The term “gig economy” was first coined by journalist Tina Brown in 2009. She wrote about the trend of workers pursuing “a bunch of free-floating projects, consultancies and part-time bits and pieces while they transacted in a digital marketplace.” To sum up, Gigs are either knowledge-based assignments or need-based tasks.
The Global Village economy runs on the principles of Consumerism. Everyone is a producer and likewise everyone is a consumer. Gigs are the primary means of value exchange
The gig economy is made up of two main components: the independent producers paid by the gig (i.e., a
task or a project); the consumers who need a specific service, for example, a
ride to their next destination, or a particular item delivered. The bedrock of the Consumerism model is the balancing mechanism that is not dependent on Government or Third Party control to function . Instead, it uses Big Data and Consumer Surveillance technology to
maintain the balance between producers and consumers.
In the Global Village, every resident is both a consumer and a producer.
One Resident needs plumbing service, another Resident provides the
service. This transaction is automatically recorded by the Village
Consumer Surveillance (VCS) application.; and a conglomeration of
companies that connect the producer to the consumer in a direct manner,
including app-based technology platforms such as Uber,
Airbnb, Lyft, Etsy or TaskRabbit. Together they act as the conduit through which the producer is connected to – and ultimately paid by – the consumer. These
companies make it easier for Residents of the Global Village to sustain themselves as both producers and consumers, which can include any kind of work, from a musical performance to
fixing a leaky faucet. One of the main differences between a gig and
traditional work arrangements, however, is that a gig is a temporary
work engagement, and the producer is paid only for that specific gig. Manufacturing, construction, and infrastructure maintenance projects are the purvey of traditional corporations and communities. In this respect, Residents of the Global Village can have dual citizenship with an IP address and a land address.
The 21st Century growth of the gig economy was driven by the development of new technologies that enabled
transactions directly between providers and consumers. On the one hand,
app-based technology platforms are replacing people as middlemen to
connect consumers and producers quickly and easily, allowing individuals
to perform a variety of tasks for complete strangers based on real-time
demand. On the other hand, people are increasingly gravitating toward Consumerism either to supplement their traditional income or to pioneer new sources of income that are less prone to recessions and inflation.
Intuit and Emergent
Research have predicted that “the number of people working on-demand [gig] jobs would grow from 3.9 million Americans in 2016 to 9.2 million by 2021.”7 The pandemic has exacerbated this growth. To accommodate and nurture it, communities transitioning from the collapsing Industrial Park model to the Global Village model must support both producers and consumers in this transition. This requires new ways of funding public services such as education, health care, and safety. It will also disrupt the ability of Federal, State, and Local Governments to impose taxes using a structure designed for the Industrial Park. Residents of the Global Village are not tied to a particular community or geographic location for their sustainence. So they will likely gravitate to physical locations that offer the best value. Talking about how to tax them is like trying to make a better buggy whip when automobiles became commonplace. Perhaps an annual "residency" fee would be a better fit for their itinerant lifestyle?
