Casey Baskin affective labor, Aneurysms, capitalism, Japan, labor, technology

A Friend in NEET Is a Friend Indeed

Paul Beatty’s brilliant 2015 novel The Sellout explores a pretty curious premise: what if a Black American decided to reinstitute slavery? It’s a thought experiment on the level of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, where a very high concept could go very badly wrong if it were in the wrong hands. Of course, Whitehead and Beatty pull it off.

As the tumultuous history of Reconstruction and Jim Crow showed, sometimes it’s easier to rent than to own. Convict leasing was a white capitalist’s dream: the cops scoop up Black men on any trivial charge imaginable, and then turn them into de facto slaves for private industry. If the guy gets poisoned or dies of heatstroke on the job, you just get another one. No net loss on the balance sheet.

No one with a brain ever said American history was pretty.

The relentless drive toward maximum precarity — euphemistically known as “gigification” — makes renting people a way of life. Uber driver, Care.com nanny, Seeking Arrangements sugar baby, the Grindr hookup that shows up to the Trader Joe’s restroom in 15 minutes flat — well, maybe I got a little too specific there.

All of these “arrangements” and platforms aspire to the Silicon Valley ideal of frictionlessness. Economic dots or particles should flow and couple and decouple without so much as a pink slip. What scholars call the Fordist economy of stable employment and mass production is so faint now as to not even be an echo. Silicon Valley seeks to instantiate the dream of neoclassical economics, as if that were possible. Homo economicus is on Grindr.

The Japanese culture blog Tofugu recently explored the world of NEET rentals, showing how affection, attention, and companionship can be turned into billable hours. NEET stands for “Not in Education, Employment, or Training,” a phenomenon of young people who have “failed to launch” in the American argot. The expression originated in that most benighted of countries, the United Kingdom, but the reality of the aimless young can be seen across the industrialized world. Some of these avocado-toast-eating, non-degree-seeking, non-homeowning hobos turn out to be quite enterprising, as it turns out. Tofugu interviewed Mio Kawai, a young woman in Japan who has made a successful business of just hanging out with lonely men. At first it sounds a lot like the sex work idea of “the girlfriend experience,” but there’s no sex. The men are not allowed to touch her. They just want company. On the other hand, Kawai stressed that 100% of her clients are men; no women ever sign up to pay to hang out with her.

According to Tofugu, this all started when a young man named Yosuke Naka decided, in 2014, to stand on the side of the road with a sign that said “RENTAL NEET: You can rent me.” And then we were off to the races. Of course, a conundrum materializes. “If a person was rented out and thus earned money, then that person would no longer be a NEET, no?” Mami Suzuki asked. “They’d technically have a job, making them a… NET?”

To be clear: putting out your shingle as a pleasant person to be around is an extremely far cry from slavery. But this new rental economy raises some interesting questions. For example, Uber makes sense if you want to go out to a bar and not drive home drunk; that service fulfills a reasonable need. But what does it mean that it’s easier to rent a person to talk to than make a friend? As anybody over 30 knows, it’s harder to make friends as you get older, so I get why people would want to “cut out the middleman” of normal human connection. Still, it sits uneasily with me that our relationships would be as thoroughly marketized and precarified as so much employment has become in the United States, Japan, and the like. As Suzuki aptly pointed out, friendship becomes employment.

Maybe I’m being too pessimistic, though. As the ambitious Mr. Naka puts it in his Twitter bio, “I’m also accepting requests to play games and build plastic models. I want to create jobs from scratch to fight against the long working hours of society.” He is making a dollar out of 15 cents, and maybe there’s something liberating there that shouldn’t be dismissed.

In any case, this week we have a wide range of recommended readings, as always. There are haircut wars in Texas; a Kubrickian monolith appears in Nevada; trans guys get dating advice. As the list below shows, the grand con of AI continues to occupy a lot of mental space for people in the media. By the way, we have an NFT of the Brooklyn Bridge we’d like to sell you.