I needed some Ikea bookshelves assembled and brought up the homepage for TaskRabbit, a service I’ve heard good things about, overlooking all the bad things one hears about that type of business in general. Unlike Uber, however, or some of the other gig economy apps that control their “independent contractors” while denying them basic employment rights, the ethos of TaskRabbit seems fairly straightforward: customers type in what they need, scroll through the directory until they find someone with the relevant skills, and make a booking online. It’s like Yelp without all the bad spelling.
Except, of course, it isn’t. In the past few years I’ve used Yelp to find a handyman to assemble a dresser and hang some paintings. In both cases, I chose the first guy who came up and, after a quick web search, didn’t seem to be on America’s Most Wanted. Yelp seemed like a usefully updated version of Yellow Pages, with the added feature – as with all early iterations of online service directories, most notably TripAdvisor – of providing a fun hangout for the unstable.
At the time the anarchy of reviews on Yelp, and sites like it, seemed to represent a downside to online services. Now I’m bizarrely nostalgic for those days: for every positive review there were two negative and 25 mad ones, allowing you to disregard the reviews altogether, make a quick choice and get on with life.
On TaskRabbit, by contrast, I was confronted with something that looked like a form of online dating. Every handyman who came up after my search was accompanied by a photo and a percentage rating; and both of these things, after three pages or so, started to give me the creeps. It seemed, simultaneously, too much data (the photo) and not enough (an opaque ratings system), but was nonetheless impossible to ignore. If one handyman has a 100% rating, does that mean he is objectively better than all those on 98%? What about the guy with 88% – which, on a scale this artificially high, suggests he is not only going to hang my bookcase askew, but murder me on the way out?
And the photos. I found myself rejecting handymen left, right and centre because I didn’t like the look of them. One was wearing a suit, which I thought protested too much; one looked a bit shifty; I didn’t like the goatee on another. This was clearly ridiculous, and extremely vulnerable to racial and other biases. The online reviews, meanwhile, while they had none of the nutty Yelp flavour, had something worse: the conscientious feel of dispatches from customers who had been begged by their providers to write something glowing to keep up their ratings.
Cuomo’s network problems
It is a tough summer in New York for those who ride the subway – declared last month by Andrew Cuomo, the city governor, to be in a “state of emergency”. For weeks trains have been getting stuck in tunnels for long stretches with the lights off and the air-conditioning faltering. In Harlem last month a train was derailed, injuring dozens of passengers.
Cuomo pledged $1bn (£750m) for improvements – an announcement received by many subway users as too little too late. Prior to that, his big idea was to install wifi in the stations, a brainwave that has come back to bite him. Now, every time there is a delay or the lights flicker off, hundreds of angry passengers disseminate their thoughts – or, as the governor peevishly put it, “nasty things about me” – directly from the station to Twitter.
Nuts to Snickers
At first it was people’s names printed on the labels of Coca-Cola bottles. Then Coke started putting on abstract nouns with an inspirational bent. Shoot forward several years and I am at the check-out in the pharmacy, faced by rows of Snickers bars, with a choice of Edgy, Hot Mess, Troublemaker and Ferocious where the Snickers name should be – part of the wearisome roll-out of “personality” to what was neutral territory. “Desperate” and “Mordantly Unfunny” were, oddly, missing from the set.
