Fiverr Gig Quotes

Though it finds its baldest expression in things like the Fiverr ads, this phenomenon—of work metastasizing throughout the rest of life—isn’t constrained to the gig economy. I learned this during the few years that I worked in the marketing department of a large clothing brand. The office had instituted something called the Results Only Work Environment, or ROWE, which meant to abolish the eight-hour workday by letting you work whenever from wherever, as long as you got your work done. It sounded noble enough, but there was something in the name that bothered me. After all, what is the E in ROWE? If you could be getting results at the office, in your car, at the store, at home after dinner—aren’t those all then “work environments”? At that time, in 2011, I’d managed not to get a phone with email yet, and with the introduction of this new workday, I put off getting one even longer. I knew exactly what would happen the minute I did: that every minute of every day I would in fact be answerable to someone, even if my leash was a lot longer.

In 2017, Fiverr ran a similar ad to NEC’s “Power Lunch,” but missing the lunch. In this one, a gaunt twenty-something stares dead-eyed into the camera, accompanied by the following text: “You eat a coffee for lunch. You follow through on your follow-through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.” Here, the idea that you would even withhold some of that time to sustain yourself with food is essentially ridiculed. In a New Yorker article aptly titled “The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death,” Jia Tolentino concludes after reading a Fiverr press release: “This is the jargon through which the essentially cannibalistic nature of the gig economy is dressed up as an aesthetic. No one wants to eat coffee for lunch or go on a bender of sleep deprivation—or answer a call from a client while having sex, as recommended in [Fiverr’s promotional] video.”17 When every moment is a moment you could be working, power lunch becomes power lifestyle.