Modern · 2010
Mobile Revolution
Apple opened the App Store in July 2008, a year after the iPhone. By 2010 the smartphone was no longer a luxury handset. It was the computer most people actually touched, and it had a labor market of its own. Small teams could ship a product to millions without a shop, a warehouse, or a software publisher. At the same time, companies like Uber, founded in 2009, and the delivery and task platforms that followed, used that same phone to break jobs into single trips and pay for them one at a time.
Two workforces grew up in the same decade and barely resembled each other. One wrote the apps. The other was summoned by them.
The app as a small firm
Mobile development rewarded people who could design for a small screen, a thumb, and a flaky connection. Studios, agencies, and lone developers sold apps directly, keeping a share and giving the platform the rest. The platform set the rules, the review, and the price of admission. Independence was real and conditional. You could reach a market that used to require a publisher, and you could be removed from it overnight.
Around the apps grew a service layer: product managers, mobile designers, analytics staff who read what people tapped, and marketers whose entire job was acquisition and retention. Social-media management hardened from an intern's extra duty into a role with a budget, a voice, and a crisis plan. Community management, influencer relations, and content moderation scaled with the audiences. Moderation in particular became a large, hidden workforce, often contracted, often traumatizing, and rarely on the company's careers page.
The gig
Ride-hailing, delivery, and task platforms classified most of their workers as independent contractors. The practical job was a shift without the word. You logged on, accepted jobs the algorithm offered, and earned a rate you did not negotiate, in a zone the map colored in. Flexibility was genuine for some people, especially those stitching it around care or another job. Benefits, a floor under earnings, and any say over the dispatch were generally absent.
The fight over what to call this work, employee or contractor, is the labor politics of the decade. It matters for the museum because the technology did not merely create a new task. It revived an old arrangement, piecework, and gave it a phone. The messenger and the day laborer would have recognized the structure, if not the rating system.
Everyone else, interrupted
Shops, newsrooms, and offices spent the decade rebuilding themselves for a customer who was holding a phone. Retail clerks were asked to match an online price. Reporters were asked to file constantly. The receptionist shared the front door with an app. These were not new occupations. They were old ones with a second boss, the screen in the customer's hand.
2010 is when software stopped being a place you went, an office, a lab, a website at a desk, and became the thing mediating the shift. The developer and the driver are both products of that mediation. One writes the terms. The other works under them.
Work that grew
- Mobile developer
- Product manager
- Social-media manager
- Content moderator
- Gig driver and courier
Work that lost its place
- Feature-phone retail specialist
- The unmediated taxi dispatch
- Software distribution through retail discs
Companies of this chapter
Largest
- ExxonMobil
Still, at the start of the decade, the company markets treated as the most valuable.
- Apple
The iPhone and the App Store turned it, within a few years, into the most valuable company in the world.
- Walmart
The largest private employer in the United States, and the physical retail the apps were built against.
New at the time
- Facebook
Founded in 2004. By 2010 it was hiring the moderators, advertisers, and product staff of a media company.
- Uber
Founded in 2009. The firm that made piecework look like an app and argued its drivers were not employees.
- Airbnb
Founded in 2008. A small software staff coordinating a much larger, scattered workforce of hosts.