Taking a byte out of new 'gig economy'

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SILICON VALLEY, CA. – There's an old axiom that says, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." Since the first Europeans (with apologies to the Vikings) sailed across the Atlantic on the Mayflower, the notion that hard work, sweat, toil and an industrious nature are the guarantors of a better future has been both a touchtone and a Rosetta Stone. It's called "The Puritan Work Ethic."

In 2018, it's high time for the Puritans to meet Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the "Pirates of Silicon Valley" running Google and Facebook – for these archetype business elites have radically transformed how Americans work. It's called the "Gig Economy."

What does that entail?

Well, to begin, it means a "career" driving a car for Lyft or Uber. Yes, we all know these (for lack of a better term) "disposable" employees lack long-term job security, benefits, retirement and other social netting one might find in Germany or Sweden. But they do have a way to pay the rent. And that's a good thing because 50 percent of all the jobs that exist today won't exist by 2030 because of artificial intelligence and robotics. People are more than thankful for their small "gigs" in the United States, where 100 million people are either unemployed or underemployed.

The prospect of driving long term for Uber looks to be somewhat rosier now since we can exhale concerning the "self-driving car" mania. With the recent, tragic crash near Mill Avenue in Tempe, Arizona (where this journalist lived while a student at Arizona State University), those who have analyzed LIDAR and full-stack engineering understand A.I. and robotics can't fully replace human drivers. This is because the "self-driving" car's brain can't differentiate between the plastic bag blowing in the wind and a cinderblock from a construction site. This type of "tech mania" is indicative of a world where common sense is often replaced by a fascination with gadgets.

We have come to understand that science is a modern quasi-religion whose daily miracles are commonplace. As Americans, we are proud of our technology and the advancements we've brought to the world. Television, radio, space travel, medicine, agriculture and, yes, the internet.

Yet we often feel disconnected from the Earth, the soil, water, air, forests, farms and nature as a whole. We extract resources. We turn them into useful products. Many of these products clog our oceans in the form of plastic blobs, so large in fact, that the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" is now three times larger than the nation of France. There's even plastic washing up on shore in Antarctica.

Trying to survive in the gig economy is no easy task. Gone are the good old days when you worked at IBM for 40 years and retired with a new gold watch. Car loans, title loans, part-time work, juggling multiple part-time jobs, life-long unemployment, pawn shops and begging on street corners are all sadly a part of "the new normal."

How will we live, work and spend in the future? The gig economy is no stranger to the merger of economics, finance and technology. One example is "MoxyOne SPEND tokens," which, according to the website, "will be used for individual and corresponding transaction fees. Practically, SPEND token holders will be able to withdraw fiat from ATMs around the world, and perform various transactions like electronic purchases using the MoxyOne wallet."

We are told that we should "expect to have the latest optimized features of the industry, more precisely MoxyAI [whose] primary focus is to help you get the ideal value out of the tokens in your account's wallet. By optimizing your spending at the time of the payment, the AI chooses from your wallet, the ones that perform best, for conversion at the highest value possible."

A.I. will, no doubt, influence how we shop and spend money in the coming decades. Yet, in terms of the larger picture, how do we, living in postmodern Silicon Valley, reconcile the new "gig economy" with the stable days of the IBM retiree? More than 80 percent of American college graduates return home to live with their parents upon graduation without a job. Burdened with debt, this number will definitely rise in the foreseeable future.

Clearly, we've reached a breaking point where the "safe spaces" of the social-justice warriors on campus cannot produce anything of value for the society other than creating professional victims. Can college graduates with no real job skills work at Oracle and Apple? We've had a stock bubble, a real-estate bubble, a tech bubble and a hide-out-at-university bubble. The bursting of these bubbles is never easy to stomach for the average consumer. Yet they do bring us back to reality. What is reality trying to tell us beyond the fact that data is the new petroleum?

This is truly a salient and teachable moment. Looking back at what we broadly consider to be the "American Old West," those who came here – from nations as diverse as Ireland and China – did so merely for the chance to make a better life. This notion, in terms of its broad strategic architecture, was not unlike the journey of the Puritans. Beyond that, the "American Old West" was not considered to be a "nation-state" or group of states by the pioneers traveling through the wilderness. Think of the Donner Party. Think of Lewis and Clark exploring the Louisiana Purchase.

Rather, the freed slaves, Chinese coolies, Irish and others building the transcontinental railroad from Iowa to Sacramento usually thought of themselves as simply trying to find a piece of the proverbial pie. "The West," in terms of the American experience of the time, was not viewed in the same way as Europeans thought of France, Spain or Holland. "The Old West" was what you could make of it on your own. And that rugged individualism led to the taming of the frontier.

Even during the Great Depression of the 1930s, California was doing comparatively well. This was because the "hard money," the gold and silver of the 1849er gold rush bonanza, was still somehow housed in the collective unconscious. California did not invest its future on stock and real-estate speculation, meaning paper assets that could easily wither and die. When Wall Street went belly up in 1929, California was not brought down by that particular bubble. California had oil, farming, shipping, tourism, beaches, the beginnings of Hollywood and other assets to ride out the storm.

History is speaking to us through the uncertainties of the "Gig Economy." As things fall apart, we'll need to help one another. We can start by talking with our fellow citizens instead of burying our heads in our iPhones. We need to plan for the storms ahead. Fiat money is, after all, only paper. Gold, silver, land, houses, cattle, food, tools – these are all valuable in their own way. Do you want to tie your personal fortune to Wall Street? Can you be sure that nuclear war, an EMP-based cosmic event like a solar flare or gamma ray burst, or some other natural or man-made disaster won't take down the internet for weeks, months or even years?

Here in Silicon Valley, there's a joke that the day may be coming when Bill Gates is forced to design a new Windows program so he can jump out of it. With that in mind, let us all embrace the future, along with the uncertainties of the new gig economy, with the same courage as the pioneers of the Old West. They made it. So too shall we.