Book - Chapter Two: Being "Less Than;" An Open Letter To Dashers

Full Dashclosure, Awakening from the human exploitation of DoorDash Singularity

Episode #4: The Full Dashclosure Audiobook & Podcast

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Now Friends, those who have not labored in the sewer of technology-deployed human hijacking that is the gig economy may also read my letter, but you won’t fully comprehend it.

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An Open Letter To Dashers, from Jeff Thomas Black - December 1, 2022

Dear Fellow Dashers and Gig Economy Laborers,

“It’s been 100 days since your last dash,” read the email. “It’s been a while, Jeffrey.” Not long enough. “Ready to earn again,” it offered.

Nope. Never again will I Dash. I’m not in a financial position to enjoy gambling and I don’t play losing games. I quit. I’d rather hunt around this page of Full Dashclosure for easter eggs. I choose to work in a real world, in this present moment that I can consciously observe and awaken to. I no longer trust black box artificial intelligence. I never did. I was simply desperate, and though educated and experienced, I was also terribly old for the modern employment market (54!) and without income-producing options during the pandemic. Desperation is very unpleasant, I know you know. I darkly-jested that I was ready to “sell myself into slavery” for money, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t make it happen! Choices have interesting and unpredictable results - in the real world.

Something inside me identifies with the meek, the many, us; the ones that inherit valuable stuff in the end of a very long and winding story. That feeling of being “less than,” while walking amongst the crowd. I’ve lived on limited income for some time now, as a preternaturally non-compliant consciousness. I have virtually no possessions and absolutely no money, but I’m happy and I’m free.

Now, I get the privilege of corresponding with you, which is a true pleasure. I’ve watched so many YouTube content creator videos on the gig economy, that I feel like I’ve known many of you for years! You deserve all the credit in the world for making the most of the opportunities that you’ve found and I honor you in writing this book. I know you’re some of the most dedicated and driven workers in our society. You deserve both steady work and honest compensation for that work, paid for a full and specific period of time; no less.

Of all my skills, compromise fails me when values and civil rights are at stake; so that’s often. Not to say I turn down many suitors for my labor. Even those I want have not wanted me. Their choice; right or wrong. I’m on the outside looking in for so long now, I can’t remember what the alternative was like anyway. So I Dashed; desperately I Dashed after finally getting a car sturdy enough for the task. It sucked, without doubt; but it beat sitting at home waiting for work that would never be offered to me in time to pay my bills, much less my debts.

I was never fooled into thinking I had a fair bargain, but I also didn’t know I was in a Matrix world; a game where I was playing against data science-informed artificial intelligence exclusively and explicitly created to exploit my unconscious mind, my assets and my labor. That took me a very long time to learn, so I came up with my own basic rules and rationale as follows:

• Live in the zone and sit at home until an offer is good enough to make you leave. Never wait for DoorDash. The waiting will waste your time, drive you crazy and coerce you into bad decisions and mistakes.

• Run errands and do shopping, while quickly declining over 90% of the absurd DoorDash offers that harass you with notifications and waste your time in the multi-step decline operation of a smartphone.

• Never drive long distances. It’s better to just sit still or go for a walk.

• Don’t Dash at night. You can’t see addresses and it’s just not worth the hassle and extra time. Stranger danger is the least of the hazards Dashers face, statistically and also from my experience. Tripping hazards, pedestrians, animals, faulty staircases and other cars are all dangerous as hell.

• When parking, limit any need to use Reverse. When you drive for many hours at a time and tens-of-hours in a week in a delivery capacity, bad stuff happens. It just does. I rarely had any issues with dings or dents in my decades of driving. As a Dasher, I found myself playing bumper-cars. Cement parking poles, half-walls, invisible curbs, other cars, parking garages; they all turned savage on me. Don’t let them turn on you. I beat the hell out of my car and it took thousands of dollars to pay for the damage; a bad bargain.

• Every time you move your car, park, get out, get back in, drive, park, deliver, get back in, and drive back to a busy zone there is major RISK involved. Delivery driving is one of the most dangerous tasks one can do. Yet, our protections for personal and automobile risks are laughable and functionally useless, in the case of a serious incident. No, they don’t want to pay your claim. Try to make them. DoorDash lives off your RISK. Know it; resent it NOW; and don’t wait for the upcoming holiday season!

What good is November 2022’s much-publicized "safety update" from the fake, rigged market scheme of DoorDash, which neither employs Dashers, nor fairly compensates us with risky expense-ridden independent gig contracts? File this propaganda under DoorDash will offer you ANYTHING BUT MONEY.

Such irrelevant public relations claims hyped by stranger danger are called corporate whitewashing. Money talks and B.S. walks! DoorDash's self-serving PR stunts don't have dollar-signs attached, so they're meaningless. Without legitimate market-based work that pays even minimum-wage after our profit-crushing expenses and the documented high risk of injuries and auto accidents we face in our tasks, there shouldn't be any gigapp labor for DoorDash to exploit. As a result, there won't be any safety concerns for Dashers to face! It’s the self-correcting answer to this global scam of soulless billionaires who enslaved us with lies, obsessively cultivated data science-driven gamification and the deployment of exploitative artificial intelligence.

Scapegoating customers that will never know or hear our complaints won’t change anything, but it will take heat off DoorDash, which under-compensates labor and causes continuing mental health issues for Dashers. DoorDash both prompts and controls the alleged “tips,” which aren’t really tips by any real-world definition.

Only the total compensation amount matters; all the categories underneath the compensation total are there to distract you; like a shell game. The same number of objects are always there, no matter how you divide them up or which categories hold any given quantity. DoorDash controls target compensation number that a Dasher will hit in a given shift; thus by extension, AI controls all alleged tips as a subcategory of the pre-set target compensation. You’re a subset of one. Nobody has your “market,” because it’s only in your head and in the Dasher game world.

This non-existent Dasher/Customer rivalry is a planted story by the craven goons in Dasher marketing. If we’re made to believe that customers aren’t giving us our due respect and are to blame for the minimal tips, then we fail to focus upon DoorDash as the sole perpetrator; the one entity responsible for controlling our labor supply, delivery demand, post-expense earnings, inflation risk and personal asset use. The data necessary for conscious and rational business decision making is precisely known, yet in a hideously–deceptive game world, it remains hidden from real world labor attempting to get ahead.

Consumers are worried about their own issues including grossly-overpriced food and merchandise, and not about our perniciously isolated ghost labor, which they rarely even see, much-less engage on a conscious level. Customers don't watch YouTube-based Dasher video content and in general, simply possess neither the time nor desire to know how DoorDash operates its business. We're merely part of a convenience service that's already too expensive without promotions, discounts and incentives. As with Dashers, DoorDash needs customers to become habituated to their platform. Addiction is absolutely key to their insidiously-rigged corporate game.

Every order you get is personalized for your past behaviors and choices. Orders are not part of any market we can comprehend, even though from a Dasher’s perception, it appears to be like markets we'd see in the real world. DoorDash is not in any way operated in a real world marketplace. That's why the Dasher smartphone app is totally isolated and disaggregated from all other DoorDash and internet-based systems. It’s why we don't get the copious amounts of data that they predict with great precision through computing that can make over 6 MILLION predictions per-second. 

Any so-called independent contractor that has Dashed for even a short period of time has probably observed that the data and statistics DoorDash serves-up to manipulate them are neither legitimately measured, nor accurately calculated. Merely 15-merchants and 15-dashers provides over one trillion possible delivery combinations. Think of this fact every time you believe you're in a market for your labor that you understand in any meaningful way. I can't understand that data and you can't either. No human being has that capability. DoorDash provides Dashers with an ILLUSION. What the Dasher app shows and offers to me is tailored to my data set. What it shows and offers to you is tailored to yours.

Data scientists even encode preset monetary targets for the gross income a Dasher will make during any given shift of Dashing. You will earn what the game dictates you’ll earn. You're NOT operating independently in any way, shape or form. Any decision you make is prompted, served and exploited by the game; a Dasher game that can strand you in a parking lot, make you frantically and dangerously busy, or send you one money-losing offer after another to gaslight you into submission; thus coercing you into bad and even MONEY LOSING business decisions. That’s called psychological abuse and slavery; appslavery - the enslaving of humans via a smartphone!

But DoorDash is a game; only a game. In the DoorDash - Dasher app NOTHING MEANS ANYTHING. The ONLY RULE is that there ARE NO RULES. These are proven facts; the hiding of which from Dashers, makes DoorDash’s onerous agreements invalid and likely criminal. DoorDash is a game in which artificial intelligence plays THE OMNIPOTENT GOD; substituting silly and fake programs, gamification elements of status, stars and badges in place of fair compensation and honest business practices. The vacuous claims attached to the gamification elements and meaningless dashboard statistics add another layer of vagary, delivering craftily-inferred and unmeasurable future benefits, never to be proven as an element in Dasher compensation.

Combined with the obfuscation of relevant data, the distractions of gamification are served to us in place of MONEY; a medium of exchange. This fact alone constitutes both illegal and deceptive practices. Money is the only reason for us to do this simple but challenging work, and DoorDash plays us for fools. Yet the fools are Tony Xu, Andy Fang and Stanley Tang, along with the investors and executives who know well the details of the scam, including DoorDash’s literally unreal corporate earnings. Of course they always “hit their targets,” it’s THEIR MARKET and THEIR WORLD! 

The classic 1983 movie "War Games" depicted a nuclear war-threatened world completely vulnerable to a militarily co-opted artificial intelligence. Just like the movie, the existential threat of DoorDash’s AI-run game cannot be defeated by any human player. Watch "War Games" and know that the singularity is here now; driving the unconscionable exploitation of our labor; using us for a global corporate financial scheme.

“THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY."

Like the cryptocurrency busts of our current news cycle; DoorDash’s financial reporting and earnings are simply too good to be true. When something is too good to be true; hide your wallet and run. Dashers must stop being their fools. It's time to get real with ourselves about the appslavery they perpetrate upon us and their accompanying labor laundering; the intentional isolation of our version of the game, our labor and our income. “They’ll gladly pay you by the hour for a minute or so;” truer words were never written about DoorDash and our so-called gig economy.

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“They’ll gladly pay you by the hour for a minute or so.” ~Jesse Jett, from his song, “Powerless”

They're manipulative monsters who are lying to the world about what DoorDash does, how they do it, what they pay, how they destroy fleeced local merchants and literally every other part of their vile business model. The truth may be hard to take - but it's truth nevertheless. I'm writing this for you today and in real time. It’s written to you, for you and from one of you.

As Dashers, we are the ONLY real elements of the DoorDash delivery operation. This completely-rigged market simulation and obscenely-predatory game must end forever. Human beings are now at risk of DoorDash’s gamified appslavery in 27-nations around the globe.

Here’s a terrifying thought. Any unscrupulous dictator or corporation could use DoorDash’s technology to enslave a corporate labor force or even the people of an entire nation. Anyone that can be given a smartphone that runs apps, is in grave danger in the DoorDash Singularity.  That’s why the DoorDash Singularity; codified and perpetrated by billionaires, is a clear and present existential threat not just to laborers, but to all of humanity. 

We can ALL find better things to do for income than be pawns in a rigged game where we lose every time we play. Even a minimum-wage job is infinitely more beneficial for workers. DoorDash must be dismantled and destroyed. There’s nothing worth saving - no innovation - and no value for humanity. End it!  What could possibly be worse than gaslighting dedicated and hard-working laborers desperate for living-wage employment, while destroying their mental health, compromising their physical health and deceiving them into working without even minimum-wage compensation - even at a highly-coerced financial loss? That’s slavery; appslavery; the singularity. 

This open letter is from my heart to all Dashers who have suffered in the abusive DoorDash gigapp, because you deserve to know the truth immediately. I simply can’t watch Dashers suffer in this gamified hellscape for another day. It’s simply too awful to behold. It’s now time for every Dasher, consumer and merchant to permanently log out of DoorDash’s world. Your future, and our world’s future depend upon a unified societal rejection of DoorDash’s cravenly destructive and dystopic illusions. May you each find happiness, peace, consciousness and gainful employment in your impending ex-Dasher life.

Sincerely,

Jeff Thomas Black 

P.S. - Under no circumstances should we ever again trust our labor to employment schemes gamified with black box artificial intelligence and exclusively served on a smartphone app. This is a new truism for the singularity. We must teach this to our children and never, ever forget.

P.P.S. - This is a true story. Don’t call me.