A panic-driven rant about the existential perils of the new economy

All right, internet people. Let’s take a minute to appreciate that we’ve got a pretty good thing going. We’ve got apps to help us bum rides from strangers, crash in someone’s apartment, plan our naps, walk our dogs, shop for groceries, pick the music, find romance, and deliver legal, primo weed.

We’ve built ourselves a hedonistic cyber-topia of free expression where anyone can host their own talk show, cats can get famous, there’s porn catering to an ever-expanding spectrum of gender-fluidity, and there’s a thriving audience for photos of your of glitter-beard, furry fingernails or colored armpit hair.

I guess, at this point – and call me a worry-wart if you want – I’m just getting a bit nervous about how we’re going to pay for all this.

It takes a lot of time and work to maintain this level of information awesomeness. There’s a podcast about a murder from 1979 that needs recording. Someone’s gotta update the Alf Wikipedia page. We need a video showing what it’s like to unbox a Funko-Pop figure of Huckleberry Hound. Is all this effort eventually converting to some form of nourishment for our physical bodies? Or is it just an after-hours hobby supported by checks from mom and dad and a part-time job at GameStop?

Does the big strategy revolve around letting advertisers piggyback on our content generation? If so, do those advertisers really think they’re reaching paying customers who have enough money to buy their products? A person can’t become a paying customer without first being a paid person. And how much is it really worth to a struggling business to have a million people click “Skip Ad” after three seconds of their million dollar ad spot? How many Blue Apron meals can podcast listeners be expected to buy when there are so many interesting podcasts to listen to that there’s barely time left to work?

And if the ad dollars dry up, what then? Will the subscription fees keep the cash nutrients flowing through the waters of the bustling digital ecosystem? We’re already scrimping and saving the earnings from our Lyft-driving side-gigs to satiate the need for Amazon Prime, Disney+, Apple Arcade, HBO Go, Now and Max, the refill plan for our Quip electric toothbrush and membership to the Dollar Shave Club. Is there even one more subscription penny left to spend on whatever’s next?

Where does this disposable income even originate? From selling shoes at the abandoned mall or bagging popcorn at the empty cineplex? From a job at Blockbuster, Toys R Us, Borders Books, Tower Records, Circuit City or the Fotomat? And even if we find a place to earn an hourly wage, where do we find the hours to earn it when there are so many important series on Netflix to binge?

Earned income is becoming un-earnable. The minimum wage is maxed-out. Credit card and college lenders are banking on all of us someday getting a real job when the real jobs are becoming virtual. The investment market is a work of collective fiction pinning its hopes to one over-inflated bubble after another. Venture capitalists are placing bets on horses with no legs to stand on. Currency itself is de-materializing into an abstract cloud of crypto-vapor!

Even the pipe dreams of massive wealth are fading into obsolescence. How do you become a rock god with a guitar-shaped swimming pool when the royalties from your hit song are paid out in pennies from Spotify? How do you become a movie star when you’re competing for audience eyeballs with kids on YouTube playing video games? Can you really become a best-selling author when you need to take an adjunct professorship at a failing university because your readers are too busy reading click-bait headlines to buy your books?

And what about getting paid for traditional hard work and toil? How much longer can we till the fields or drive the big-rigs when the robotic harvesters, and self-driving trucks are already well on their way to the workforce? Meanwhile there are single moms working 16 hour days at three crap-ass jobs just to pay for mac and cheese. Does she need to work even harder so she can learn Javascript and prep for the day when her job as the last human at the Walmart checkout is eliminated by a touch screen? The protestant work-ethic that built the country is now rewarded with a life-long lease on a studio apartment wallpapered with credit-card bills in the heart of Suckerville.

Do you ever visit a new town, or even look around your own neighborhood, and wonder what people are doing all day that’s keeping the place from just collapsing into a ghost town? You look at a nice house and think: “How did the person that lives there get the down payment for that house? And how did they then get enough money to paint it lavender?” Because there’s no sign of some bustling, benevolent industry that’s employing everyone. No coal mine or auto plant. Just a few failing strip malls and abandoned industrial parks. You drive down main street and wonder, “How many livelihoods can that dog salon or carpet store actually support?”

Well that’s how I’m feeling when I look around the internet. Every time I Google a question like “How do I get a riding mower unstuck form the mud” and get 25 great answers complete with videos, I can’t help but wonder how we’re affording all this generosity of knowledge. Is everyone on a magical trust fund? Is there some secret stock portfolio that I forgot to invest in? I can’t help shake the feeling that the foundation is crumbling beneath our Zappos-adorned feet. Is this party taking place on a thin crust of financial ice above a subterranean inferno of bank loans with ever-compounding interest?

I know I can’t be the only one wondering how a person is expected to make their way in this ever-shifting landscape. I’m a college-educated white dude who grew up in the suburbs. I’m in the tech industry, I own my own business, I work on paid gigs pretty much every day. Even with all these advantages and all these wonderful tools at my fingertips, I find the whole “not going broke” part of life to be a rather sophisticated balancing act that grates against my designer’s desire for systematic simplicity and user-centric elegance.

As far as I can tell, the only disadvantage I’ve been handed is the same one we’re all dealing with – an outdated, overly-complex, and inflexible socio-economic system that’s ill-suited to the task of keeping people alive.

So if there’s an app that will figure out how to fix this, we’re gonna need it pretty soon.