Morlock Elloi on Mon, 21 Aug 2017 19:08:47 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> Richard Florida Is Sorry


The book is also mentioned in
https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Foerdert-die-Hightech-Industrie-die-in-Staedten-wachsende-Ungleichheit-3808816.html

If you visit San Francisco, you'll notice metastasis of the servant economy:

- In high end supermarkets most shoppers (more than 50%) are servants shopping for someone else (and obviously cannot afford to shop there themselves.) They wander through the supermarket looking at their handsets for guidance, which is reminiscent of how Amazon warehouse workers spend their hours. But these are high-class servants. For the lower-class servants, that do not personally shop, the supermarket staff puts pre-packed bags into basement lockers, which these servants then take to cars. It becomes obvious why Amazon is buying Whole Foods.

- Many restaurants now have a separate queue for servants that work for one of dozen startups that mediate between restaurants and food delivered to homes, after 30% cut. There is a stark class difference between restaurant guests at tables and these servants.

- Streets are packed with chauffeured cars (Lyft, Uber, etc.), the servants eyes glued to their handsets, as they wait, illegally parked, for their customers.

The point is that the the two classes mingle in the everyday leisure life, but unlike in the pre-servant economy, the classes are not separated just by what they wear, drive, visit or buy. They are now separated strictly by the function. If there was any egalitarianism in the leisure-space, it's gone.




On 8/21/17, 04:44, Felix Stalder wrote:
At the risk of flogging a dead horse, it's noteworthy that Richard
Florida's new book, "The New Urban Crisis", by and large, falsifies his
earlier pronouncements on the "creative class"  and his recipes for
urban renewal.
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