I think people have been raising the fundamental moral hazards, lack of business viability and externality problems of gig economy / “marketplace” startups for a long time. But braindead rich people who want to believe in unicorns still pour money into saccharine VC fake shit, giving people of deplorable moral status huge piles of cash, sociopathic ego-stroking soap boxes to stand on, and every incentive to pursue regulatory capture strategies as temporary props to lever up an IPO and foist the inevitable market correction losses onto unwitting regular people who come to own toxic business stocks through dark patterns in their retirement plans with “target date” mixes and automatic adjustments hard to opt out of.
At some level you have to be angry at consumers who use and defend these businesses, and be angry at employees who agree to work for them and smugly believe it’s all untouchable becuz tech.
If you are an engineer for Airbnb, Bird, Uber, Lyft, etc., you are the problem.
You have to be responsible for the business model of the jobs you take. What is the value proposition? Not just internal to the company, but to the external world.
Until rank and file engineers start saying no to these jobs, nothing is going to get better. We have to say no to horrible working conditions like open plan offices, braindead infantilizing office spaces where video games and catered lunches matter more than basic health benefits, severance pay, and work life balance.
It’s not going to get better until we just refuse to participate in these sham businesses and we stop glorifying some manifest destiny founder trope as if it’s worthy of admiration or good for the world.