The unofficial mantra of Web 2.0 billion dollar companies comes from Netflix: "We are a team, not a family." This has been a convenient way to sell the lack of traditional support structures employers used to offer their employees as an innovative, fresh, forward-looking, positive thing. Which of course it is--just not for the workers.
This is why the buzzwords that Web 2.0 companies like Netflix use are so inflected with sports and entertainment ideas--superstars, rock stars, Like "star' athletes, low-level workers at Web 2.0 companies have no job security, no benefits, and can be cut or traded like widgets. Except that with real sports stars and entertainers, workers can make enough money to retire on by the time they're 35. These "cutting-edge" tech companies, on the other hand, pay recent college grads $30,000 a year if they're lucky, and work these poor souls so hard that burnout rates are outlandishly high.
So what's the next major frontier in the increasingly absurd landscape of contemporary capitalism? How about selling college students on the buzzy, progressive idea of indentured servitude! How hip, how new, how exciting!
Purdue University has spearheaded a new method of getting students to accept outrageously high tuition rates that they will almost certainly be crushed under the weight of for decades. In exchange for funds to pay their tuition, students can pledge to pay a percentage of their future incomes.
The new agreement goes by a few names, like "income-sharing agreements" or "human capital contracts," and are seen as a way to spread risk and prevent students from being locked into dangerously high debt payments. Of course, what it really is is a textbook case of indentured servitude. Such are the grave times in which we live, the student debt crisis is so bad, it makes indentured servitude seem like a reasonable, perhaps even preferable, alternative to the current prospects.
Web 2.0 companies sell us freedom, opportunity, individuality and self-empowerment. What they've mostly done is get rich dressing up old capitalist control systems as an exciting fresh future.
