs because he has been offered an abundance of possible selves; he holds two jobs because neither one, alone, will keep the roof over the family that is the reason he rises. The toggling is not the exercise of a preference.
It is the visible symptom of an insufficiency — the way a limp is the visible symptom of the stone in the shoe, and no one, watching a man limp across a parking lot, announces that he has developed a taste for asymmetrical locomotion.
I have used the image before and I will use it again because it is exact. A man swimming between two sinking boats is not exercising freedom of navigation. He is choosing, at each stroke, the vessel that is going down more slowly, and we insult him when we mistake his calculation for a holiday.
So let us build forward from the speaker's premise rather than merely quarrel with his conclusion, for the premise, once you take it seriously, carries you somewhere he did not go. If it is true that workers like the flexibility — and I believe it is true — then the honest question is not whether they like it but what it is a substitute for. Flexibility is a real good. So is a wage that does not require two employers to assemble. So is health coverage that survives a slow week.
The trap of the entire conversation is its grammar of subtraction, the assumption that each of these must be purchased with the surrender of another, as though dignity came in a single currency and every desire drew down the same small account.
This is the company store translated into the language of optionality, and it is worth remembering what the company store actually was, because we have sentimentalized it into a folk song and forgotten that it was an accounting trick. The miner was paid in scrip, and the scrip was good only at the store the company owned, and the store set the prices, so that the freedom to spend one's wages was real in exactly the way the freedom to toggle between two apps is real — which is to say, real inside a fence whose builder is careful never to mention the fence. Sixteen tons, and what do you get. The genius of the arrangement was never that it denied the worker choice; it was that it flooded him with choices, all of them inside the perimeter, until choosing itself became the proof that he was free. The men designing the new arrangement have read no ballads and require none.
They have merely rediscovered, with the fresh amazement capital brings to every rediscovery, that if you offer a man enough small freedoms he will stop asking for the large one, and that the large one — the sufficient wage, the durable protection, the standing to bargain — is the only freedom the arrangement cannot afford to grant.
The two-trillion-dollar valuation and the reflective vest belong to the same sentence, though they are never printed in it. The capital gathers upward into figures no worker will ever hold, and the freedom disperses downward into a thousand small toggles, and both movements are called, by the same men, inevitable. Wanting both flexibility and security is not a contradiction to be resolved. It is the human condition, stated plainly, and the only people who find it paradoxical are the ones who profit from the paradox.
