Re: <nettime> Richard Florida Is Sorry

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

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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