Services like OnlyFans and Uber point towards a new form of exploitation that is both hypermodern and feudal — all made possible by the Internet.
You might be wondering how anyone could suggest that Uber and OnlyFans (OF) have any similarity beyond both being companies. While there are important differences about the specifics of the content of each service, when viewed at a macro-operational level their similarities become clearer. Both corporations are multinational monopoly digital platforms that use atomized labour from individuals who are viewed as flexible contractors, able to work whenever they so please with some caveats.
Uber is a ridesharing and food-delivery app (Uber Eats) based in San Francisco, California. Beyond differences in the charging structures of Uber and taxis, which are important considering Uber capitalizes on the fact that many individuals own personal vehicles, they ultimately undercut the power of taxis who rely on scarcity of supply. Moreover, Uber doesn’t pay a cent on wear and tear of one’s personal vehicle or for gas when on the job allowing enough room from the lack of those fixed costs to charge less for rides and capture more of the market.
The company is a successful example of Silicon Valley’s VC-infused tech-start-up sector which has a virtual monopoly on innovative high-technology production in the western hemisphere. Uber saw $1.8 billion USD in profit last year, the first time they posted profits since the now mega-corporation went public in 2019.
While Uber is certainly a brilliant idea from a market standpoint, three important aspects of Uber’s model should be noted when thinking through how societally we are worse off with it around: 1) it makes use of already-existing infrastructure entirely created by the public sector in terms of roads and the Internet (which was largely developed by the US military); 2) it contracts labour from individuals who use their own labour (driving) and capital (a car) and are therefore treated as “independent contractors” despite being better described as employees; 3) most of its profits and taxed revenues don’t filter into the hundreds of cities and localities it operates in (other than Silicone Valley, California and the US federal government, but even those revenues being taxed can be avoided through tax evasion schemes like using a Dutch holding company to avoid taxes).
Now consider OnlyFans, a London-based Internet-content subscription service that features mostly pornographic content from independent creators. OnlyFans makes revenue through fees, a 20 per cent cut on creators’ earnings and subscriptions.
Again, the same three components are at play with OnlyFans: it uses the infrastructure of the already existing Internet; it considers its workers independent contractors who sell their labour (taking and posting erotic pictures and videos, usually of one’s own body); and the bulk of the company’s revenues are only being taxed in England and London.
Much like how in the medieval period in Europe under manorialism, a lord owned a piece of land called a manor and had serfs work the land to support themselves and the lord, the “independent contractor” loophole on Uber and OnlyFans allows them to have no obligations to those who survive through working on their platforms, amounting to something like a digital fiefdom.
In broad strokes, this is the argument posed by economist and former finance minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis in his book released last year, Technofeudalism.
In an interview with The Guardian, Varoufakis explains that the new lords of big tech “charge rent… The people we think of as capitalists are just a vassal class now. If you’re producing stuff now, you’re done. You’re finished. You cannot become the ruler of the world anymore.”
While we can table the validity around the main thesis of Varoufakis’ book, that a techno-feudal system is replacing capitalism, his description of how big tech operates more like a feudal system than a capitalist one in the digital sphere perfectly describes the machinations of Uber and OnlyFans’ production model. Due to being considered “independent contractors” instead of employees, Uber drivers, for example, have had to fight in different countries and localities for employment status benefits like a minimum wage, health insurance and more.
The biggest case of this linguistic-legalistic sleight of hand being undermined by collective action from couriers took place in Ontario, Canada.
Uber Technologies Inc v Heller was a 2020 Supreme Court of Canada decision in which Ontario citizen and Uber courier David Heller and some of his colleagues argued they were entitled to a minimum wage and vacation and overtime pay under Ontario employment standards legislation. Uber fought this with the defence that being an “independent contractor” meant that one had flexibility over when to work and when not to, effectively making them not employees.
The Supreme Court, however, reached an 8-1 decision in favour of Heller to proceed with a class action against the ride-share company, a decision many legal experts said constituted a major victory for labour rights in the grey zones of online “contract” work.
Returning to the three previously outlined components that track in both OnlyFans’ and Uber’s business models, some of these shared characteristics can be solved in similar ways and others require more nuance to solve based on the content of the service.
In Uber’s case, all three issues can be relieved by simply nationalizing the service.
It makes sense if you consider that Uber is making use of public infrastructure in terms of roads, which take on wear and tear from their drivers, as well as the Internet, which was developed by United States’ taxpayers. As economist Mariana Mazzucato argues in her brilliant book The Entrepreneurial State, most of the greatest innovations of the past half century — the Internet, touchscreen technology, biotech breakthroughs, GPS, pharmaceutical NMEs, nanotechnology — were almost always first developed in the public sector and then the private sector later used the base innovation to create products like the iPhone.
Another aspect to consider vis-a-vis nationalization is that most people can benefit from using an Uber-like service as most people today have a phone and because so much infrastructure in the modern world, especially in North America, is centred around the automobile. This means most people paying into a nationalized Uber-style service would reap the benefits at far lower costs.
The knock-on effects of having a national Uber service would likely fix the “independent contractor” loophole as public sector employees, in general, have better benefits. Furthermore, the optics of a government employer skimping on standards protected in their own employee-standards legislation would be bad, to put it mildly.
Nationalization would certainly fix the untaxed revenue issue with these platforms. The revenue would go directly back into the pockets of the governments offering the service, which could then be used to pay for more services for those governments’ constituents instead of doing what many large private firms do with their profits, i.e. buying back stock and boosting executive and shareholder pay as is the case in so many large publicly traded LLCs.
OnlyFans is a trickier case when it comes to solutions.
In many ways, OnlyFans is a far more safe and less viscerally exploitative platform for sex workers than in-person forms of sex work such as prostitution and stripping as one can create content from the privacy of their own home, circumventing the threats of rowdy customers, abusive management and the transmission of sexual infection and disease. With that being said, all the same issues around Uber in terms of the company avoiding providing basic employment benefits to their workers, avoiding taxes and using Internet infrastructure to build a private media empire are still at play with OnlyFans.
However, it would be difficult to nationalize OF as one can anticipate with a reasonable degree of certainty that many taxpayers would not want their money funding a pornography-creator hub.
Additionally, the service being a fully online digital commodity introduces other potential complications around access to foreign creators and consumers depending on how protectionist the platform policies are. If someone’s tax dollars going towards an adult-content platform wasn’t enough to disturb them, their tax support mainly helping creators outside their country who keep most of their earnings and who pay income taxes to their own governments just might.
OnlyFans’ issues might be better treated by robust domestic legislation that takes its cue from the argument Heller brought to Uber, that OF is essentially an employer and needs to treat its workers as employees, providing benefits and so on.
Beyond that, not much else can be done pragmatically to directly socialize a service like OF other than that and increasing regulation of sex work more generally, even when it’s purely an online commodity.
Despite this, a wager might be made by the left that if other parts of society are cleansed of a logic dominated by capital, sex work — which will always exist of course — will be far less prevalent as people will likely feel less of a need to sell something as private as their naked body in a system that views people’s needs and unique abilities as far more essential than their ability to produce profits for a small amount of people in order to not starve, but I digress.
All in all, platforms like Uber and OnlyFans signal a sea change in how we think about the direction the economy and society are moving.
If Varoufakis is right, and a new kind of feudal political economy is emerging through big tech, that direction for all of us is likely not a better one, and OnlyFans and Uber are just the tip of the iceberg.