We feel disconnected because we've been forced apart

There’s a story you might have missed, because it flew under the radar this week. It was overshadowed by Wendy’s announcing that they plan to implement “surge pricing” along the lines of Uber and Lyft, then frantically walking it back after public outcry. But this other story operates along similar lines, and is just as insidious. It’s bosses using AI to monitor and review workers in real time.

This has been rolled out quietly, but now over 100 stores across the country, including KFC and Dairy Queen and Taco Bell and more, are using an AI program called Riley to surveil workers. The program uses audio and video inputs to instantly measure performance, and the company that owns it lauds its ability to reward workers for “upselling” customers, or getting us to buy more crap. But they don’t publicly celebrate how workers could be punished by Riley, even for things out of their control, like understaffing. Outsourcing the assesment of worker performance to AI sounds like a nightmare, one that hands human management to a machine and leaves workers more isolated, vulnerable, and alone.

Connection

I wanted to write about isolation and connection for a few reasons today. The first is that I see a lot of intruiging writing about connectedness. It talks about how people have fewer friends, how we feel more lonely, how community isn’t what it used to be in so many ways. But then I get to the diagnosis, and something falls short. I often get to the end and it’s social media, it’s polarization, it’s a matter of individual choices rather than massive systems that have separated us from one another and left us struggling to connect.

This isn’t always the case, but too often our inquiries about loneliness and connection are asking “Why am I lonely?" rather than "Why are we lonely?” You and I might feel alone for all sorts of unique reasons, but we are cut off from our neighbors primarily because of policies, systems, ways the world works now. And that’s frightening. It’s unpleasant. These systems are massive and powerful and hard to put our fingers on.

But the second reason I want to write about connection is that the news has it on my mind. News about work and workplace trends and the housing market and more provides the concrete examples that allow us to put our fingers on the systems that run the world, makes them tangible and concrete. And right now there’s plenty of news about how the rent is too damn high, how the gig economy is killing us, and how algorithms shouldn’t be running out lives. I think these all fall into the exact arena we need to look to if we want to get serious about ending the epidemic of loniliness. We’ll never get to the we of it all without talking about the systems that govern our lives.

Work

Wendy’s, AI, Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, GrubHub, our lives are increasingly being controlled by algorithms, algorithms that work for the bosses. For companies already using surge pricing like Uber, it means consumers paying more, more corporate profits, but not necessarily more money for workers. In fact, Lyft and Uber have been taking more and more of your fares, and giving less to drivers. Sometimes, they take over 50% of what you pay.

Delivery companies like DoorDash, Grubhub, and the Uber Eats platform also take money from workers and adjust prices algorithmically. Roshan Abrahan describes the whole gig economy as an “ad-hoc world of ‘independent contractors’ whose boss is an algorithm.” And one study he discusses says that “haphazard algorithmic pay has turned having a job into something more like gambling.” You don’t know how much you’re going to make, you don’t know how much the company will take, nothing is predictable and the money you need to survive is uncertain.

The gig economy was sold as a distorted form of entrepreneurship. People were told they could hustle, get a second job, set their own hours, and make as much as they wanted. In Planet of Slums Mike Davis rips into this idea, calling it out as a total lie, particularly how it’s been used to wreck stable industries and lure people into exploitative jobs in the global south. And we see it everywhere. Stable, union taxi jobs replaced by gig work. No benefits. No stability. And no connection.

In addition to all of the economic impacts, or part and parcel with them, has come an isolating and isolated form of work. Millions of people, now“independent contractors” working out there on their own, are directed by an algorithm to enrich tech companies. These people spend much of their days solo, cut off from other workers and other people as a whole. This diminishes worker power almost infinitely, and it isolates us socially and emotionally. Amazon delivery workers, Instacart workers, DoorDashers, there is a growing legion of people who are forced to spend the day fundamentally alone in order to make ends meet.

As Eddie Ongweso writes: “The gig economy doesn’t actually exist. By skirting US labor laws, a host of companies can misclassify their workers as independent contractors, exempt them from basic rights or social welfare programs, and then pay them less than minimum wage in many cases. None of this is really new and it’s certainly not an ‘economy.’ Rather, Silicon Valley has managed to reinvent piecework, albeit in a digital form, whereby workers are forced to work longer hours unpaid as they wait for assignments that'll pay paltry sums.”

And this was not a product of worker choice, it was dictated by capital shifting to this so-called gig economy filled with algorithmic bosses and supposed tech innovation. This all primarily serves to make the rich richer while creating a new form of underclass servant who works in isolation both from the boss and the consumer.

Communities

Over in Arizona, Attorney General Kris Mayes is suing a little-know company called RealPage and nine corporate landlords. She’s accusing them of illegally conspiring to price-fix rentals. What is RealPage, you might ask. It’s a multinational corporation that provides property management software to owners in the rental industry. One usage of their software, in addition to allowing for illegal conspiracies to raise rents, is that it helps landlords see how they can still increase their profits while having more vacancies.

According to one opeator quoted in the AG’s filing, RealPage “totally turns the industry upside down” and allows landlords to leave more units vacant while still making more money. In short, they calculate how much landlords can raise the rent before too many people are no longer willing to pay. If prices go up 20%, and vacancies only go up 10%, hey you’re making more money. Never mind the people without housing.

One of the defendant landlords acknowledged that this pricing scheme has increased turnover rates by 15%. And AG Kris Mayes says that rents in Phoenix and Tucson are up about “at least 30%.” So even though more people are struggling to find housing thanks to greedy rental corporations and RealPage’s algorithms, landlords are raking it in. One corporate landlord alone acknowledges that they made an extra $10 million from the scheme.

It doesn’t take much to see how more and more people being forced out of their homes hurts neighborhoods, hurts the communities that form in apartment buildings or in towns as a whole. Some people have to leave entire cities or regions because they’ve grown too expensive. In some towns 40% of available listings are now AirBnbs, another tech company that markets itself as a side hustle but is, in reality, algorithmic exploitation. And it does algorithmic damage to industries and unions and workers and communities. When people are priced out they grow more isolated, more cut off, more alienated. People have to live farther from work, farther from friends and family, farther from the networks they know.

Choices 

There are choices we can make. There are ways we can move through this world that make us more connected, and less alone. I want to be on my phone less, I want to spend more time deliberately connecting with the people around me. I want to spend a lot of my time organizing, getting to know my neighbors, teaching, learning, interacting with people face-to-face. I can do those things, and our choices do matter. How we spend our time and energy matters.

But to be able to spend our time well, to have the ability to get to know our neighbors, to have the ability to connect with our coworkers, we need a degree of housing and job stability. These foundations allow us to connect with one another, they lay the groundwork for us to engage in relationship building, in friendship, in community. These facets of our lives create the playing field we live on in so many ways. Our work and our housing are the bedrock of financial stability, of the stability of our lives, and therefore the bedrock of our ability to be a part of networks and communities and relationships.

There are other factors. There are churches and organizations and families and more. But if we’re forced to move again and again, if we’re forced onto the streets or struggling to make money, participating in life becomes difficult. And when you multiply this problem onto a societal scale, we find a society where the masses are living more isolated and unstable lives, while the networks of the rich and powerful remain strong and steady, and grow stronger.

We need each other to be happy, and we also need each other to have any sort of power. And we do need power. We need the power to hold our communities together against the onslaught of profit-seeking enterprises that are more than willing to tear us apart from each other to make a buck. We also need the power to change how our economy works as a whole, to stem the tide that forces us into isolated jobs with algorithms for bosses, cut off from human beings. We need each other, often even more than we know. We need a world where we are able to connect with one another, where we are able to be in community and relationship with one another, where we’re not cut off, alienated, isolated from one another. We need that world in order to be less lonley, and less alone. That world must be built, and it must be built by us.