Hello frendz. This week's music is Little People.

Around the interwebs,

• [fr] Fortnite : Comment gagner des milliards avec un jeu gratuit, excellent résumé des mécanismes neuro/psycho utilisés pour rendre addictif le jeu vidéo Skinner box le plus populaire du moment.
• David Cain: Patience is something you do, not something you are. I like his idea of "micro-patience" as the very doable act of practicing non-resentment during momentary discomfort.
• [fr] Monsieur Phi fait découvrir de la belle SF, avec une Lecture audio de "Greg Egan : En apprenant à être moi". Et entame une dissection.
• 99designs - 100 years of Bauhaus: what today’s famous logos would look like in Bauhaus style; cooooool! Via [fr] Nouveau Projet.
• Tech:
  • Eric Higgins: Technical debt is like Tetris, nice analogy!
  • W3C approves WebAuthn as the web standard for password-free logins, finally! HN.
  • Atlantic: The servant economy, via Kottke.

    It’s not hard to look around the world and see all those zeroes of capital going into dog-walking companies and wonder: Is this really the best and highest use of the Silicon Valley innovation ecosystem? In the 10 years since Uber launched, phones haven’t changed all that much. The world’s most dominant social network became Facebook in 2009, and in 2019, it is still Facebook. Google is still Google, even if it is called Alphabet.

    Politically, the world is night and day, though. In that context, these apps take on a strange pall. The haves and the have-nots might be given new names: the demanding and the on-demand. These apps concretize the wild differences that the global economy currently assigns to the value of different kinds of labor. Some people’s time and effort are worth hundreds of times less than other people’s. The widening gap between the new American aristocracy and everyone else is what drives both the supply and demand of Uber-for-X companies.

    The inequalities of capitalist economies are not exactly news. As my colleague Esther Bloom pointed out, “For centuries, a woman’s social status was clear-cut: either she had a maid or she was one.” Domestic servants—to walk the dog, do the laundry, clean the house, get groceries—were a fixture of life in America well into the 20th century. In the short-lived narrowing of economic fortunes wrapped around the Second World War that created what Americans think of as “the middle class,” servants became far less common, even as dual-income families became more the norm and the hours Americans worked lengthened.

    What the combined efforts of the Uber-for-X companies created is a new form of servant, one distributed through complex markets to thousands of different people. It was Uber, after all, that launched with the idea of becoming “everyone’s private driver,” a chauffeur for all.

    An unkind summary, then, of the past half decade of the consumer internet: Venture capitalists have subsidized the creation of platforms for low-paying work that deliver on-demand servant services to rich people, while subjecting all parties to increased surveillance.