Fauxciologist

...if young people are given the choice between unbelief and a faith that puts a light God gloss on the same consumerism and materialism that everybody else lives with, then who can blame young people for rejecting it?

The 1960s movements were born out of excess, a generation with too much time and certainty; our era, by contrast, is defined by scarcity, how unlikely it is that we’ll come close to achieving those handed-down dreams in the first place. Better, probably, to start reaching elsewhere—if we don’t, we too might win only similar cultural victories, and find instead of a more sustainable adult life only a shallow, push-button version of the sharing economy, a version dictated by some of the only people left in America who don’t even have these problems.

Love is the only impetus that is sufficiently overwhelming to force us to leave the comfortable shelter of our well-armed individuality, shed the impregnable shell of self-sufficiency, and crawl out nakedly into the danger zone beyond, the melting pot where individuality is purified into personhood.

Like it or not, employment in the United States looks different than it did 50 years ago--at least 30% of the workforce are independent contractors, the ratio of part-time workers to full-time workers is still higher than before the recession, and there are 2.87 million temporary workers, a record number.

This rising legal retribution is a huge threat to the gig economy. Not being responsible for employees’ taxes and benefits allows companies like Handy to operate with 20% to 30% less in labor costs than the incumbent competition, leading to eye-popping numbers like Uber’s $40 billion valuation or Instacart’s latest $220 million round of funding. Lose this workforce structure—either by a wave of class-action lawsuits, intervention by regulators, or through the collective action of disgruntled workers—and you lose the gig economy.

The rise of these “nerds,” who don’t commute to an office but earn $100 to $150 an hour from companies such as Microsoft and American Apparel, tells an important story about where the labor market and the economy are headed. For one, companies can now bypass costs associated with hiring full-time employees or paying the overhead of big consulting firms, says John Shegerian, president of the recycling giant Electronic Recyclers, which used HourlyNerd to find a Harvard MBA to write a business plan for a new project.

It was there, in the occupied rotunda, that Americans would catch their first, fleeting glimpse of the intergenerational alliance that the 99 Percent Movement convened: older, unionized workers side by side downwardly mobile Millennials. In the age of austerity, both social strata were being asked to bear the cost of a crisis they had had no hand in creating. And both strata were facing the prospect of losing the social rights and living standards that earlier generations had taken for granted.