Article by Jamie Powell

Silicon Valley’s mission to return the globe to a Victorian modus-operandi seemingly knows no bounds. The latest (re) invention from our Bay area doyens? Discrete labour.

May we introduce you to Jupiter — a service that, for a monthly fee, will not only deliver your groceries, but also stock your fridge (or pantry, or cellar) at home whilst you are away. Intrusion-as-a-service, if you will.

Apart from giving several strangers carte-blanche access to your house, the service makes some sense superficially. High functioning white collar types, so it goes, are overworked, time-short and perpetually hungry thanks to their keto diet, so having a full fridge back at the flat does alleviate the stress of having to go to Whole Foods after you jump off the Google bus. 

It is also, theoretically, more efficient. Multiple drops can be made in one trip, so energy (in the form of fuel or leg-power) is saved, and the company says that their service uses less packaging than a traditional supermarket sweep. (As an aside, the economics of this model, as we’ve found with many delivery-fee based companies, are somewhat fuzzier.)

That’s all well and good. But Jupiter also returns us to a Victorian era of capital-labour relations where the scrabbling underclass are not just glimpsed through carriage windows on the way to the manor, but hardly seen at all.

In fact, it’s a slightly worse deal for the modern work-hand. Victorian (and pre-Victorian) servants were often housed in the grand manors of their masters and provided with the relevant care — be it education, healthcare or sustenance. Often, they ingratiated themselves with their masters to the extent they’d be left some of the capital stock in the will — Jane Austen’s parting gift to her brother’s longtime cook, Madame Bigeon, being one such example.

No such mechanism for sharing in this capital exists now for those at the bottom of the human-bringing-food chain. In fact, many of the most transformative start-ups of the past decade have allowed those with equity funded capital — such as a flat — to squeeze more yield out of the relevant asset, which then leads to the accumulation of more capital, and so on.

Of course, the counterargument is that tech-driven deflation means many of these goods and services are also enjoyed by those who never had access to them before. But how it shapes our view over human beings is arguably far more problematic. That’s assuming that the user of services such as Jupiter, sees workers as humans at all.

Silicon Valley shares many tropes with the Victorian era, not least an obsession to master death, but as it turns out, a firm return to a servitude economy seems its best bet at returning us to that state of affairs.

It’s a strange situation, the Victorian-era used to be thought of as an anachronism, a societal structure we’d rather not to return to. Well, as it turns out, we don’t mind turning our clocks back a century or so, as long as a few Y Combinator graduates get rich.