Fucking gig economy: all the extra work you put in - signing up for yet another platform, installing software, and waiting for the actual work to begin - all unpaid.

Weeks of waiting for the “project” to begin. Then suddenly:

My Slack would fill up with GO TEAM GO messages from someone who was just out of college, someone who has no idea that across the decades, people have died trying to establish labor laws that protect workers from the exact same conditions that he is now responsible for perpetuating, accompanied by numerous rocket ship emoji reactions.

Not to speak of projects that never take off.

The wages were dropping week by week. When I first started scrolling the contractor jobs in early 2025, companies like Mercor, Handshake, Turing, Task-ify and Outlier were offering $150 an hour for “experts,” $35 to $75 an hour for “generalists.” Today, Mercor says the average hourly rate on its platform is $105. But in my searches across the industry near the start of 2026, the experts were often getting $50 an hour, and the entry-level grunt workers were getting as low as $16 —less than California minimum wage. Contracts were now referred to as “sprints.” The work had to be done, asap, as fast as possible, for employment that might last 24 hours.