The gigification of...everything
This is a blog about philanthropy but today I'm thinking about the world of work. The economy. Jobs. Maybe it's because I woke to an unsolicited email from LinkedIn titled "Handling late career job loss." My first thought was "screw you." My second thought was for all the 000s of public servants (federal government employees) who also got the email.
Three hundred thousand - 300,000 - Black women have left the workforce in the U.S. in the last 3 months. How is that even possible? The public sector - government jobs - have long been a major pathway for professional success, for job access to those most marginalized. Black women and their families have thrived in public sector jobs. Who do you think the car dealer and the slumlord were targeting with their chainsaws and job eliminations?
I've also noticed the entrepreneurial response from some Black women to losing their jobs. Karen Attiah, an incredible reporter and a columnist for The Washington Post, has taken a class she used to teach at Columbia School of Journalism and turned it into a public offering. She's launched the first session of Resistance Summer School - which sold out with more than 500 people in a matter of minutes or hours at most.
Tirrea Billings, a former foundation employee, has launched a 4-week Transformation Syllabus, focused on philanthropists and their staff people. The course - plus her newsletter, Philanthropy Unfiltered, appears to be her next gig. (I don't know Ms. Billings, but I do read her newsletter).
The newsletter+ business model is having a moment. Reporters in particular, such as several who've left the Post, are giving it a good run. Just today, another one of the Post's reporters announced a new business he's building around his TikTok following.
The infrastructure for solo gigs is quite strong. All the social media platforms now cater to the "influencer" role - influencer being the aspirational title for what each of these individuals+social media+patreon+gofundme+cash app are trying to be. Of course, in the U.S. there is no social infrastructure for thriving as an individual - e.g. healthcare, retirement, disability insurance, union benefits all remain the purview of corporate employees.
And over there in corporate land, the AI fantasists have taken off their gloves. The CEO of NVIDIA, a company that makes software chips for AI systems, has announced that AI is changing (read: eliminating) all jobs. Mechanized, a startup in San Francisco says its purpose is to eliminate all white collar jobs. I see this as just the logical extension of this round on the hype cycle, BUT the fact that these kind of announcements aren't being met with pitchforks says something about those of us who are not building these systems. Why do we put up with this BS? That's a blog post for another day.
One part of the fascist coup currently underway in the U.S. is the way government leaders have gleefully engaged the tech fantasists who desire a fully-automated world. Helping Musk build a global satellite infrastructure, handing over health and social security data on all Americans to Palantir: the global surveillance state is being built in a public-private partnership the likes of which we've never seen. Such a system will be very difficult to break down precisely because it is infrastructural.
And, quite frankly, I don't see enough of my fellow humans resisting it. Most humans instead seem to be gleefully drinking the AI Kool-Aid* and handing over their data, their organization's data, their community's data to AI systems, tools, and products without nary a second thought. Those doing this with data on other people - especially if those people are the theoretical beneficiaries of a nonprofit's work - are negligent in a way that I've run out of words trying to describe.
People who have been fired still need incomes. That's obvious. I count myself among them. We are going to see an explosion of individuals "gigging" their expertise on foreign policy, health policy, journalism, peace and conflict resolution, trade policy, you name it. News organizations, universities, health providers - these may be the top of the batting order for gigification. Next up in the order? Nonprofits of all kinds, state government employees, environmental researchers and activists - I'd say they're next in line. In other words, it's not just taxi drivers, gig work is coming to you (you'll probably call it "consulting.")
In fact, I'd posit that we're about to see a major repositioning of expertise from INSIDE organizations to outside independent individuals or small teams over the next 18-24 months. Given the challenges facing new entrants to the job market, the next phase after the expertise exodus might be the creation of lots of small shops with one or two senior people and one or two people just beginning their careers. Some of these will be able to grow and support more people, but not many.
These shifts are important for philanthropists and nonprofits to understand. The shifts will make glaringly visible the lack of social infrastructure. They will create whole new approaches to education, new phases in careers, require new types of skilling, shift where, how, and by whom work gets done. They will make it harder to hold remaining institutions - both public and private - accountable. More and more of the real work of change will move outside organizational walls - leaving foundations ever further from the action as they retain their focus on tax-code approved organizational forms.
Foundation philanthropy is not likely to be on the front line of any of these shifts, and informed philanthropies may be working to remedy some of the easily predicted harms of this transition. In the meantime, it would behoove foundations and philanthropists to think hard about how the world of work works now, not just how it used to.
*I know that reference dates me, does it mean anything still?