Why the gig economy was doomed from the start

For a while there, it seemed like "Uber for X" was the only pitch that mattered.

To many, the rapid rise of Uber wasn't just a major tech success story — it signaled a wholesale change that was coming to how people thought of work. Traditional jobs, the thinking went, would soon become less and less common, with predictable, inefficient employment getting replaced by the flexibility of independent contract work. The "gig economy" was underway, and it was unstoppable.

Except that it stopped. In her new book, Gigged, reporter Sarah Kessler chronicles the ascent and decline of the gig economy, starting in the early 2010s, when it seemed every service — from grocery shopping to cleaning offices — could be "app-ified" to be done by easily scalable contract work, to the death of many of those services a few years later, when their models proved unsustainable. Read more...