We have reached a nadir

Tracy and I were watching the Monday Jen Psaki show on MSNBC tonight when a new ad appeared.  Usually, the ads at that hour – 8 p.m. – have something to do with getting old.  People have fallen, and they can’t get up; they can remember stuff like what they had for breakfast this morning because of a new miracle pill that enhances their memory; their feet feel better and they can walk the dog longer distances because of the new insoles they’ve begun using in their shoes.

Tonight was different.  An ad appeared for something that offered to help you out in your business with “freelance AI experts.”

The word “freelance” was once a badge of honor in the journalism game.  I remember the day after I resigned my position as a staff writer at the Village Voice seeing a friend in a Village bar.  “Hey, I heard you left the Voice,” he said.  “You’re freelance now!”

There was pride associated with being a freelancer.  You came up with ideas for stories and you pitched them to magazine editors, or if you were having a good week, the phone rang, and it was a magazine editor offering to send you out to Kansas City to do a story on mob murders that had recently broken out there.  One day I got a call from a magazine that wanted a piece on the cabaret circuit, a string of night clubs that had sprung up around the country on the order of New York’s Reno Sweeney or The Ballroom that featured singers like Karen Akers and on the high end, out in Las Vegas and San Francisco, Peter Allen, who was then married to Liza Minelli. 

You could make a decent living freelancing back then.  It involved a lot of travel, but travel on TWA and Pan Am was sexy and exciting.  I once stayed in a boutique hotel in Paris that had a bathroom the size of a New York studio apartment, and I sat in first class on a cross country flight next to Chip Monck, the stage manager at Woodstock famous for warning people, “stay away from the brown acid, man” in a voice that sounded like the advice was coming down from God himself.

You didn’t have office hours because you didn’t have an office.  I remember thinking one night in a $10-a-night pensione in Beirut listening to bomb blasts going off one after another in the darkened city, this is my office.  It was a thought at once romantic and dangerous and stupid in a mix of youthful ambition and naivete.

That was what it was like to freelance.

Now, tonight on our television set, we learned that all you have to do is pick up your cellphone or walk across the room to your laptop and you can avail yourself of a business that promises you freelance AI experts.  If it’s AI, they’re not human.  If they’re experts, their knowledge comes from raking through billions of bits of work by other people that is available without charge on the internet.  And if that is what freelance now means, well, we are doomed.