In this context, self-employment is not a freely chosen path, but rather a forced imposition. A look at the demographics of lean platform workers seems to support this. Of the workers on TaskRabbit, 70 per cent have Bachelor's degrees, while 5 per cent have PhDs. An International Labour Organization (ILO) survey found that workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (AMT) also tend to be highly educated, 37 per cent using crowd work as their main job. And Uber admits that around a third of its drivers in London come from neighbourhoods with unemployment rates of more than 10 per cent. In a healthy economy these people would have no need to be microtasking, as they would have proper jobs.

Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, loc. 71