Film review: DOXA’s The Gig Is Up puts a human face to soulless ghost work and the platform economy
Vancouver-based director Shannon Walsh’s documentary reveals the exploitation of global gig workers
Photo courtesy Intuitive Pictures
The Gig Is Up opens the 20th annual DOXA Documentary Film Festival on May 6 and streams to May 16. A Q&A with director Shannon Walsh and special guests will be livestreamed May 7 at 7 pm PDT. The film will have a special DOXA Drive-In screening at the PNE Amphitheatre on May 13 at 9 pm PDT.
AS SURELY AS it cut down all the trees and extracted everything from the ground, capitalism these days is mining its very last resource—humans. This is the unvarnished truth of the gig economy, another of those glorious 21st-century tech innovations that has created incalculable wealth for a small few and a shittier world for everyone else.
Some 10 years after its debut, many now grasp the model of exploitation pioneered by the likes of Uber in which all costs are burdened by overworked “independent contractors” who then enjoy precisely no labour protection in return. Vancouver-based director Shannon Walsh’s The Gig Is Up adds fine detail to the picture, looking at the “platform economy” and its sick cousin, ghost work, in which millions of stressed-out and screen-addicted workers sacrifice their souls on the altar of transhumanism as they scramble to complete the “human intelligence work” that computational AI cannot, often for pennies, at least as often (if you’re outside the US or India) for Amazon gift cards.
The Gig Is Up divides most of its time between veterans of the field like Deliveroo rider Leila, seen in a futile battle with the company to compensate a colleague paralyzed in a work accident, and the wiry, gold-toothed Floridian Jason, whose mastery of paid online surveys keeps his multiply-addicted mother in lotto cards. Radicalized Uber driver Annette puts a fine point on matters: “People in their cushy little 9 to 5 jobs might think they’re safe, but there are companies out there trying to turn every industry into an Uber.”
Disappointingly, a COVID-set coda overlooks how the pandemic has set the stage for that very thing, but it’s a small complaint in a film that otherwise brings welcome clarity to one of your more pressing nightmares.
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