Tara McMullin

Not only do today’s platform-based workers exist in a nascent labor category, but their participation is decentralized, making it harder for them to connect with each other. As the industry has matured, and consolidation has led to monopsony power, platform labor has reached a turning point. Platforms are increasingly governing participants’... See more

And I realised that if you ever hear someone explaining things in terms of a long list of caveats, the odds are good that you’re looking at tacit knowledge in action.

Successful platforms do not just discover what consumers want — they produce the consumers and the forms of consumer desire that they need.

Willfulness can create all sorts of personal suffering because, at the end of the day, we don’t have control over all sorts of things, and certainly not over other people. Some walls are meant to be broken down or scaled, but others are clear signals to attempt a different tact.

What sorts of signals are we ignoring when we hit those concrete... See more

I think of it as the difference between order and a different kind of order. Because there’s nothing chaotic in diversity. There’s nothing chaotic in a city with many different subcultures all interacting and going about their business. That is an order of its own. It’s just — it looks different from the suburbs.

Indeed, the literature on love and happiness at work is remarkable for its insistence on the identity of interests that will be generated, that both employers and employees will profit equally from its recipes for emotional reform and affective discipline. In what is perhaps a way to make good on the claim about mutual advantage, the health benefit... See more

The securitized subprime mortgages that triggered the global financial crisis demonstrated that even the most material of possessions—the home—was as if made of air and could burst like a bubble. The same years saw the permeation of network technologies into everyday life through smartphone use. These were years in which the meanings of materiality... See more

The aspect ratio of our lives has changed. By narrowing our field of view, cutting off our peripheral vision, the phone doesn’t just remove us from space and provoke a sense of claustrophobia. It isolates us.