Straining Against The Yoke

There is nothing to lose but your five-star rating and $2 tips.

As you log into the app, announcing yourself to the world as a five-star driver for LiftShare, the newest ride-share/gig economy sensation, a sigh escapes involuntarily.

You’ve been driving for LiftShare for about a week, sticking to the daytime and late afternoons to try and avoid the drunk crowd. You’ve made a decent amount in the past few days, but something still eats at you. So many people have complimented you for a job well done, but each shift passes like a blur. You log in, drive your passengers to their destinations, log out, go home and crash immediately. You hardly have time for yourself, to say nothing of your two roommates and friends.

<hey Trevor what the fuck how is this about video games>

It turns out that driving people around the city is actually pretty tiring. Who would have thought? It isn’t necessarily the driving, you kind of like that aspect. It’s the talking. Your entire life, everyone has always talked up your ability to hold a conversation, to make people feel like you were really listening to them, but these people… they’ll talk about things you wouldn’t talk about with your most intimate friend, much less a stranger in a car. It’s exhausting.

They want to be heard, but more than that, they want to be acknowledged. And you do your best, but sometimes it’s hard. You’ve got your own problems, right? Nobody’s paying you to talk about them, though, and it’s hard to get the cash together to pay someone else to listen to you talk about them. So the last week has been tiring. But hey – you’re your own boss. That’s good at least, right?

No one is an island.

We’re all part of this complex, frustrating, self-perpetuating system that seeks to extract as much from us as is physically possible before there’s nothing left of us to discard. It’s a system designed to keep working people working forever, while making the people who own the means of production fabulously, inconceivably wealthy.

You know this, but it’s really difficult to think about that stuff – as intended – when you’re just trying to pay rent on essentially the kindness (and whims) of strangers. You could work retail, or in the restaurant business, or for a call center or something, but isn’t the relationship the same? You do the work, someone else reaps the rewards. Your cousin worked one of those call center jobs, got fired after a couple of years. She was always on time, did her job well, but when the axe came down it came down on her. They told her they had to let her go due to “changing business needs.” Guess they didn’t need her. She’s been driving too, ever since.

You drive around town. The rides aren’t coming in quite as heavy today, but it’s only a bit after noon. Keep your speed down, conserve gas, follow the law, don’t instigate anyone’s road rage, and you can get through even a slow shift with relative ease. Maybe you can even squeeze an extra shift out of your slowly emptying gas tank.

<yo seriously what the f->

It’s kind of shitty that LiftShare doesn’t take care of your gas. It’s not surprising but every time you think about how expensive paying at the pump is, even in your hybrid, it makes you a little angrier. Of course you’re not going to bring it up, since this is how you can afford to eat. Also, you’re “your own boss,” which – if you were working for yourself, you’d have to pay for all this out of pocket anyway. That’s probably word for word what anyone at LiftShare would say.

Plus, as the app likes to remind you every time you log in, you are “strictly a contractor of LiftShare,” not an employee.

This is how the gig economy can extract more of your labor without giving you the benefits afforded full time employees of the companies you work with. You’re an independent contractor. You don’t get health insurance, the company isn’t going to take taxes out for you, and you certainly can’t unionize*. This is true for every ride-share driver and delivery person. It’s also true for freelance writers, programmers, and other creative types. And you can’t change the situation without changing the laws, and you can’t change the laws without giving lawmakers the incentive to do so. You got that kind of “incentive?”

No, of course you don’t.

The sun hangs low in the sky above the city, bathing everything in an orange glow. You’ve given rides to a few individuals, each of them deciding to keep the ride quiet. Not in an unpleasant way! Just… quiet. You wish every shift could be like this. You might even make it to this evening with energy enough to hang out a little bit with your roommates, assuming they feel the same.

It’s hard to get a read on your roommates. You’re friends-of-friends from school. You each have different tastes. One of them is super boisterous and outgoing, while the other mostly just makes jokes all the time. They’ve known each other longer than they’ve known you. You want to be better friends with them. You’re afraid if you can’t get there they’ll kick you out when the lease is up. Doing LiftShare makes enough for rent, bills and food, but you don’t exactly have a big savings account. You want to be their friend, but you also feel like you need to be. Doesn’t feel great, to be honest. Maybe it’s an irrational fear like your cousin told you, but nobody’s ever stopped being irrationally afraid when that was pointed out to them.

Your roommates got you a gift tonight.

It was a $30 Nintendo eShop card with an attached note.

“Hey we noticed you’ve been out driving a lot. Thought you might like to let off some steam. Love u xox”

You decide to get two games, Eliza and Neo Cab. You like visual novels for the most part, and you heard some passengers of your’s raving about these games. Plus, Eliza’s on sale. You just have to throw in a couple bucks to cover what the gift card doesn’t, and you’re good to go.

You start with Eliza.

In Zachtronics’ Eliza, you play as Evelyn Ishino-Aubrey, a physical proxy for a therapy AI called Eliza. Your job is to sit in a chair and read off a script Eliza provides you based on what its clients say. You get tips and a star rating based on how well you adhere to the script, and how convincing you can be to each client.

Your first client, Darren, is suffering from existential dread. There’s no point to anything, the world is in a state of irreparable disruption, and he’s feeling very, very small against this backdrop. You wish you could say anything to him that might help cheer him up, but Eliza’s not interested in that. As a “personal digital counselor,” Eliza asks questions, and then makes limited recommendations based on the answers to those questions. The recommendations can be anything from meditation to medication, to a combination of those and more. It takes special care to remind each patient that it is not a substitute for a licensed counselor, and to consult a psychiatrist any time a medical recommendation is made. Proxies are trained not to deviate from the script, otherwise they can be suspended from the program.

Darren doesn’t take kindly to Eliza’s recommendations, nor your tone in stating them. He storms off.

Luckily, the rest of the game is a bit more fleshed out. Not only do you help clients as a proxy, but there are moments where you talk with your friends and colleagues, learning more about them and yourself as you go. It turns out you were one of the core engineers on Eliza prior to your sudden departure three years prior. You know some of the higher-ups in the company, and some of the highest-up know about you.

Before you know it, the game is asking you to make some choices. You can decide whether to start your new life with any of the many people you meet, like your asexual, cookie-baking manager; your old, lecherous, alcoholic project manager who has spun off from your old company to form his own startup; the CEO of your old company; or your best friend, another former engineer who’s decided to devote her time to music and privacy activism.

What hits hardest are the conversations. Just like with LiftShare, the people who use Eliza want to talk to someone about the things in their lives that are not going the way they planned. They tell you their secrets. But instead of feeling drained, when you play you want to help! You want to give them advice or hold their hand or give them any sign

I should do something nice to repay my roommates

that you care.

You stayed up too late playing Eliza last night. It was a pretty game that ultimately kind of stung. You made some choices you wish you could take back, but that would mean multiple playthroughs. Somehow that didn’t feel right. Better that you stuck with what you did the first time. It felt more honest that way. Now you’re starting your shift a bit later than usual. Still, though, it shouldn’t be too much of an issue.

“The benefits of being my own boss,” you say aloud to no one. It’s true – being “late” like this would have gotten you fired anywhere else. Choosing your own hours and being late meant, at worst, a bit less money.

You open your app and log in. Your rating has gone down, but only slightly. Someone gave you four stars because their food was cold when you got it to them. That’s weird. You check their order and – yep, a salad. They just ordered a salad. Did they expect their salad to be hot? Who eats hot salads?

Today is gloomy. Maybe part of it is your mood, carried over from yesterday, but the clouds are definitely hanging low and thick in the sky. It’ll probably rain later, which is good because requests should go up. With any luck you can make enough to negate starting later. Well. That might be nice.

Wouldn’t it be even nicer if you didn’t have to worry about working day-to-day, or living paycheck to paycheck? This is a precarious life. There’s no security in it. If you have a spate of bad rides, if LiftShare shuts down, if you get in an accident or you get sick, it’s all over.

It’s better than having a boss.

You do have bosses. Your customers are your bosses. That rating system is your boss. The market is your boss – if you miss an hour of drive time, that’s either an hour you’re not getting back or an hour later you’ll have to drive to make up for it. And there are periods throughout your day when people simply won’t want a ride. No demand for what you can supply.

I’m fine doing this. It does what I need it to.

Okay, fine, whatever. Maybe you might reconsider, but that’s up to you.

You keep driving.

Not as many customers as you thought. Not really even as many as yesterday. But enough, going far enough to be beneficial. You stop for gas after your fourth ride. The sky is slate-gray, but the light is soft somehow. Like, it’s not a cloudy day full of ill portent, just… overcast. Normal old overcast.

Ultimately you know that this job is as fleeting as any other. You know you’re being exploited by LiftShare, just like the proxies in Eliza; subjected to people at their worst, forced to deal with people’s gross hygiene, inappropriate stories and comments, absurd demands and mercurial tempers. But you’ve also been party to people at their best, their nicest, their most serene. At least you’re not really doing counseling, and people know that. You’re just a taxi service.

And you know what? That’s fine for now.

The sun’s rays peek through a gap in the clouds, casting a pale hue. You smile and hit the road again.

<what is thi>

You get home late. Your roommates keep to themselves tonight, but you can hear them working on their respective projects. You’re exhausted, so you go straight to bed and to sleep.

As you sleep, you dream. Nothing is recognizable except a mood. Pure pulsating dark anxiety, shadows dancing across your vision, everything filled with an energy that makes you sick.

You wake up much later than you wanted to. It’s the afternoon. You could take a day off, but rent is due in a few days and you’re cutting it closer than is comfortable. If you drive, on the other hand, you run the risk of dealing with the night crowd. You feel a headache spinning up. Ugh.

Stay in it is. Besides, there’s that other game you got, Neo Cab.

In Neo Cab, you play as Lina, a driver for a kind of… rebel rideshare startup, as she acclimates to life in Los Ojos, a city seemingly wholly-owned and operated by the Capra Corporation. Capra is similar to Eliza’s Skandha, in that it’s a cross between a rideshare company and Tesla Motors if Tesla also had all sorts of other businesses like insurance plans and hotels under its wing. I’m saying don’t let Elon Musk play Neo Cab.

Los Ojos is a land of opportunity for you, a driver for rival Neo Cab, except for one problem: your roommate and childhood best friend, Savy, goes missing on your first night. Now you have to rely on your only income source – driving – for survival in a city full of autonomous vehicles, anti-car bike gangs, corporate-owned cops and at least one QUANTUM WITCH. On top of that, you have to cultivate relationships, make connections and get information from the people who ride with you.

You work and work, you get all this information, you make all these friends, and then… so that’s how Neo Cab ends, huh?

You don’t want to talk about it in a lot of detail, but you’ve been thinking a lot about how people take advantage of others. Maybe they’re just trying to move up the ladder at work. Maybe they just want in on that friend group really badly. You’ve had friends like this. They were always nice to you, at least to your face, but you always felt like they were moving you around, like a pawn to their queens. You like to think the subsequent falling-out was simply a natural occurrence of time and entropy, but really, you disengaged because you were kind of tired of being someone else’s tool.

You look out the window. It’s firmly evening. A light rain has begun to fall and you can hear the faint pat-pat-pat of the drops hitting the concrete. A sigh involuntarily escapes your lips. Maybe tomorrow.

“In any frank accounting, it wasn’t street protests that broke the WTO. The Doha round of talks stalled out years later thanks to a combination of resurgent nationalism in the US as George W Bush shifted imperialist strategies after September 11th and coalition work done between national governments in the global south that gave them leverage. There is simply no substantive causal link between these developments and the street protests we organized,” writes William Gillis in his piece on the 20th anniversary of the Battle of Seattle. “[…]The chief success of Seattle was a media victory. Anarchists became suddenly visible to the world, political positions that had been entirely suppressed from the public arena were suddenly visible and accessible.”

Initially I wanted to write about Eliza and Neo Cab as being cardinal examples of anti-capitalist games with explicitly revolutionary themes, goals or endings. But the more I’ve teased these games apart in my mind the more I know that’s not a great way to frame either.

In both Eliza and Neo Cab, the protagonist discovers deep ethical problems they have to face basically by themselves. In Eliza the problem resides specifically in who Evelyn ends up with by the end of the game. If she chooses to go back to work for Skandha, she will be endorsing massive privacy violations on the scale of millions and a CEO intent on abusing his wide access to personal identifying information.

If she goes and works for her former team lead at his startup, she’ll have to deal with the ramifications of making a device that creates simulations in dreams, with the CEO’s stated goal being that he wants to end suffering… forever. Or she could say nah to both options and live with her punk DJ-cum-activist girlfriend.

In Neo Cab, the corporations are all evil, yes, but it turns out that your best friend and prospective roommate is also not super great! You can expose Capra for emotionally manipulating the population of Los Ojos into passing a bill that would ban human driving in the city limits, but in the process you discover that your so-called best friend has also been emotionally manipulative. Probably for years. To everyone she’s met.

We’re soon going to have to reckon with our relationships – not just to the socioeconomic systems around us, but also with each other, on social media or in person. Systems of exploitation and domination are all around us, and it’s quickly becoming time to abolish them.

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