Platform gig economy bypasses firms to make laborers self-branding contractors.

Evidence

The syncing of logistics and investor systems in platform startups deliver the new “sharing” economy, the disintermediated infrastructure of immediacy style. In this gigification of labor, companies and jobs are on the wane, while services sold by the unit are on the rise. The resulting conditions for both workers and consumers bypass the firm as middleman to facilitate direct contact and instant fulfillment, begetting an image of the economy as consentingly intimate independent contractors: Mutuality, Inc., immediacy’s in-firm form. In constant pursuit of reputational capital to shore up their contractor profiles, individual laborers are rendered “auto-entrepreneurs,” self-employees who charismatically radiate their intrinsic value. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 67

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘auto-entrepreneurs…charismatically radiate their intrinsic value’ formulation connects to the reader’s interest in how the economic infrastructure produces a style; links to the gig-work critique literature and to how immediacy’s ‘direct contact’ aesthetic mirrors market disintermediation. — connects to: The contractor framing of gig work mainly benefits employers, not workers — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 217; Gig work shifts labor from white wealthy clients to poorer black and Latino workers — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 221