Liberating structure

  It would seem to be a liberating structure. A person has the opportunity to work from anywhere in the world, to receive a higher salary, but, on the other hand, it turns out that restrictions are reproduced at the time level. The centers of economic activity, such as Moscow, still exercise their dominance. If you live in a different time zone, for example, in Omsk, then you must live in the same regime as Moscow, your whole life is shifted. You know when customers are most active.

We found out that each time zone in Russia shifts the working time by an average of fourteen minutes, and there are people who take orders in the USA. There, the offset is even greater. As a result, your work schedule is completely different from the daily routine of the place where you live. Time is structured elsewhere, not where it flows.

- This probably applies mainly to freelancers who work outside the bounds of space - unlike taxi drivers or couriers. How is the very understanding of freelancing changing due to the expansion of platform employment?

“The fundamental problem is that people don't differentiate between platform types. Take, for example, freelance exchanges - they are rather infrastructure, marketplaces. There, real independent freelancers are looking for orders by grain, they are just faced with the problems of structuring time, which I mentioned, but this is still only part of the reality.

But there is a completely different part of it: delivery services and taxis, and these are also platforms, but of a different type. I call them hidden corporations - they pretend to provide information services and simply bring consumers together with someone who wants to provide them with a service. But this is not at all like a marketplace: we call Yandex.Taxi, and do not bargain with a specific taxi driver. The algorithm sends us some kind of driver with a branded car, and we just use the service, the quality of which is again guaranteed by the platform. It is an electronic corporation that operates on a just in time system.

Now the states have realized: such corporations have begun to be forced to work within the framework of the legal conditions of the labor market.

The number of lawsuits against Uber is on the rise worldwide. At the same time, I have never heard of lawsuits against freelance exchanges, because there is no such conflict in this area - the marketplace does not control you and does not directly control you. And in shadow digital corporations, the situation is different, your boss is an algorithm, you are controlled by an algorithm. They tell you what to do now, trackers dictate your route. The algorithms know the optimal routes, the time of movement of a person and a car, and if you deviate, you will have penalties, etc.

This is a completely different reality, so sometimes there is some misunderstanding of freedom and non-freedom. It's one thing when the algorithm indicated to the courier that he must arrive at this restaurant for an order and then take it to a certain address within 15 minutes. If the courier fails, he may be fired. Deactivated as they say. And it's a completely different matter when a freelancer realizes that in order to earn more, he should not go to bed now, but look for an order for himself.