Need-order-get
Thanks to the suddenly intensifying economic downturn, some of the more dubious money-making strategies previously presented as "innovative" are being re-evaluated (i.e. fled from). The crypto crash is an obvious example: What was frequently touted as a hedge against inflation and stock market dips turned out to be a loss multiplier. It seems that crypto investors were not intent on building a decentralized alternative to the financial system after all but were just the usual suspects from the standard financial system looking for yield under conditions where conventional (i.e. actually socially useful) investment opportunities appeared to be insufficient to their greed. And as usual, that provided for scams designed to evade financial regulation so as to target novices, exploit their hope and desperation, and drain their resources away. In other words, crypto has been and will continue to be a way to replay the 2008 global financial crisis, only without requiring the pretense of building houses first in order to create risky financial bets.
Another cheap-money-fueled sector now being re-assessed is the venture-capital-backed gig-economy and delivery startups: Uber, Deliveroo, GoPuff, and the like. These money-losing business models have abruptly run out of runway, and commentators are saying "farewell," though as Paris Marx noted on Twitter, whether that's to the "servant economy" or to "the millennial lifestyle subsidy" depends on where you stand in the class struggle.
"Millennial lifestyle subsidy" sounds like a term engineered to enrage millennials, positioning them as freeloaders rather than victims of the economic wreckage created for them by previous generations. Of course it's no surprise that Kevin Roose, who shilled for crypto a few months ago and created a bunch of new bagholders, uses that phrase. The word lifestyle, which implies having a choice, is especially galling, given that the business model of the companies in question was to undercut alternatives for the service they offered so that people would have no choice but to use them. They marketed themselves as providing convenience and agency and dominion to their customers, but it's more that they turned those concepts into vague, consumable feelings, token gestures in the face of mounting precarity.
Ride-hailing and ultrafast delivery services try to make themselves necessary by destroying the fabric of urban life, undermining public transportation, replacing retail storefronts with ghost stores, filling the city with underpaid "independent contractors" on e-bikes goaded by impossible quotas to Evel Knievel their way through the streets and sidewalks, sending what pedestrians remain scattering. To equate the services these companies offer, which prompt isolation and stratification and dislocation from neighborhood life, with "urban lifestyles" is to entirely misunderstand them: City dwellers are forced to accept a "lifestyle subsidy" in lieu of being able to live in a better version of what cities could offer. They are not getting a gift of "laziness"; they are getting a consolation prize to distract them from an invasion by alien predatory forces.
Typical of this dynamic was when startups would dump electric scooters like so much trash on the sidewalk in unsuspecting and under-regulated municipalities: Look how convenient it is to have people throw obstacles everywhere! Look how everyone is learning to adapt to contempt for public space, to disposability as a mandate! Wow, the lucky people who live in this town must be so excited to become so lazy!
Ali Griswold's description of instant delivery services' (failing) master plan offers a clearer picture of the ideological work those services must perform to have a chance. They burn through cash in an effort to secure market share and "train customers in 'need-order-get' buying behavior." They must overcome investor skepticism over "whether consumers in the long run would be willing to pay the true premium that comes with 15-minute convenience."
In other words, they know that people don't naturally or automatically want their kind of "convenience" and the socioeconomic distortions required to make it possible. Likewise, the mechanistic stimulus-response reflex of "need-order-get" is not necessarily all that is left of the possibility of freedom; we must be compelled to accept that consumerist parody of freedom as our horizon of possibility. It remains true that it's not "natural" to want to command servant labor. We must instead be repeatedly bribed to see ourselves as the center of the universe and fail to recognize that it is collapsing.