Month: September 2020

Just over a year ago, in The Clutch Class (Aug 29, 2019), I argued that within the historical relationship between capital and labor, gigworkers would be considered scabs, and that this is a position we should unapologetically own:

The defining characteristic of a scab is striking a self-interested independent bargain with the capital-owning/managing/leading class that breaks from any larger collectively bargained deal…

So yes, to a 1910s union firebrand, we are no better than traitorous scabs.

This defining characteristic of scabs is also the defining feature of the gig-worker class. We defect from collective actions and trade off higher security, better benefits, and lower personal overheads, for two things…

1. More personalized working conditions built around desiderata that may not be shared by any larger group

2. Continuous, independent maneuvering capability where aligning interests with a group might require too much lock-step marching, or worse, voluntary social immobility

In that post, I proposed that we should consider ourselves a clutch class, as in both the mechanism and in the sports jargon sense.

In that post, I also took note of a piece of legislation that was at the time making its way through the California legislative process: AB 5, which sought to reclassify vast swathes of the gig economy as part of the paycheck economy, subject to minimum wage laws, benefits expectations, and crucially scheduled hours.

The bill, as you probably know if you follow these things, passed. But the battle did not end there. We’re now heading into another crucial battle: over Prop 22, which seeks to exempt rideshare companies from AB 5.

From AB 5 to Prop 22

AB 5 passed in 2019. I don’t have mixed feelings about this. It was a decisive step backwards from the brave new future of the gig economy. It was an utterly cynical and regressive piece of legislation that sought to manipulate sentiment against large corporations to deny access to flexwork to a large class of people, in order to secure traditional paycheck employment for a much smaller class.

Instead of solving the genuine new problems created by the new economic sector, it sought to transform the new problems into old ones that the political class knows how to profitably keep alive.

There is no great mystery as to why traditional labor politicians would push this kind of legislation: it is better to have 10 people beholden to you for a paycheck job than for 100 people to have the option to work in a flexible way without being politically beholden to any source of political patronage. This kind of calculus is the foundation of what is known as clientelism. It is a kind of politics that is nearly 200 years old. It is the kind of politics practiced by Donald Trump, except in the case of AB 5, it comes from the old-school Left.

Around this time last year, I recall watching a television interview with one of the politicians supporting the bill. She was saying something like “you shouldn’t have to work more than one full-time job to make a living.”

The statement was revealing. Those who support legislation like AB 5 believe in a one-person-one-job world. Because it is a world they know how to control politically.

This is not necessarily a bad-faith agenda. There are laudable political efforts that are primarily focused on workers making so little at a full-time job they have to either take a second job, or access safety net benefits, just to make ends meet. The best-faith reading of AB 5 is that it is in the spirit of other regulations designed to prevent exploitative employers from essentially externalizing part of their labor costs to the state, effectively turning the existence of a safety net into a business subsidy for themselves.

This problem is one that should be solved.

Minimum-wage laws, which work as temporary palliatives while automation drives matters towards a more permanent resolution, are a painful but acceptable distortion to the labor market that do exactly that (I’m in favor of minimum wage laws, but not for the usual humanitarian reasons).

AB 5 was not about solving that class of hidden-business-subsidy problems. It was about trying to grow the set of people who are vulnerable to that problem. It was about creating and capturing a new class of worker within traditional clientelistic labor power models. It was about preserving a world where “worker” is a legible category, and every individual has a single worker identity that can fit neatly into a single political representation, as a client beholden to a particular political patron.

Politics is like business that way: like Drucker said, it’s about creating a customer.

The idea of someone who works more than one job out of choice. Who is a small-scale, capitalist who owns at least a small piece of the means of production (a laptop, a car, a guitar), who wants to play with risk-and-return decisions, whether they involve record deals, viral blog posts, or pricing surges on rideshare, is deeply threatening to how traditional labor politicians build and exploit a base of political power.

After AB 5 passed, there was widespread general criticism from many corners of the gig economy. Gig musicians suddenly had to worry about being able to work at all. Many publishing outlets stopped accepting freelance writing from California-based writers.

But the response from one group in particular set the agenda for the larger fight: rideshare and delivery companies.

Rideshare companies won a temporary reprieve from the courts to avoid complying with AB 5, and sponsored a new ballot initiative, Prop 22, that will be voted on in November. Prop 22 basically seeks to exempt rideshare and delivery companies from AB 5. The rideshare and delivery companies (Lyft, Uber, Doordash, Instacart, Postmates) have poured over $180 million into the initiative, which is a record.

Here’s the thing. However distasteful it might feel to support big platform companies pouring this much money into a political process, in this case, they’re on the right side of history. (So if you’re a California voter and inclined to take cues from a scabby neoliberal shill like me: Yes on 22).

Not because they’re the good guys, but because the politics behind AB 5 is even worse.

California vs. Rideshare

It was never a secret that AB 5 was aimed directly at the rideshare companies, and if Prop 22 passes, AB 5 will basically be hollowed out into uselessness.

For Lyft, Uber, Instacart, and others in the business of turning people with cars into micro-capitalist free-agent franchisees, AB 5 was obviously an existential threat, and equally obviously, they could not possibly comply with the law and continue operating.

How much of an existential threat?

In a previous, lower-stakes version of the battle, in Austin, TX, the rideshare companies left the city rather than operate under a much less severe regulatory threat (fingerprinting regulations motivated by a rider safety case). In that case, I could see the logic of the regulatory attempt, and was sympathetic to it. In the year or so that it took for Lyft and Uber to return to the city under conditions they could live with, several small local startups emerged as alternatives (I’m not sure how many of them are still around).

As these things go, reclassifying contractors as employees is about a million times more threatening than being required to fingerprint drivers. It is a big enough threat that it is likely worth giving up even a huge and attractive market like California.

It is, of course, really hard to root for the rideshare and delivery companies. They are the face of Big, Evil, Platform Capitalism right now. But for years, it’s been equally obvious what’s actually a good way to rein in their excesses. Let’s call it the Actual Plan™ to clean up the dirty business of rideshare and delivery:

Actual Plan™

1. Clean up the shady capitalization that is distorting the prices of rides/deliveries

2. Compensate drivers for the value of the data they generate

3. Make the dispatching algorithms auditable and/or open source

4. Create room for drivers to differentiate and earn a premium

5. Give drivers a piece of the equity upside of the trend towards driverlessness

If we could do this, the price of rides/deliveries would likely go up, demand would go down somewhat, and the market will find its natural equilibrium. There would be fewer drivers, but they’d probably make more. But it wouldn’t be the sort of artificial restriction of supply that would be achieved by artificially forcing paycheck employment on a natural flexwork sector, or worse, something like the old taxicab medallion scheme.

There are of course, many problems faced by rideshare drivers as a consequence of being in the gig economy that are not the fault or problem of the platform corporations. The big one in the US of course, is of course health insurance, which (no brainer) should continue to be available through means that are not linked to employment, let alone traditional paycheck employment.

Obviously, the rideshare companies would fight the Actual Plan™ too, and if that battle took shape, I’d definitely be on the other side from them. Right now, there are no serious groups fighting for anything resembling the Actual Plan,™ but that doesn’t mean we should back the wrong plan because the right one isn’t being backed.

The Actual Plan™ aligns with the natural structure of the gig economy, represents the interests of all current drivers (not just the ones who want to level up to a paycheck job), and crucially, all potential drivers, for whom possibly driving rideshare is an option in reserve for when they need to patch over a rough time. It also turns the rideshare sector into a positive example of expanding the power and quality of the gig economy, rather than giving it a bad name and hanging it like a dog.

And this isn’t just a matter for people working in the rideshare or delivery businesses. Versions of these problems exist in all parts of the gig economy, and versions of the Actual Plan™ are already really in some parts. For example, on the high-end consulting front, where things are much better, we already “own the data” from our work to the extent that it’s intellectual property we generate (such as workshop materials or general business ideas) that does not rely on proprietary data client data.

There’s no reason that kind of power should not be enjoyed by drivers in the rideshare sector.

The Outlook

Patching over a rough time with gig economy income, incidentally, is what a lot of people are doing right now thanks to Covid19 (though more on the delivery end than the rideshare end). So this is a particularly fraught time for this issue to be coming to a head.

So what’s the outlook here?

I have no idea whether Prop 22 will pass or not, but the two futures that loom are clear: either it passes and rideshare/delivery companies stay in California, or it fails, and they leave rather than subject themselves to AB 5, throwing thousands of people out of work in the middle of a pandemic. The latter outcome is drastic enough that as in the case of the Austin exit, I imagine a return would be brokered around some sort of compromise.

Whatever the current structural problems of the sector, the basic idea of the sector itself is here to stay. We will not be giving up the convenience of ordering rides or food/grocery deliveries through apps. It is a genuinely technological advance over people using phones to call inefficient human-powered dispatching layers that are obviously better handled by algorithms.

The way the service is provisioned though, is much more fragile.

Regressive legislation like AB 5 could easily spread around the world, making the app-based service sector something like the regulatory-captured medallion-based cab sector it replaced.

Or, the current structure could continue, creating a large flexwork economy.

This doesn’t mean things will be perfect. These services are natural oligopolies for now. Until we invent a truly decentralized (eg. blockchain-based) way to provision them, and/or full autonomy arrives, there’s always going to be 2-3 branded service platforms offering rides and deliveries in every local market.

And of course, the serious capital-structure and price distortion problems of the industry will remain, and need to be gradually sorted out. Some now-familiar big names might go bankrupt, while this sorting out happens. But whatever the ultimate set of winners, it will likely still be oligopolist. Drivers will still be the relatively weaker party, even if they are not so weak that clientelistic political patronage is the right solution.

This means all the cronyist problems that come with oligopolies, the asymmetry in relations between the platforms and drivers, and the continuing struggle around the Actual Plan™ will continue for the forseeable future.

But like I said, that’s the worthwhile fight. The one worth fighting.

Unevenly Distributed Freedom

Though I think AB 5 is cynical political opportunism, there is a very real problem here. One traditional labor politicians are exploiting rather than actually solving.

The gig economy is creating a genuinely new class of worker-consumer-citizen with genuinely new kinds of representational needs, calling for a genuinely new kind of politician. Unfortunately, though it is big and growing, it is still too small to be worth cultivating. If you have political ambitions, trying to genuinely represent gig workers who want to be gig workers is not a smart career move.

Unlike most valuable political constituencies, we are not legible, concentrated, and easy to target and activate for political purposes. We also do not have a sufficiently cohesive and predictable set of political attitudes or interests. Our interests cannot be summarized in a single, simple political message that a politician could ride to power.

But this will not always be the case, and I hope savvy young political aspirants see that.

We free agents are not labor, but we’re not full-blown capitalists either. Owning a car (even debt-free) or laptop is nothing like owning a big share of a platform company. But the balance is swinging in our favor with every passing year.

We free agents are not pure producers, nor are we pure consumers. We are prosumers who “consume” work at our discretion, in a way that combines variety, risk-taking, and opportunism. An environment full of flexwork potential is critical for us. But at the same time, we do require some of the protections and safety nets that traditionally, labor movements have sought to win for their constituencies.

There are political representation needs here that are just close enough to old labor that we are vulnerable to capture by them if we don’t find our own political representatives.

One way to understand our economic and political condition, and why our interests keep running up against those of traditionally organized labor, is to consider the classic leftist slogan, “None of us is free until all of us are free.”

The slogan comes from Marxist theory, and can be roughly understood as the philosophical point (entirely valid) that patterns of structural oppression trap the oppressors as much as they to do the oppressed. That the freedom apparently enjoyed by the oppressor or capital-owning class is illusory, and that true freedom won’t exist until it exists for everybody, in the worker’s paradise to come. In practice, of course, the slogan serves to consolidate class solidarity within the traditional labor class, rather than underwrite any sort of universal philosophical debate about the psychology of oppression and the futures of all classes.

The pragmatic alternative to that slogan is the much less catchy, “Some of us are somewhat free, somewhat sooner than everybody else, and that’s probably a good thing up to a point for the universal cause of freedom.”

The future of freedom, with apologies to William Gibson, is unevenly distributed, and the scabby clutch class is creating it.

I am in the gig economy, I enjoy no employment based benefits like a minimum wage, paid sick leave, or unemployment/disability insurance. Yet I don’t feel oppressed. The freedom I enjoy feels very real, even if it is not perfect or complete or universally entangled with freedom for everybody.

Of course, as a well-paid management consultant, my situation is vastly different from those who rely on lower-valued work like driving or deliveries, but I’ve spent enough panicked months wondering how to get through lean patches, and deal with delayed invoices, with rent coming due, that I do in fact know what that’s like.

And cliched and Tom-Friedmanesque though the move may be, I’ve talked to enough rideshare drivers who clearly actually enjoyed their flexibility to know that this class is not a figment of my imagination.

The attempt, by traditional labor ideologues, to pretend that the freedom of the gig economy is some sort of false consciousness, or that everybody in it is really actually yearning for the security of a paycheck job and is being coerced by Evil Corporations to pretend otherwise, is gaslighting pure and simple.

So it is probably time for the gig economy to get real political representation, rather than expecting old labor to speak for us honestly. And I for one am happy to get behind any visionary young politicians with both the imagination and boldness to fight for the future rather than for the past.

<< Staying With the Questions | Yakverse Index | Yakverse: Endgame

This is the first of the two-part finale of the Yakverse Chronicles.

The call from Agent Guy Lestrode of the FBI G-Crimes division came at 3 in the morning, waking me from a particularly vivid apocalyptic corona dream.

“This is Lestrode. Agent Jopp needs you at a crime scene right away. Get dressed. I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes. Wear a mask.”

“Wait, what…where? What time is it…it’s three in the morning!”

“I don’t know anything either. I’m bringing coffee. I guess we’ll both find out together.”

Fifteen minutes later, I was climbing into Lestrode’s car. He grinned at me through a KN-95 mask, and offered me a cup of gas-station coffee and an alcohol wipe.

“I already finished mine. Feel free to take off your mask and drink yours while we drive. We can drive with the windows down. ”

“Where are we going?”

“It’s about twenty minutes away, up in the hills somewhere.”

We drove in silence. I drained the tepid coffee in a few large gulps, and put my mask back on. Lestrode rolled the windows back up.

The route seemed oddly familiar.

“I feel like I’ve driven this way recently.”

“Yeah? Well, we’re almost there. Just one more right up there.”

I figured out why the route looked familiar just as Lestrode made the last turn. It was the street with the mansion where Gao, Anscombe, and I had met up with Khan back in early March, just as the pandemic was starting.

It couldn’t be a coincidence. Could it?

***

I had my answer a couple of minutes later. Lestrode turned into the driveway of the exact same mansion where we’d had our meeting. A police cruiser and two unmarked vehicles were parked along the semicircular driveway.

“Shit, I’ve been here before. Back in March.”

It wasn’t a coincidence. What was going on? I hadn’t heard from Khan in months.

Agent Jane Jopp, the senior partner of the Jopp-Lestrode G-Crimes duo, met us at the front door.

“Rao says he’s been here before,” Lestrode volunteered.

Jopp didn’t seem surprised. “He does, does he? This way, both of you. I have to warn you, it’s not pretty.”

The cop at the front door held it open for us and nodded at Lestrode. We walked through the anteroom, past the dining room, past the skullduggery room where we’d had our meeting in March, down a long hallway, and into a large conference room.

Six bodies lay slumped in their chairs around one end of the long, rectangular conference table. Phones, tablets, papers, and half-empty wine glasses were on the table in front of each of them. Some had been knocked over. There were two wine bottles on the sideboard, one empty, one half full.

There was no mistaking the tall, powerfully built body slumped back in the chair at the head of the table, the head thrown back at an awkward angle.

It was Khan.

Ulysses Alexander Khan. Legendary former McKinsey engagement manager. Scholar, but no gentleman, of consulting.

“CSI is on its way, but looks like a mass poisoning. Probably the wine. We haven’t yet id’ed any of them. You recognize any of them?”

I nodded, and said carefully, “That’s Khan, the tall guy… Ulysses Alexander Khan… we’ve worked together a bit. I was here in March. How did you make the connection to me?”

“We found three packages in the anteroom addressed to you, your friend Gao, and somebody named Arnold…”

“…Arnie Anscombe?”

“Correct. So you know him?”

“The three of us were… exploring a new gig with Khan. Nothing’s panned out yet. Pandemic and all. But why is G-Crimes here in the first place?”

A new voice spoke from behind us, “That would be my doing. Hello again Mr. Rao.”

I turned around. It was Agent Q. I still didn’t know his name, or which three-letter agency he worked for.

“Agent Q! Somehow I’m not surprised to see you here. Does this have something to do with the counterfeit yak coins thing you’ve been investigating?”

“Got it in one. Yes. We got wind of Khan in connection to some Covid-vaccine deals in Russia where a bunch of the fake coins turned up, and we’ve been watching him for the last month. We had this place flagged, so we got the alert when the butler called 911.”

Jopp said, “There was no other staff around last night besides the butler. He served the wine and left them to their meeting around midnight. When he came back to check half an hour later, they were all dead. Says he heard nothing.”

Agent Q said, “This mansion belongs to a Russian oligarch friend of Mr. Khan here. He was part of an organization we’re watching, it’s called The Club… heard of it?”

I opened my mouth to answer, then shut it again. This was starting to look dicey for me. Fortunately, I was saved by the bell. The cop from the front door popped his head into the conference room.

“The G-Crimes search team is here. CSI’s five minutes away.”

Jopp said, “I’ll get them started searching the grounds. Lestrode, you’re with me. Rao, look around, see if you can spot anything else or if you recognize any of the others. Don’t touch anything.”

Agent Q’s phone rang.

“I need to take this, excuse me.”

He stepped out into the hallway, leaving me alone in the conference room with the bodies.

I looked at the others. Four of them I didn’t recognize: all middle-aged men. Two white, one black, one Asian, probably Chinese. All four had a certain air about them that seemed familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

The fifth was a woman. An older woman, in a long, flowing dress, slumped face down on the table. I went around the table to try and get a better look at her face.

It was then that I recognized her. It was my long-time mentor, The Ancient One. Veteran indie. Trickster. Rider of helicopters. Owner of one of the last known strategometers.

Her long sleeve was obscuring her wrist. Did I dare…?

I peeked quickly out into the hallway, it was empty. I scanned the ceiling. No obvious cameras.

I took out my pen, and carefully moved her left sleeve back. The strategometer was on her wrist.

I hesitated for a second, then made up my mind. Carefully, but quickly, I took it off her wrist and pocketed it.

In my defense, there are only about a dozen strategometers left in the world, and if it vanished into the evidence lockers of the G-Crimes division, it would be lost to the indie world forever. Besides, tradition has it that strategometers aren’t exactly passed down from indie to indie, but sort of…. ritually stolen, shall we say? By tradition, you’re supposed to tell the person you’re stealing it from the time.

“I guess it was your time, Ancient One,” I whispered into her lifeless ear, and stepped back around the table, just as Agent Jopp returned.

***

“Well, we are searching the area, and Lestrode is questioning the butler and looking at the security footage. You got anything else for me, Rao?”

“I’ve met the woman a few times over the last decade…I don’t know her name, but everybody called her The Ancient One.”

“The Ancient One? What is this, some sort of LARP?”

I shrugged. “You meet some odd people in this line of work. She was well-connected. Top-tier indie. Involved in lot of deals in Asia and Europe. Secretive. Flew around in helicopters. Expect-me-when-you-see-me sort of person.”

“What about the other four men?”

I frowned, “I don’t recognize them, but there’s something familiar…”

Then it hit me.

“Bainies! They’re Bainies. I didn’t recognize them without their hoods and cloaks, but that haircut is unmistakeable. Plus the fact that they’re getting haircuts during Covid. But they’re not wearing their shareholder-value-maximizer bracelets, so I’m guessing they’re ex-Bainies.”

“We’ll follow up on that. So we’ve got an ex-McKinsey guy, a bunch of ex-Bainies, and a mystery indie consultant who called herself The Ancient One? Great.”

Footsteps sounded in the hallway.

“That must be CSI. Let’s head over to the library. Q said he’d meet us there.”

***

Lestrode was just wrapping up with the butler when we entered the library. I recognized him. It was the same butler who had let us in back in March. He didn’t seem to recognize me.

“Hang around for a bit, I may want to talk to you some more,” Lestrode told him, as he left the library.

Jopp and I settled into armchairs.

“Get anything from the butler?”

“He swears he personally cut the foil and uncorked the bottles and cleaned the glasses before the meeting. Says he didn’t see anyone else besides the people at the meeting.”

“Can he identify the others?”

“No, but he says the group has met here a few times since June. And that Khan once referred the group as the Potsdam group.”

Jopp frowned. “Potsdam? As in the failed post World War 2 conference that started the Cold War?”

Lestrode said, “I did get something off the security cameras though. Took a picture of the screen with my phone, we’ll get the files later. But it’s pretty clear. This was a few minutes after midnight.”

He handed Jopp his phone. Jopp frowned, then looked at me, hesitated, then handed me the phone.

“Anyone you know?”

It was a picture of a picture, but perfectly clear. My hands went slightly clammy.

It was a face I had only seen once a decade ago. A face I wasn’t sure was real. The face of the Bhutanese monk who had given me my first two yak coins a decade ago, when I was first getting started as an indie consultant. He was looking straight up at what must have been the front-door camera, with a serene expression. He was dressed in a western-style suit, but it was him alright. You don’t forget people who do magic disappearing acts in front of your eyes.

I frowned and squinted, thinking furiously. How much should I share? Just how entangled was I already, in every aspect of this mess?

“Not sure. I don’t think so. Didn’t the butler say nobody else came in or out?”

Lestrode said, “Maybe one of the meeting attendees let him in.”

Jopp said, “Looks Thai. Or Burmese maybe.”

“Bhutanese,” said a voice. Agent Q had joined the conversation unnoticed. He had an unsettling way of doing.

He was carrying a small plastic crate, with a bunch of packages and boxes inside it. He put it down on the floor and stretched a hand out towards me. I handed him Lestrode’s phone.

“Is that the package addressed to me on the top of the crate there?” I asked.

“Yes, and several other very interesting things I found in the skullduggery room. Sorry, but you’re going to have to wait a while for your package Mr. Rao.”

Jopp interrupted, “Bhutanese? You don’t seem to be guessing.”

Agent Q was looking at the phone and nodding knowingly.

“I’m not. Our friend here has been seen all over the world in the last decade, but especially in the last few years. Comes and goes. Has an uncanny way of being somehow around when the murkiest deals are going down. We call him the monk. The only thing we’ve been able to figure out about him is that he’s Bhutanese.”

“What is he, some sort of deal-maker? PLA agent?”

“We thought he was a PLA agent too initially, but it doesn’t seem likely. He never seems to be actually involved in any deals. And he’s definitely not one of my… ahh… Chinese peers, look at how he’s staring at the camera. But if anything big is going down in the global gig economy, I’ve come to expect him at the scene. Doesn’t bother to hide his presence, and there’s always a few people who recall seeing him or even speaking with him. But we can never find him afterwards either. We think he’s from the Order.”

Lestrode said, “You mean the Order of the Yak? I thought that didn’t exist anymore?”

Agent Q shrugged. “Well, let’s just say the yak… motif… seems to show up wherever the monk shows up.”

He turned towards me. “Maybe Mr. Rao can help us out here. Weren’t you in Bhutan a few years ago Mr. Rao? I seem to recall you writing about that in your newsletter? And I hear you’re involved with a new yak organization….”

“That’s the Yak Collective! Nothing to do with any of this! We just took some naming inspiration from the Order, which of course is just ancient history. And you all know my newsletter is half fiction! Surely you don’t believe all that crap about actual yaks and vanishing monks!”

“But you really were in Bhutan in 2011 weren’t you? Are you sure you haven’t seen this man before?”

He thrust the phone towards me again. A subtle change had come over his face. Jopp and Lestrode were looking at me strangely as well.

Suddenly, I realized I was being interrogated. And not too subtly either.

“I swear I haven’t seen him. Why would I hide it if I had?”

“I don’t know. But on a different topic, we were talking about The Club earlier when we were interrupted. What about that? Khan ever talk to you about that?”

I decided it was time to show more of my cards. A record of cooperation would be good if this thing went sideways.

“Yes,” I replied. “In fact that’s what Khan was trying to get us hooked up with. He said the Club was a group of high-net worth individuals who wanted to revive the Order of the Yak, and would support us doing so. That they’d send gigs our way.”

“Hmm, did he say why? Or what they wanted?”

“No. Everything fell apart with Covid. We haven’t heard much from him since the initial meeting in March.”

“Have you done any work for the Club? Any paid gigs?”

“Not that I know of,” I said truthfully. “Of course I can’t tell if they had a hand in lining up any of my recent gigs, but I don’t think so.”

“What about your friends, Gao and Anscombe?”

“You’d have to ask them, but I don’t think so.”

“We will. What do you think might be in these packages Khan was going to mail you?”

“I honestly don’t have the faintest idea. You’ll have to open them and look.”

Agent Q paused and looked at me appraisingly, then seemed to come to a decision. He sat down in an armchair and pulled the crate towards him.

“Quite a few things here of interest. Besides the unmailed packages we have here a large box of fake yak coins,” he pulled it out, set it on the coffee table, and threw the lid back. It was, as he said, a pile of yak coins. I picked one up and examined it.

“Yeah, these are fake,” I said, and put it back.

Agent Q looked at me but said nothing, then reached back into the crate and pulled out a smaller box.

“…and more interestingly, this smaller case of what appear to be real ones.”

I was eager to continue cooperating where it couldn’t hurt.

“Yeah, I recognize that second box. He gave the three of us coins from it back in March. They were genuine.”

He looked at me, and again said nothing.

“Finally,” he said, pulling out a thin folder, “We have here, a folder labeled Potsdam.”

Lestrode spoke up, “The butler said this group was called the Potsdam group. What’s in the folder? Is the Potsdam group the Club?”

“Perhaps. There is just a single sheet of paper with a list of names and 32-digit hexadecimal numbers in this folder. Encrypted identifiers I’m guessing. We can have the cryptanalysis team take a crack at it.”

I decided to brazen it out. I was either a suspect, or part of the team. There was only one way to find out.

“Is my name on it? Khan never mentioned this Potsdam thing to me.”

Agent Q looked up at me, “These look like code names. Greek gods. Prometheus, Zeus… mean anything to you?”

I shook my head.

Lestrode looked at me and smiled cheerfully. Maybe I wasn’t a suspect after all.

Jopp looked at me and nodded, in a not-unfriendly way, and nutshelled the situation.

“Well, it looks like we have a lot to go on. Six bodies, a clear photo of this monk character. This Potsdam list, fake and real yak coins… and I am guessing CSI will be able to get us something once they run a tox screen on the wine and look at all the papers and phones in the room.”

Agent Q looked at her with an undecipherable look. “I wonder…” he said.

Before Jopp could continue with her overview of the mise en scene, there was an interruption. One of the CSI techs walked in.

“We’re still photographing everything, and we’ll get the stuff to the lab as soon as we can, but we thought you’d want to see this now. We found these coins, one clenched in each of the victims’ right fists.”

He placed a small evidence bag containing 6 antique looking coins on the coffee table, and stepped back. We all looked at each other, then leaned in to peer at the bag.

They were yak coins, but unlike any I’d seen before, real or fake, and quite a bit larger. Each was a bimetallic disc in the form of a yin-yang. Except, instead of a circle, each of the fish-like halves had the head of a yak for an eye.

I looked up to find Agent Q staring at me.

“Looks like these are new to you as well, Mr. Rao,” he said.

He picked up the bag and handed it back to the CSI tech. “Put a rush on these, would you?”

The tech nodded and headed out of the room. Agent Q stood up, but the boxes back into the crate, and picked it up.

“Well, I’d better get to work on these. You’ll let me know if you find anything else Jane?”

Jopp nodded, “I guess we’ll be done here pretty soon as well.”

Agent Q walked to the door, then paused, and turned around to look at me.

“And Mr. Rao….”

“Yes?”

“Don’t leave town for the next few weeks.”

To be continued

The great irony of the gig economy is that free agents have some of the most rigidly prescribed roles imaginable in industrial-style corporate machines. Late-capitalist corporations are some of the most machine-like organizations ever seen in history.

The classic image of Charlie Chaplin caught in a gear train (from Modern Times) is perhaps a better visual metaphor for under-the-API jobs like driving for Uber or delivering for Instacart than it is for actual factory jobs. The addition of software makes the underlying industrial machines more machine-like, not less.

But even when you don’t have an app as your boss, providing you with precise micromanagement cues and feedback to drive your work, it is surprisingly hard to get your mind free of the industrial cog-in-the-machine mindset.

You can take the cog out of the machine, but not the machine out of the cog.

And believe it or not, this is a good thing. There are aspects of coghood you want to preserve when you go free-agent, whether it is above or below the API.

If you’re smart, you want to be a free cog. You don’t want to fetishize complete freedom from structure.

The Upside of Coghood

The thing is, despite the pejorative and dehumanizing connotations, there are many excellent aspects to being a cog in a machine — and excellent for you, the worker, not just your boss, or evil capitalist owners.

To understand why, it is worth taking a moment to understand how gears actually work (cog is an alternative term for both a gear and a tooth on a gear).

Gears transmit torque from one shaft to another, via forces transmitted between the faces of interlocking teeth. Modern gears have what is known as an involute profile — the path traced out by the end of a taut string being unwound from a cylinder. Involute gears have the special property that a steady force is transmitted smoothly at the contact surface (gif from Wikimedia Commons):

Involute gears are the result of centuries of refinement and evolution in gear design. They are the reason why modern machines are efficient, low-noise, and low-vibration. Helical gears (which add an angle to the gear tooth edge), improve things even further.

With the right lubrication and bearing designs, modern gear trains can be nearly noiseless, highly efficient, and capable of generating and transmitting incredible speeds and forces.

If you’ve never watched a gear train in motion, it’s worth finding one and looking closely at it. There’s lots of fun gear videos on YouTube. There is an ASMR-like oddly satisfying quality to many of them.

Take a moment to reflect on the beauty of gear technology. Clever geometry produces a smooth, continuous, and efficient emergent system behavior out of fundamentally non-smooth and discrete individual behaviors. A single gear is a disc with a discrete arrangement of teeth around its rim, yet it can participate in the production of varied smooth movements.

For a paycheck employee at well-run business, the upsides of coghood are automatic, and don’t require much maturity or self-awareness to realize and appreciate. Being part of a smoothly functioning machine can be deeply satisfying, if it is the right machine for you. You are in deep synchronization with people you work with, smoothly handing off your work. Your current work also sets up your own future work, creating a satisfying path of habit refinement and growth for you.

As a free agent though, you have to work to recreate the benefits of coghood for yourself. The key to that is understanding follow through.

Follow Through

What makes an involute gear better than more primitive kinds is that it embodies better follow-through in its geometry. It disengages smoothly, setting up smooth engagement for the next tooth, without interruption or jerkiness in the work being transmitted to the next gear in the train.

This is follow through as in golf or tennis swings: a way of refining atomic actions so they flow better into bigger chains of actions, and set up your own next atomic actions better.

All long-term value is built from the follow-through aspects of atomic behaviors.

An example from my consulting work is writing up notes after meetings. It is one of the very few disciplined follow-through behaviors I’ve managed to develop and actually stick to over years.

During a meeting with a client, I just make take very brief notes in the form of key points and phrases. They are memory cues, not verbatim transcripts. Actually recording and transcribing is not just overkill, it actually works worse.

Afterwards, I write up more careful notes and send them to the client. Before the next meeting, I take a couple of minutes to review the last meeting’s notes (many of my clients do so as well). That’s it. Follow-through doesn’t have to be complex.

This single “involute profile” habit turns a staccato thread of thought and conversation, with lots of potential for inefficient rework/redundancy, into a smooth stream. Before I learned to do this consistently, meetings with clients were often frustrating. I felt like we were unnecessarily going over ground already covered, forgetting relevant things that were said in previous meetings, and even backsliding from good decisions to bad decisions on occasion.

Once I started my note-taking, all that changed. Meeting sequences began to feel like steady forward progress with very little backlash. Context-switching between clients got much more pleasant (particularly important on days when you have back-to-back meetings with entirely different clients, which I try to avoid, but sometimes happens).

Clients often don’t recognize the value of the notes initially. Superficially, it seems like make-work. But as the relationship develops, they realize that it’s the core of why sparring with an external consultant is valuable at all. Even if you never refer back to the notes, and your client never does either, the very fact of writing them up lends a smooth continuity to the conversation track, and a sense of accumulating insight and value. It is at the heart of the deliberate practice element in executive sparring.

The idea generalizes.

• If you do design, you should have follow through around how/where you save your design files after each session, and how you log the evolution of a piece of design.

• If you do contract programming, your disciplines around checking in and checking out code during work sessions, and your commit messages, are a big part of your follow through.

• If you conduct workshops, debriefs with participants, and reviewing your own “game tapes” when available, are part of follow through.

The basic idea is simple, but not reducible to a formula: identify the threads of repeating behaviors that make up your consulting practice, decompose them into repeating actions that are like gear teeth, and audit their follow-through structure. If the atomic behavior feels frustrating, chances are the frustration is where you need to focus, to discover better follow-through profiles.

Discover, not invent or design.

Invention and design tend to add artificial ritual and ceremony rather than follow-through per se. While these can be helpful additional elements, they are not substitutes for good follow through, which must be discovered, and evolved through trial-and-error refinement.

The Natural Shape of Work

Follow through is about respecting the momentum of every atomic action, and uncovering the value inherent in the “extra” effects that appear naturally when you let that action run its course. Follow through is about letting the action end where it wants to end, not where it stops producing legible, billable value.

Follow through is about letting work assume its natural shape. Paradoxically, it can feel very unnatural the first few times you do it. Remember it is not the natural shape of your mind or body. It’s the natural shape of the work, which involves elements besides you. This is the idea of “good form,” which is about the relationship among you, your tools, the work output, and the behaviors of others for whom it is work input.

Often, the sign that you’ve discovered the natural shape of work is that you can describe it in a simple way. Note how I explained an involute profile — in terms of the unwrapping of a taut string wrapped around a cylinder. If you have good mechanical instincts, you may be able to see why that implies smooth contact forces. Even though the mathematical equation of an involute curve is complex, there is something very natural and intuitive about this common description (it’s how instructors typically explain gears in machine design classes).

Discovering the natural shape of work means looking carefully at the “geometry” of your atomic behavior and improving it through trial-and-error.

If you do it right, follow-through will be simple enough that you can learn to practice it almost unconsciously, but not so simple that it doesn’t do the job of transmitting work to the next person, and setting up your own next action, smoothly.

For a paycheck employee in a good job, a good manager might instill good follow through in you, if you if you’re lucky. As a free agent, you’ll generally have to do it for yourself. And in a way that generalizes across your gigs.

If you offer a single skill, think of that skill as a single gear wheel, with each instance of use of that skill as a tooth. Whatever you do must smoothly hand-off useful work in two directions — to the tooth engaged with yours (the customer or client’s complementary behavior) and to yourself in the future — the next tooth coming up behind the currently active one.

If you offer complex combinations of skills, things get more complex of course.

Designing for Cogginess

As you refine the core behaviors of your consulting practice, you should build the follow-through into the definition of your work, and incorporate it in how you price your services. You should design your services for cogginess.

If your client is not willing to pay for follow through, they don’t understand how you create value, and it’s your job to explain and market yourself better so they do.

While it can be easier in the short term to simply hide the follow-through behaviors in an opaque pricing structure, in the long run it’s better for you and your clients if follow through is visible to both of you, and appreciated by both of you.

If you are a well-developed free cog, everything you do will smoothly drive value for the client, and set up your own future behaviors. That’s the definition of a good work habit, and a good — as in satisfying for you — work ethic is built up of many different good work habits.

And if you’re positioning, explaining, and pricing your services correctly, your client will recognize all this. And be willing to pay for it.

That’s what it means to be a free cog.

I had a lightbulb Doh! moment yesterday: there is an eerily close rhyme between the evolution of the coffee industry and the evolution of the consulting industry. Like coffee, consulting is entering its fourth wave. Even the dates line up fairly well. Here is a graphic laying out the analogy in detail. For those of you unfamiliar with the 4 coffee waves, I’ll briefly explain that (it’s a great story) and elaborate on the mapping.

The Four Waves of Coffee

Pre-industrial coffee was some mix of global luxury commodity, like spices, and local artisan markets where there was supply within cheap local reach. Then 4 waves played out, each wave creating its own kind of customer.

1. In the first wave, coffee grew from a limited market to a huge, global mass market, thanks to industry consolidation, reliable commodity supply chains, and the rise of large mass-market brands of cheap blended coffee, like Folgers and Nescafe. Coffee became a domestic staple everywhere, like tea before it.

2. In the second wave, brands like Starbucks created a premium retail coffee industry globally, a market for differentiated blends/flavors, globalized differentiated supply chains, and an early-stage single-origin market. They also created a lot of flashy, faddish products, and signaled more quality than they actually delivered in the base product. The also created an experience economy around coffee: a scaled-up version of the Viennese coffee house, and fueled growing aversion towards the low-quality first-wave product.

3. In the third wave, a wave of independent coffee shops (often with their own roasting and sourcing operations) took advantage of the globalized, high-visibility supply chains created by the second wave, and more advanced artisanal brewing technologies, to create a connoisseur’s market based on single-origin beans and careful brewing. They created an educated consumer sensitive to terroir and suspicious of faddishness. Many connoisseurs became home-brew experts as well. Many baristas ran coffee appreciation and brewing classes, making the industry more like the wine industry. Starbucks tried to join the third-wave market with its Reserve and Roastery outlets, with limited success.

4. In the fourth wave, the curated indie cafe experience turned into newer high-end chains with values-based brand promises, like Stumptown, Blue Bottle, Verve, and Intelligentsia. These chains cultivated both their own high-end coffee experiences, and sold premium roasted beans for home-brewers. The artisanal brewing methods evolved into more of a mix of science and art. The fourth-wave outlets are unabashedly ideological, with strong politics on display in the business model, gleefully overwrought mission statements, art-gallery level attention to aesthetics, and highly visible secondary charitable missions.

The big takeaway here is that each wave created its own class of customer for coffee, adapted to the capabilities of the wave. Individual businesses couldn’t really fight this. The dynamics were bigger than them. A couple of quirky anecdotes reveal the nuances of this story.

First there is the story of the Clover, an extremely high-end $11,000 brewing machine that was effectively positioned as an AI barista, able to finely control brew temperatures and times customized to beans. It arrived in the middle of the third wave, and was quickly acquired by Starbucks. But it never quite made an impact. Some think Starbucks bought it to kill it, but I believe it was the right machine at the wrong time, at the wrong price point, rather like the Segway. A little too early, and with an element of thoughtless over-engineering, a bit like the Juicero. As many commentators pointed out at the time of the acquisition, the output of the $11,000 machine could be replicated by a skilled barista using pour-over equipment worth $200. All you really needed was a temperature-controlled kettle, a hand-cranked burr grinder, a decent ceramic filter, and good filter paper.

Second, there is the Nespresso. During this period, Nestle went after the home/office automatic brewing machine market. Previously you either had crappy drip coffeemakers or high-end espresso rigs. K-cup machines occupied the uneasy middle: apparent ability to handle different blends and beans, but not really. Nespresso machines on the other hand, with their bar-coded custom capsules and smarter brew control, did change the game. I bought a Nespresso Vertuoline (now Vertuo) when it first came out around 2013, and have been using it daily for 7 years. During that period, I also got pretty good at pour over at home. They are not directly comparable (Nespresso machines basically produce espresso and dilute it into Americanos for drip-coffee sizes), but of similar quality.

The Clover failed to challenge the fundamentally artisan orientation of the third wave. I suspect an equivalent could be made for under $1000 today, and have much more success within the fourth wave (for example, in franchisee locations of brands like Verve or Stumptown). The Nespresso machines succeeded in finessing a part of the discerning consumer demand for artisanal coffee into a proprietary, vertically integrated coffee-machine/capsule market (it’s possible, but quite hard, to hack Nespresso machines by refilling your own used capsules).

The takeaways from these 2 anecdotes is: you cannot really fight the really big megatrends, but you can time things right, and finesse the trends on the margins. What drove the four-wave history of retail coffee was simply globalization, growing business and technical knowledge, improving equipment, and better quality control.

Now let’s apply the story template to consulting.

The Four Waves of Consulting

Pre-industrial consulting was basically advice from Robber Barons in their memoirs, and local business savvy supplied by Rich Uncles. Then four waves played out.

1. In the first wave, starting with BCG in 1963, as the world slowly started getting off the highly planned, regulated, and protectionist path and into globalized competition, consulting became a meaningful activity. It accelerated with the oil shocks and Japanese competitive threat of the seventies, and came into its own with deregulation in 1980. BCG, Bain, and McKinsey dominated the game, with support from “positioning school” management academics like Michael Porter, who came from an economics background. The Big 3 tended to focus on the very basic “Folgers” grade corporate-wide strategy functions: restructuring, layoffs, efficiency/productivity.

2. In the second wave, starting in the late 80s with small boutique firms headed up by marquee-name thought leaders (often heretic-alumni of the Big 3) like Tom Peters, Jon Katzenbach and others, consulting acquired a big secondary market of premium customers. As with wine and coffee connoisseurs, there was a lot more signaling than taste cultivation going on, and frequently, faddish and shticky value propositions based on esoteric theories du jour, like chaos theory, “design thinking” or “systems thinking.” The idea that consulting is about “flavor of the month” offerings can be blamed squarely on the second wave, just as Frappuccinofication of coffee can be blamed on Starbucks. As with Frappuccinos, boutique firms often peddled sugary coffee-flavored desserts as coffee. They favored flashy thought leadership, airport bestseller writing, and keynoting. Just as Frappuccinos are great as dessert but not as coffee, second-wave consulting output is great as entertainment but not as consulting advice. But there was also genuine movement away from CYA consulting in service of 80s deregulatory playbooks, and towards real curiosity about management as an art and science one could get better at.

3. In the third wave, powered by the internet and blogging, around 2000, a wave of indie consultants hit the market. Like their barista counterparts, indies were unconstrained either by economies of scale or by the reliance on marquee-name airport-bestseller rainmaking. Using small, online personal brands and networks, they were able to find and cultivate a clientele for their fundamentally bespoke, high-trust offerings. Though the third wave had its share of second-wave style faddishness (*cough* lean startup *cough* four-hour anything), most indies tended to play a longer, more self-effacing game, developing substantial offerings over 4-5 years of trial-and-error practice rather than flashy ones piloted as a TEDx Podunk talk, and hastily repackaged into a book. They moved away from both first-wave cynical CYA consulting and second-wave theatrics, and towards genuine business nerdery as a calling. But the price was a sharp limit on scale. Like the early third wave coffee shops, they tended to be too dependent on founder-baristas and struggled to open even a second location.

4. In the fourth wave, which is just over two years old, the indie world is transitioning from individual business nerdery and personal brands/networks to more of a science, and creating a landscape dominated by shared networks rather than individual indie consultants. The Yak Collective is one such network that I’ve helped instigate, one with a focus on pragmatism and delivery, and devoted to consulting as something of an empirical science you can study and get better at through trial and error. There are others with different shared values. For example, I just read this NYT article about an emerging network/subculture of indie consultants devoted to spiritual counseling. I hate every element of this particular example, but the point is, the fourth wave is made up of varied subcultures of indies with shared values.

It’s really early days yet with the fourth wave, both for coffee and consulting. But there’s definitely something going on.

Waves and Generations

At the risk of over-simplifying this, for both coffee and consulting you could say:

• First wave is the Silent Generation with a cronyist ethos and no taste.

• Second wave is Boomers with a flashy charisma ethos, some taste, and a lot of stagecraft.

• Third wave is Gen X with a retreating/self-effacing nerd ethos and skeptical but deeply held tastes. It’s obviously the best wave.

• Fourth wave is Millennials with an ironic/kayfabe ethos and cynically performative tastes.

This shouldn’t be too surprising. Both coffee and consulting are products for minds. Psychoactive products that link to producer and consumer personalities. You should expect to see echoes of generational personalities. Both are also mid-career markets. Your coffee tastes settle down around when you settle down into an adult career.

You typically land in indie consulting in mid-career too. By age 30-35, you know how you like your coffee, and have enough work experience to be fuel a consulting career.

That said, this is just a fun aside. Don’t take the generational mapping too seriously.

Third-Wave Blues

I’m a pretty stereotypical and representative third-waver myself, I’m frankly suspicious of a lot of the things the fourth wave seems to stand for. This means I occasionally suffer what I call the third-wave blues witnessing the rise of the fourth wave and the slow passing of the third. What I dislike about the fourth wave:

• It’s more uncritically communal than I like

• It’s more theatrically ideological and political than I like

• It vastly over-indexes on aesthetics and appearances

• There is a certain self-importance to it

There’s a clear third-wave/fourth-wave generational tension. If third-wavers were trial-and-error consulting nerds, fourth-wavers are consulting auteurs who have Theories about How the World Should Work, and expect to arrive on the scene with ideological documents, and be listened to.

Still, on some fronts, it feels like the Fourth Wavers are onto real doctrinal discoveries and innovations that perhaps the empirically wired “show me” Gen X third-wavers are too skeptical of. I try to watch out for this tendency too much skepticism in myself. My general approach to mitigating this risk is sometimes betting against my own instincts, and on the instincts of younger people. They might not have logged the hours of experience I have, but they might be attuned to weak signals in the environment I’m deaf to. They can log the experience over time, but my attunement is only likely to get worse. So it’s time for me to listen despite my suspicions and instinctive dislikes.

To some extent, I’m probably going to stay stuck in the third wave for the rest of my career. I’m 45, and a bit set in my ways. That said, I’m open to many elements of the fourth wave, which is part of why I’m devoting significant bandwidth to the Yak Collective experiment, which is definitely a very fourth-wave thing. In some ways, I’m too old by about a decade to be part of that kind of experiment, but in other ways, I’m enough of a business and consulting nerd to want to learn from it.

Will the fourth wave grow up and disrupt the first three waves significantly? Will it stumble and fail? Will I grow into it, or stay stuck in my third-wave niche?

You can ask these questions about both coffee and consulting. I suspect the answers are actually going to be the same.

***

This has been one of the occasional free issues of the Art of Gig newsletter. In the four weeks since the last free issue (July 30th: Leverage Curves and Career Paths), I published the following subscriber-only issues:

1. August 6th: The Art of Being Unmanaged

2. August 13th: The Prosumer Gambit

3. August 19th: Dog-Fooding for Indies

4. August 27th: Reality-Arbitrage vs. Dog-Fooding

For those who signed up recently, Art of Gig is a weekly newsletter on the gig economy, with a particular focus on indie consulting. I typically do a free issue at least once a month.