The Truth About the Freelance Economy

By Eliza Romero

Back in June 2017, I wrote a blog post called “The Pros and Cons of the Gig Economy” where I talked about my high hopes for a freelancer economy. Even though I said we needed specific government measures in place for it to thrive, I was very enthusiastic. In theory, “gigging” or “freelancing” sounds great to independent contractors and creatives who crave freedom and want to do what they are passionate about for a living. Gigging means that freelancers can come in for their designated assignment and then leave when it’s finished. Ideally, they’re leaving for their next well-paying short term gig.

I was wrong.

When you dig deeper, the reason the gig economy even exists is pretty grim. You know, the lack of being able to find stable employment in the era of mass layoffs and in an economic climate where the average person struggles to eek out a decent living wage. When I wrote the blog post, I was enthusiastic but I no longer feel that way. In retrospect, my optimism was a bit naive.

I read The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida in college and I read The Gig Economy by Diane Mulcahy and was pretty enamored with the freelance lifestyle, and to be perfectly honest, I still am. But I worry about others and have been thinking about the other freelancers. In The Gig Economy, Mulcahy talks about how full-time jobs are slowly disappearing, either by being declared redundant or being replaced by automation. Freelance or contract gigs are taking their place. She wrote this book because she’s a professor in the Babson MBA program where she teaches a super popular course called, of course, The Gig Economy. This is all true, but unless you want to live an extremely stressful life or you hit the big time — Oscar-winning actors and authors of blockbuster novels, for example — you’re going to need someone supporting you who has both health insurance and a stable income, otherwise you could seriously go insane.

It is certainly the entrepreneurial dream. If it was more realistic and easier to do, it would be the greatest thing ever. Follow your passion, always do something different, work on lots of projects at once or work on just one at a time, in a different location or at home if you wanted, As far as making money, it would be great if it was easy to find these kinds of gigs, get hired at the rate you quote them, and then get paid in a timely manner.

Income inequality and the way we’ve shifted our culture to a winner-takes-all society plays the biggest part in the killing of the creative class (even more than the internet, in my opinion). For a creative class that is mostly made up of freelancers, there is just no safety net for them and when I say safety net, I’m talking about health insurance, unemployment benefits. And guaranteed pay. Ask anyone who’s ever freelanced before and they’ll tell you how you really need to follow up hard to get that paycheck. It might be six months after a project is complete before you see any compensation. Nobody wants only independently rich people to be able to make music, write novels, write articles, design clothing, take photographs, make films, etc. All of these obstacles create a culture in which nobody will see an incentive to create anymore, and I find that detrimental to any society.

You can’t have a thriving creative class without low-rent living and studio spaces. Every artist enclave is known for attracting creatives because of large spaces rented for cheap. Creatives need to collaborate, find inspiration and feel supported by one another. Baltimore had this for a while in the mid 2000s, and now those same neighborhoods are boasting loft spaces for $3200 a month.

When I was in grad school, I lived in a neighborhood called Mount Vernon, which was nicknamed the “East Village of Baltimore” (a name that everyone hated but it stuck because Rolling Stone did a story on the music scene there). I was able to rent a 1200 square foot, 2 bedroom apartment right in the center of neighborhood for only $1000 a month. Now that same building has gone co-op and instead of students and musicians living there, it’s a bunch of finance and lawyer types. DC is inaccessible now too. NYC’s downtown Manhattan used to be the haven for artists, musicians and media types. Then it was Brooklyn. Now they’re moving further and further east. Austin, Texas, another city where I used to live, is getting more and more crowded and expensive once corporate types who were looking to buy the city’s cool caché started moving there.

Pretty much once corporate types start moving in, it becomes inherently uncool and all the artists leave. A great artist enclave will always have a thriving music scene. Once the musicians go, all the others go. Will rising rents cause the creative class to disappear or will it just cause the creative class to move to new cities?

I am very skeptical of the freeing benefits of the internet economy now. In theory, it sounds great. It can be and has been done. But it’s so rare when it does. The few success stories create such a false sense of hope. There is a new industry of internet and social media entrepreneurs who claim that they can teach your their secrets to success if you sign up for their courses. I want to put out a warning to any aspiring bloggers, photographers or influencers out there. Don’t buy into a course that someone offers that promises to show you how “You too can finally quit your job so you can make six figures a year!” The whole online coaching course thing is so fake and predatory. There are too many coaches, and not enough people actually doing the work. There are even coaching courses to teach you how to sell and teach online coaching courses. It makes me want to puke. They are just as bad as MLMs, in that they captivate people and they speak directly to their innate need to be valued and needed. They will convince you to spend all this money buying more and more of their online courses and products, and tell you it’s all about investing in yourself. It’s bullshit. I get that they’re trying to make a living but they’re selling a bogus product to people who really shouldn’t be parting with their money that way. Successful bloggers don’t take those courses, even on their come-up.

Nobody saw the damaging effects of technology on the creative middle class. In fact, photographers, architects, graphic designers, musicians, and journalists enjoyed the new conveniences of these technologies two decades ago, before those same things began chipping away at their own livelihoods. For designers to work, there needs to be a marketing or PR budget, and in the recession, most of these budgets were cut, even from major corporations. Same with newspapers and magazines. Photography, journalism and design jobs all got cut. Now everyone just goes on PowerPoint or Photoshop and think they don’t need to hire a designer. It’s one of those industries that is seen as “Cheaper isn’t just better; it’s the only way to do things now.” It just needs to look good enough. Craftsmanship isn’t valued anymore.

Something I always notice is when you drive down the street and you look at how horrible the signage is in most places, it’s because of all these well-meaning but unqualified people who think that they can just throw something up on Photoshop. (Side note: I miss hand-lettered signage.) People don’t understand that a professionally trained artist is much better than some kid who learned how to use Photoshop on YouTube. People value the tools but don’t value the craft that informed their creation in the first place. This drives down the rates and brings a bunch of fakes and phonies into the profession. This is hard for millennials, because being a designer, architect or photographer was such a glamorous profession in the early 2000s. They are the kinds of occupations many creatives aspired to be while in high school and college.

I used to be really naive about the internet democratizing the playing field for creatives, especially those working outside of major metropolitan areas like NYC and Los Angeles, for example. But I was wrong. All it has done is create an environment where there just isn’t enough paying work for everyone involved. Everyone thinks that just because distribution has been democratized, then talent has been democratized too. It hasn’t. For example, people will view images of art installations in museums and art exhibits and they think, “Oh I can do that.” No. They can’t.

There is the term “cultural elite” which is code for “someone who has gotten away with something for far too long,” according to novelist Jonathan Lethem. “It’s a term of distrust — you can almost hear a plan for vengeance in it.” We see this with museums and philharmonics having to defend their worth based on the money they are able to generate. “When a Kentucky newspaper reported the Chapter 11 filings of the Louisville Orchestra, the reader comments generated by the story gave a sense of the way so many people think about culture and the market: ‘Get rid of them, they aren’t self-supporting.’ ‘Pack up your fiddles and go home. Find real jobs.’ ‘Sell off all assets to pay these people off, fire them all and get rid of the Orchestra. It’s isn’t popular with the residents or they would have packed crowds and not have to worry about money.’” Basically, the sentiment now is that if you can’t generate income or profit, then you shouldn’t exist at all. Everything is being held accountable. (Timberg, The Killing of the Creative Class)

I do think that there is a demonization or devaluation of creative workers and aspiring artists in mainstream society. We’re called starving artists, we’re called unique but useless, and we’re basically made to feel like lazy idiots if we don’t want to enter a STEM major or field. Not everyone is cut out for STEM. So it’s a major thing that the creative class is struggling so much. We consider people who want to major in the arts and find careers in them as entitled. So when people started losing their careers after the dot com burst and great recession, we just shrugged them off. Society sneers when a musician or a photographer gets laid off. It’s almost as if we see it as, “They got what they deserved.” There is so much resentment toward those who pursue cultural work. It is seen as playing. I really think it’s because work is viewed as something to dislike while you just suck it up and do it. So if someone actually loves what they do, people get bitter and want them to be miserable too.

Do we view artists’ struggles as what’s supposed to happen? Is this why society views artists with disdain?

Also, the big question: Why do we even need a freelance economy for creatives? Isn’t it just an excuse for CEOs and companies to escape any sort of social responsibility while paying their higher executives even more? The freelancer economy was created out of necessity. Most people would prefer to just find a stable job rather than constantly scrambling and searching for their next hustle.

It’s time to stop giving these gigs sexy names like “side hustle” and start calling them what they really are — informal employment that leads to nothing but precarity for young professionals and the working class.

Source: Scott Timberg, Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class.

*To read more by Eliza Romero, visit her blog Aesthetic Distance. She can also be found on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Her weekly podcast, The Aesthetic Distance Podcast, is available on Spotify, Soundcloud, Apple, Google Play, Stitcher, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.