What’s driving the new economy? The old economy’s gas-powered vehicles.
One of the most remarkable and unanticipated benefits of the cloud revolution has been the emergence and rapid growth of the so-called gig economy. Ubiquitous personal geo-location, itself an unheralded revolution, combined with a cloud-centric software “platform” that connects buyers and sellers, has spawned one of society’s most dynamic, free-market employment systems. Hundreds of digital platforms—from Uber and DoorDash to TaskRabbit and Rover—now serve as the marketplace for all manner of trades in goods and services that are, in nearly all cases, facilitated by gig workers. The freelance marketplace already generates more than $200 billion annually. Pew Research found that roughly one in six adults (heavily skewing to young adults), and one in four lower-income Americans, do gig work, for which many say that the income is “important or essential.”
