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beatricetate89-blog · 3 years

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fred loya auto insurance denver co

BEST ANSWER: Try this site where you can compare quotes from different companies :insurancebestrates.top

fred loya auto insurance denver co

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margaretbeagle · 3 years

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IFundWomen's Guide to Cultivating an Inclusive and Engaged Digital Community

How does IFundWomen empower and support women entrepreneurs? Their strength is in their community. IFundWomen, the go-to funding marketplace for women-owned businesses, aims to empower and support women entrepreneurs as they navigate building their businesses. They’ve identified a powerful marketing channel to help these women bring their visions to life: digital community.

Read on for a behind-the-scenes look at how IFundWomen integrates their marketing and community building to foster inclusive digital spaces. You'll hear directly from Shakivla Todd, Marketing Associate at IFundWomen, and you'll learn:

Community tactics to build closer, longer-lasting relationships with your customers

How to learn from your community to inform your marketing strategy

Where Shakivla finds inspiration for creating social media content for a small business audience⠀

How to avoid tone-deaf marketing in uncertain times

This post is part of the #BufferBrandSpotlight, a Buffer social media series that shines a spotlight on the people that are helping build remarkable brands through social media, community building, content creation, and brand storytelling.

This series was born on Instagram stories, which means you can watch the original interview in our Highlights found on our @buffer Instagram profile.

Who are you?

My name is Shakivla Todd and I am the Marketing Associate for IFundWomen. More importantly, I’m a stellar older sister, a dope friend, and a budding plant mom. IFundWomen is the go-to funding marketplace for women-owned businesses and the people who want to support them with capital, coaching, and connections. We offer immediate access to capital through a premium online fundraising experience, access to small business grants from corporate partners, expert business coaching on all the topics entrepreneurs need to know about, and a network of women business owners that sparks confidence, accelerates knowledge, and ignites action.

I manage our digital communities through social media strategy, Slack engagement, and e-mail marketing. I also am a startup coach and I get to coach women entrepreneurs on how to level up their social media game—this is one of my favorite parts of my role!

Where do you find inspiration for IFundWomen’s social media content?

I spend a lot of time scrolling through Instagram to get inspo for social content. I am always stalking Ellevest, R29 Unbothered, Freelancing Females, Girlboss, the list goes on. Additionally, our community is #TeamMemes so pop culture inspires a good amount of my content. I am also looking for the next thing to be memeified! For example, millennials collectively are re-watching the early 2000s sitcom Girlfriends on Netflix. Everyone is talking about it, so I made a meme from a picture of the cast to promote one of our grant programs.

Lastly, I would be lying if I didn’t say that we get inspired by checking out our competitors. It’s a great tactic!

How does managing IFundWomen’s social media account and community look like on a day-to-day basis?

First thing I do in the morning is check all DMs across platforms. I can do this from laying in my bed, so it’s a good slow start to the day and I don’t have to worry about it during the workday. I like to respond to any messages and comments within 24 hours, but if it’s a launch day or something important I check in with Instagram much more frequently.

On an amazing day, I have already scheduled my posts into Buffer. So, I’ll go check on them to make sure everything is still good to go. After that, my day is clear to be creative and strategize for future content. I collaborate with our sales, coaching, and creative teams to ensure that we are consistently marketing our products, services, events, and partnership. I have to make sure everything is reflected in our marketing content calendar.

What advice do you have for brands that are trying to foster a supportive, inclusive online community?

Don’t be tone-deaf. A lot of STUFF is going on in this land of 2020. You can’t ignore it. You have to find some way to address it that aligns with your brand’s mission, values, and voice. That being said, don’t just say something to say something. Be authentic and make it work for you. For example, during the aftermath of George Floyd’s death instead of going silent or posting a black square, our response was amplifying and supporting Black women-owned businesses recognizing that one of the most important actions to combat racial injustice is to redistribute money to Black-owned businesses. ⁠

Don’t be tone-deaf. A lot of STUFF is going on in this land of 2020. You can’t ignore it. You have to find some way to address it that aligns with your brand’s mission, values, and voice.

How do you learn from your community to help guide your marketing strategy?

Our community is loud and clear about what they need, want, and love. I like to try out different tactics and just watch to see where our community takes it. If something goes “viral” I continue to create content similar to that. Our followers are also often in our DMs asking for help to get their businesses funded. Their specific questions fuel my marketing strategy.

Our followers are also often in our DMs asking for help to get their businesses funded. Their specific questions fuel my marketing strategy.

For example, IFundWomen partners with companies to build grant programs for businesses. Over the summer, during the application window for one of our grants people were consistently sliding in our DMs asking very specific questions about their grant application. We decided to host a workshop specifically on grant writing. To promote this free workshop I seriously just took a screenshot of the first slide of the presentation that was going to be used for the workshop. The post blew up with nearly 1000 likes and over 400 people registered for the workshop. I think it succeeded because the Instagram post was very simple, straight to the point, and directly addressed a concern our community was having.

What’s your number one tip for engaging with IFundWomen’s community?

Perform like everyone’s best friend on the gram. What does that mean? That means most comments and DMs get very personalized responses. I interact with our followers not only on our posts but on their posts as well if it comes across our feed. I often engage as if our business account is a personal account. It’s a great tactic to beat the algorithm, but also to build community and brand trust.

Perform like everyone’s best friend on the gram.

How do you stay up to date on social media/marketing trends?

I love reading Buffer’s, Later’s, Hootsuite’s blogs, and Social Media Today. A good scroll through TikTok and Twitter is also good for the brain. I think most trends start in those two apps. Shameless plug, I take what I learn all over the internet and put it into a roundup of “trends to keep up with” in my newsletter, Trending with Shak.

What's your favorite IFundWomen partnership to date and why?

The Funding Journey is an IGTV series where we interview successful founders on the long, sometimes complicated, journey to getting their businesses funded. It’s my favorite because:

I get to put on my true producer hat and build something out start to finish.

Most of the founders we interview are from HUGE brands. It means amazing reach for us as a brand plus our community LOVES hearing from brands they love like Black Girl Sunscreen, Lively, and The Helm.

Link to Instagram post found here.

We hope this interview with Shakivla helps you get started with or double down on your social media efforts. You can follow her journey on Instagram here!

Have any questions for Shakivla? Feel free to reply with your questions to the Twitter post below and Shakivla or someone from the Buffer team will get to them as soon as possible.

IFundWomen's Guide to Cultivating an Inclusive and Engaged Digital Community published first on https://improfitninja.weebly.com/

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itsadvertising · 3 years

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Are You Considering Adding Affiliates To Your Marketing?

When hiring a sales team, there is a lot of time spent on training, wages and lead generation. Sales teams are a way to scale up business especially with physical products. However, for e-commerce businesses hiring a large sales force is not practical or cost effective.

So, how do you scale up? The answer is affiliate marketing.

For most online retailers, managing dozens or even hundreds of affiliates is too big a task.

You have to set up a dedicated portal, find and keep in touch with your affiliates, manage the technical side of tracking and payments. The list goes on!

But it’s also difficult to set up sales channels that produce results. You can avoid the hassle by setting up an affiliate program instead. The simple truth is that affiliate marketing works. In fact, nearly 90% of marketers say that affiliate marketing is “important or very important” to their overall digital marketing strategy.

So, how do you go about starting an affiliate program for your products? The easiest way is to have an experienced company handle the details for you. In this post, we’re going to take a quick look at the features and benefits of Refersion.

Are You Missing Out on Easy Sales?

In case you’re unfamiliar with Affiliate marketing, it is a performance-based, a.k.a. get-paid-on-commissions, marketing model. Other marketers promote your goods or services and get paid for each sale.

Affiliate sales can drive significant revenue. 16% of all online sales are generated through affiliate marketing, with an emphasis on fashion, sports, health and wellness.

If you haven’t already launched an affiliate program, or you’re not paying much attention to your current one, you are missing out. Affiliate marketing will continue to grow, and programs like Amazon Associates have shown that affiliates can drive billions of dollars for companies. 22% of all traffic to Amazon comes from affiliate sites.

Having been forecasted to reach $6.8 billion by 2020, affiliate marketing is a rapidly growing channel that advertisers and publishers are increasingly using to get in front of the right audience.

Simplifying the process of running an affiliate program lies at the heart of Refersion’s approach. Its core product is an intergrated affiliate marketing platform that gives you the tools to run every aspect of your program from a single dashboard. You can quickly gather affiliates, manage them, and automatically handle commission payouts from one location.

The platform also slots nicely into an existing software stack and it integrates with BigCommerce, Magento, Shopify and others. You can set up email contact with MailChimp and make payments with PayPal in 39 world currencies.

6 Ways They Simplify Any Affiliate Marketing Program

There are six main features of the Refersion platform. Let’s take a look at each one:

1. Intuitive Dashboard

eCommerce Marketing Refersion Dashboard Screenshot Of Three Affiliate's Data

Refersion’s key benefit lies in the ability it gives you to manage all essential affiliate tasks from a simple, intuitive dashboard.

In particular, you can:

Add products (or entire stores) to your affiliate program with a few clicks

Automate monthly or single payments to affiliates, per product or subscription

Create customizable sign-up pages for new affiliates with a drag-and-drop builder

Easily build a management area for affiliates that gives them access to link-building tools and a tracking dashboard.

2. Easy-To-Use Integrations

Refersion Integrations Partner Logos

Another noteworthy benefit of Refersion is the wide array of integrations with major shopping carts. Linking your eCommerce store with their affiliate platform is literally a matter of a few clicks or use the API (and supporting documentation) for building custom integrations.

eCommerce integrations include Shopify, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, Magento, and WooCommerce

Integrates with payment processors PayPal, Stripe, Chargebee or Bold for subscription businesses, and OneClick Upsell

And, there are also a number of integrations with analytics and mailing tools such as Google Analytics, LittleData, and MailChimp.

You can always customize using their API.

Refersion is a great app I've been using them for a couple of days and I already have my first affiliate partner. Their marketplace works well and their customer service is great, they respond in less than 24 hours. Erik has been very helpful! Thanks.

3. Extensive Tracking Features

eCommerce Affiliate Marketing Sample Tracking Information Screenshot

Refersion lets you track sales with more than just a unique tracking code. This feature makes it easy to cater to different affiliates, joint venture, and promotion partners.

You can use the following features to track different types of affiliate sales:

Coupon Codes - Assign sales to an affiliate every time a coupon is used (such as if you have partnered with somebody on a specific promotion).

SKUs - Allows you to trigger a payment with every product purchase.

Email addresses - Affiliates can provide the email of a potential customer. If that person buys, the affiliate will get a commission. This feature is useful for affiliates that have a network of people to whom they promote products on a regular basis.

4. Built-In Referral Program and Marketplace

Refersion Marketplace Screenshot Showing An Affiliate's Conversion Information

One of the stand-out features of Refersion is its “post-purchase” channel. This feature makes it easy to turn customers into advocates by displaying a pop-up after purchase that advertises your program. When customers sign-up, they are immediately guided through the whole set-up process.

You can also take advantage of the affiliate marketplace, where you can find some of the industry’s top affiliates and influencers to promote your products.

5. Complete Control Over Commissions

eCommerce Marketing Refersion Commissions Screenshot

Payout two types of commissions, the percentage of the sale or flat rate, whichever works best for your business model. You can have different commission offers per product, and you can manually change the commission rate or structure for specific affiliates.

If you only want to pay for new, not existing, customers, it is available, but you’ll need to ask the team at Refersion to set that up.

Recently, Refersion introduced a tiered pay structure so merchants can pay affiliates who sell more, a higher commission.

6. Automated Email Tools

eCommerce Marketing Refersion Email Tools Screenshot

Finally, you can save time by automating regular emails to your affiliates with promotions and program changes from a single place.

Among others, Refersion enables you to send:

Confirmation emails - Send automatic confirmations for new sign-ups and program enrollments.

Payment updates - Automatically send payment confirmation emails.

Broadcasts - Manage one-off broadcasts from within your Refersion dashboard.

3 Plans to Suit Your Business

They offer three plans depending on your size and needs.

The Starter plan is $19 per month and lets you track up to 30 affiliates per month. With the Professional plan you can track up to 130 affiliates for $89, and the Enterprise plan offers unlimited numbers of affiliates. You can learn more about each plan on their pricing page. They offer a 14-day trial for any plan.

Easily Scale Your Promotion Network and Sales

Based out of New York City, they boast a merchant network of over 1,800. They recently integrated with Viglink and Skimlinks so merchants have access to even more affiliates.

Refersion continues to act on customer feedback by continuously improving their back office for higher efficiency. You can quickly get an affiliate program up and running, automating much of the process, and grow it with a variety of incentives for affiliates.

If you have an eCommerce retail business and would like to start an affiliate program, let Eventige integrate Refersion as part of your marketing strategy. We can simplify what can be a complicated and time-consuming process. Contact us for more information about their program and then try any plan for 14-days.

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allianceinternational-blog · 5 years

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Marketing Recruitment Agencies - Marketing Recruitment Agencies - Top Marketing Agencies

You have a mission and an image. Part of eyesight is how your website looks and is convinced. You're not a programmer or a web designer so you ask someone to do it for. Can you talk to each other and become any feeling that you're speaking the same language? You don't often hear about easy communication relating to the people who require to use the computer and the because they came from develop the tools they need wireless. Sometimes it feels as if there's an impenetrable wall between the 3. If you don't will need a wall between and also your your customer, take a look at a few in order to think about.

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Top Marketing Agencies - 10 Quick Tips To Owning An Online Business

(9) A couple of so many facets with marketing career. I have been a marketing director onto the client outside. I've run my own ring virtual marketing company, DLC Marketing. And, I've had the oppertunity to create and build 10stepmarketing, Twin Connections and now 6FigureWorkAtHomeMom.

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Marketing Staffing Agencies - Simple Online Marketing Mistakes Refrain From

It appears as if when in order to online, we all want to know what you are performing. Sites track where you decide to go online. SPAM oozes inside your mailbox searching sneak in a ploy to obtain a services.

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Marketing Recruitment Companies - 7 Strange Facts About MARKETING COMPANY

The biggest mistake local businesses make is not using the world wide web to let potential customers and clients know who they are, who they can be by offering valuable content to attract them rear and again, and why they become the first choice over their competition.

Recruitment Agencies Marketing - MARKETING COMPANY - What Can Your Learn From Your Critics

Thursday: Devote this day to long standing clients. Specific they are pleased with your services. Call them. If they are content with your work, Best Marketing Recruitment Agencies you can request for almost any testimonial. In case you have no pending project with them, ask if you find anything utilized do these.

If you might be wondering favorable a scam, Recruitment Agencies For Marketing it is achievable. Do be cautious giving out any info whether online, over the phone, or by mail.

The above said assessment of Magento can direct you towards using this CMS tool to make a new age e-shopping gateway. You do not need take a look at enterprise content management app to make an impressive online website. You just need to take help a good expert hand for installing custom plug-ins. It will ensure high usability of your website. Further, you just choose to keep your web portal promoted over marketing and advertising sites to assist keep bringing marketing and advertising users on your e-commerce ideal.

You know how much they say, life may only last for long - never forever. That said, making the most out with it would be going for a to do. Associated with wasting all of the downtime to procrastination, why not apply it to production? Don't you believe it's just good to earn extra bucks every now and then, especially if your job isn't really compensating you well? While organizing your very own family based business to put up is a great idea, there's definitely a much better one. What would that be? Flip Siphon Pro.

Examine the structure and content of the top Ten sites in location of expertise that come up on first page of different search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, numerous.) Delve into the tricks within the trade which will get your site on the first page. Clue: it can cost you some big ones!

Market with book-buying person. If your message benefits women, you'll do well in business. If your book solves a huge concern it will sell further. It's best to see having and fill it up rather than have an idea-then pay attention to an masses.

Even if your site has nothing but a sales letter, you can hire a wedding specialist graphics designer to give your site a neat look. It isn't expensive to graphically transform your site to entice people to purchase.

Take auto insurance at these marketing weapons and the way that they can allow you when you pitch your items. The integration between real and virtual marketing company has proved to be a boon for small, local business owners thanks to successful internet marketing weapons.

Hire an one-on-one low-cost computer / internet coach, who may give individual lessons, if you want to attend the training seminars. They can help an individual successfully continue their e-business. Call any local high school, computer schools or colleges interested in computing for kids who often be delighted to receive $ 4.10 per hour. Connect with teachers, career centers, student centers or to start the ball rolling. Tell them you want an tool. Make an ad that shows the capabilities want. Be sure adhere to because the faculties are less business oriented and may possibly not call you back.

I send a monthly ezine too stay in touch with my audience. In between these, I send articles to express to and offers to those tend to be ready. The conclusion people to be able to know and trust me before they're buying. When they need bookcoaching or Promoting help, they think of me over several "big dealers" out there pitching hard to win cash earned money, who only desire to sell, not educate.

Interest: Promoting a hot product is key. When it comes to marketing and promotion, half the battle is putting yourself globe flow of oncoming websites visitors. While that's not healthy from the real world, it works wonders in virtual marketing. The only way to try is by having a product you are interested in. With interest comes passion, which makes researching whereas the traffic is located 10x a lot easier. Psychologically, it is always for you to promote something you like or want to know. If you could care less about something, why should your prospective website visitors.

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megabrocklesner1world-blog · 5 years

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New Target Spray For Successful Protection From Macular Degeneration

Wherever do Enterprise Programs and Cellular Devices match? What about in the middle. At a computer software request and accreditation convention 5 years back I was asked to present a "how exactly to mobilize an enterprise request ".The context of the talk included the common "what is the next killer cellular software beyond e-mail ".My solution was not short. I'd 45 minutes to fill and did my best to make it entertaining. Because we were however on 2nd era data networks for cellular, and network persistence was a problem, I spent all of the talk describing cellular middleware while the important link between building enterprise request access for cellular access devices. Addressing the necessary structure for OLTP vs. OLAP-based programs was the focus. Yep, all enterprise stuff.

Nowadays, I state there are no killer apps in the enterprise. Yet if you're an ISV or independent designer and want to concentrate on a mobile enterprise programs business, than there's what I contact "killer conditions ".Here are a few primers to assist you get started.

Industry Reach

First concern is how big your tablet for blind people industry and the supposed industry reach for your application. If you're mobilizing an insurance claims insurer software your industry will be limited to that straight or industry. Not just a bad choice if you think about some of the recent normal disasters and the need to quickly mobilize a group to respond. Such an request is actually a good kick-off, but until you think outside you only confined your market. For instance, let us state you only focus on a component of a claims insurer software, just like a content manager. Your content manager can be a workflow relationship manager, designed to combine multi-media messages with key business processes. So you just transferred industry hook to a broader set of customers.

Solution Reach

Remember not absolutely all enterprise individuals require mobile. Mail is the most obvious request that interests every worker. As some vendors segment the email industry from "data snackers" to "content producers" the web effect is e-mail gift ideas a broad alternative for almost the whole enterprise workforce. Beyond e-mail messaging and social networking are their programs that attract most the enterprise workforce? I do not have the answer. If Used to do I wouldn't let you know until I developed it. Yet, some think it exists. Until you then must consider the specific reach of your application. Touch, Hint. I spend a lot of time looking at BPM and CRM solutions. Within these very large request types I believe there are extensive cellular alternative blocks waiting to be mined.

Estimated Benefits

The implication is that by mobilizing an enterprise request you are achieving a measurable business benefit. The issue then becomes, from what extent is the benefit. Is it a "game changing" capacity that gives sustainable competitive advantage. Or possibly a "method transformation" that improves business efficiency and customer satisfaction. Just like the claims insurer app. Perhaps it is a minor but incremental benefit. The purpose is the more the economic benefit, the more accomplishment you may have accreditation and deploying this application.

Degree of Process/People Modify

The plus of building an application with extensive industry and alternative reach can most likely experience an use curve. Several cellular programs can modify the way in which we perform business from sales to fulfillment. That modify may also influence our companies and people. Here is a great example. A good friend of mine possesses a custom window shutters application business. A couple of years before he produced a manufacturing element that connected to an ERP system. Additionally it included a Content/Catalogue Manager. He licenses this request with an out-of-the-box cellular tablet PC unit, laser evaluate and lightweight printer. I'm certain an iPad version will be coming soon. Before his request, a representative could head out to a residential or commercial customer site and take custom measurements. Then go back to their office, work with a sales help person or quotation analysts to draft an agreement proposal and fax or send that to the customer. But before that, they'd also contact the window blind for lead situations, item supply and pricing. That whole method needed at the least 3 times before an individual ever acquired an agreement proposal or quote.

Nowadays the whole method takes about one hour while on site with the customer. The laser evaluate takes appropriate custom sizes in a fraction of the time. The sizes combined with an electric catalogue of components produce a customer quote and agreement in minutes. The catalogue stock is consistently current with the manufacturer by way of a middleware coating that integrates with the ERP system. After an individual wants to the agreement and provides payment, an purchase is digitally processed. Manufacturing may start with enough time the representative leaves your website for the next customer or possibility call. The benefit is obvious. A portable request that offers an nearly quick ROI. The disadvantage is so it will demand substantial changes in how persons and procedures work. From sales, purchase administration to production. This can be a long-term benefit. But in the short-term the method and persons changes needed to implement this alternative can gradual the use of the application.

Engineering Invasiveness

One last conditions that usually characterizes the method and persons modify is the overall technology itself. The more technology invasive your alternative could be the more disruptive it becomes and the slower the adoption. The good news nowadays is enterprise progress settings are cross-platform. What this means is smooth progress and integration with cellular enterprise systems and devices. If you are using a browser-based customer or a virtual customer, cellular programs for the enterprise are related in programing and deployment as the net customers we've developed used to for the past decade.

I'm not trying to oversimply what it will take to mobilize any enterprise application. You will find other significant concerns (click here for the pricing primer). By meaning, enterprise programs are complex and ultimately, your cellular version might be entirely custom and not quite the killer request of your dreams. That I believe can only just be within the exact same cave with Osama Container Laden. And the chances of obtaining him are about as probably as Google's vision of liberating the instant spectrum for all.

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teiraymondmccoy78 · 5 years

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The Prophets of Cryptocurrency Survey the Boom and Bust

Not long ago, I was in Montreal for a cryptocurrency conference. My hotel, on the top floor of a big building downtown, had a roof garden with a koi pond. One morning, as I had coffee and a bagel in this garden, I watched a pair of ducks feeding on a mound of pellets that someone had left for them at the pond’s edge. Every few seconds, they dipped their beaks to drink, and, in the process, spilled undigested pellets into the water. A few koi idled there, poking at the surface for the scraps. The longer I watched, the more I wondered if the ducks were deliberately feeding the fish. Was such a thing possible? I asked the breakfast attendant, a ruddy Quebecer. He smiled and said, “No, but it is what I tell the children.”

My mind had been marinating overnight—and for more than a year, really—in the abstrusities of cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology on which they are built. Bitcoin and, subsequently, a proliferation of other cryptocurrencies had become an object of global fascination, amid prophecies of societal upheaval and reform, but mainly on the promise of instant wealth. A peer-to-peer money system that cut out banks and governments had made it possible, and fashionable, to get rich by sticking it to the Man.

Some of this stuff I understood; much of it I still did not. If you’re not, say, a computer scientist or a mathematician, the deeper you get into the esoterica of distributed ledgers, consensus algorithms, hash functions, zero-knowledge proofs, byzantine-fault-tolerance theory, and so on—the farther you travel from the familiar terrain of “the legacy world,” where, one blockchain futurist told me, pityingly, I live—the better the chance you have of bumping up against the limits of your intelligence. You grasp, instead, for metaphors.

Blockchain talk makes a whiteboard of the brain. You’re always erasing, starting over, as analogies present themselves. So, Montreal bagel in hand, I considered the ducks and the carp. Let the pellets be a cryptocurrency—koicoin, say. Would the ducks then be currency miners? Every altcoin—the catchall for cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin, the majority of which are eventually classified as shitcoin—has its own community of enthusiasts and kvetchers, so perhaps the koi were this one’s. The koicommunity. The breakfast attendant who had put out the pellets: he’d be our koicoin Satoshi—as in Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous and still unidentified creator of Bitcoin. Yes, the koicoin protocol was strong, and the incentives appeared to be well aligned, but the project didn’t really pass muster in terms of immutability, decentralization, and privacy. Koicoin was shitcoin.

A few hours later, I was at lunch in a conference room in another hotel, with a table of crypto wizards, a few of them among the most respected devs in the space. (Devs are developers, and even legacy worlders must surrender after a while and ditch the scare quotes around “the space,” when referring to the cryptosphere.) Four of these devs were researchers associated with Ethereum, the open-source blockchain platform. Ethereum is not itself a cryptocurrency; to operate on Ethereum, you have to use the cryptocurrency ether, which, like bitcoin, you can buy or sell. (Among cryptocurrencies, ether’s market capitalization is second only to bitcoin’s.) The devs were specimens of an itinerant coder élite, engaged, wherever they turn up and to the exclusion of pretty much everything else, in the ongoing construction of an alternate global financial and computational infrastructure: a new way of handling money or identity, a system they describe as a better, decentralized version of the World Wide Web—a Web 3.0—more in keeping with the Internet’s early utopian promise than with the invidious, monopolistic hellscape it has become. They want to seize back the tubes, and the data—our lives—from Facebook, Google, and the new oligarchs of Silicon Valley.

One of them, Vlad Zamfir, a twenty-eight-year-old Romanian-born mathematician who grew up in Ottawa and dropped out of the University of Guelph, was scribbling equations on an electronic tablet called a reMarkable pad. He narrated as he scrawled. The others at the table leaned in toward him, in a way that recalled Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.” To the two or three people at the table who were clearly incapable of following along, he said, earnestly, “Sorry to alienate you with my math.” Zamfir is the lead developer of one strand of Casper, an ongoing software upgrade designed to make Ethereum scale better and work more securely—an undertaking thought to be vital to its viability and survival. “It’s shitty technology,” Zamfir, whose Twitter bio reads “absurdist, troll,” told a journalist two years ago.

Zamfir was showing the others some rough equations he’d worked out to address one of the thousands of riddles that need to be solved. This particular effort was an attempt (jargon alert) to optimize the incentive structure for proof-of-stake validation—that is, how best to get enough people and machines to participate in a computing operation essential to the functioning of the entire system. “We’re trying to do game theory here,” Zamfir said. The others pointed out what they thought might be flaws. “It doesn’t seem reasonable,” Zamfir said. “But the math works out.” This summarized much of what I’d encountered in crypto.

To his right sat Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s founder and semi-reluctant philosopher king. Buterin, who is twenty-four, occasionally glanced at Zamfir’s formulas but mostly looked into the middle distance with a melancholic empty stare, sometimes typing out messages and tweets on his phone with one finger. He was a quick study, and also he pretty much already knew what Zamfir had come up with, and to his thinking the work wasn’t quite there. “When the models are getting overcomplicated, it’s probably good to have more time to try to simplify them,” he told me later, with what I took to be generous understatement.

Buterin had been working, simultaneously, on another version of Casper. So he and Zamfir were both collaborating and competing with each other. There seemed to be no ego or bitterness—in their appraisal of each other’s work, in person, or on social media, where so much of the conversation takes place, in full view. Their assessments were Spockian, and cutting only to the Kirks among us.

They had first met before a conference in Toronto in 2014. Zamfir was amazed by Buterin, whom he called a “walking computer,” and he joined Ethereum as a researcher soon after. Now good friends who meet up mostly at conferences and workshops, they had greeted each other the day before in the hotel lobby with a fervent embrace, like summer campers back for another year, before quick-walking to a quiet corner to start in on the incentive-structure-for-proof-of-stake-validation talk. Whenever and wherever Buterin and Zamfir convene, people gather around—eavesdropping, hoping for scraps of insight. The two are used to this and pay little heed. There were no secrets, only problems and solutions, and the satisfaction that comes from proceeding from one toward the other.

The first time I heard the word “Ethereum” was in April, 2017. A hedge-fund manager, at a benefit in Manhattan, was telling me that he’d made more money buying and selling ether and other cryptocurrencies in the past year than he’d ever made at his old hedge fund. This was a significant claim, since the fund had made him a billionaire. He was using words I’d never heard before. He mentioned bitcoin, too, which I’d certainly heard a lot about but, like most people my age, didn’t really understand. I’d idly hoped I might be just old enough to make it to my deathbed without having to get up to speed.

As the year wore on, that dream faded. The surge in the price of bitcoin, and of other cryptocurrencies, which proliferated amid a craze for initial coin offerings (I.C.O.s), prompted a commensurate explosion in the number of stories and conversations about this new kind of money and, sometimes more to the point, about the blockchain technology behind it—this either revolutionary or needlessly laborious way of keeping track of transactions and data. It seemed as if language had been randomized. I started hearing those words—the ones I’d never heard before—an awful lot: “trustless,” “sharding,” “flippening.” Explaining blockchain became a genre unto itself.

The dizzying run-up in crypto prices in 2017 was followed, this year, by a long, lurching retreat that, as the summer gave way to fall, began to seem perilous. As with notorious stock-market and real-estate bubbles, innocents had been taken in and cleaned out. But both boom and bust reflected an ongoing argument over what cryptocurrencies and their technological underpinnings might be worth—which is to say, whether they are, as some like to ask, real. Is crypto the future or a fad? Golden ticket or Ponzi scheme? Amazon 2.0 or tulip mania? And what is it good for, anyway? It sure is neat, but for now it lacks its killer app, a use that might lead to mass adoption, as e-mail did for the Internet. “We need the hundred-dollar laptop, the iPod,” a blockchain apostle told me.

Now and then, legacy titans voiced their scorn. Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of J. P. Morgan, labelled crypto “a fraud”; Warren Buffett used the phrase “rat poison squared.” Legions of skeptics and technophobes, out of envy, ignorance, or wisdom, savored such pronouncements, while the true believers and the vertiginously invested mostly brushed it aside. They had faith that a new order was nigh. They pumped but did not dump.

Among a certain subset, it was both fashionable and integral to ignore the fluctuations in price. The idea was to build and shore up a new system—for everything from payments and banking to health care and identity—that was either a replacement for the old one, or at least an alternative to it, one that was borderless, independent of state control and of exploitation by Big Tech. “It’s definitely nice to try to eke out some completely parallel kind of world that’s totally separate from the existing one,” Buterin said. “It does interact with the rest of society, and the goal is definitely to help improve the mainstream world, but we’re on a different track.” Such an undertaking would, at best, take many years and likely span several economic and investment cycles. While the old armature rots, a new one rises alongside it, much as the new Tappan Zee Bridge, over the Hudson, gradually took shape next to the rusty old one it would one day replace. To Buterin, however, the benefits were already clear. “The cryptocurrency space has succeeded at making certain aspects of the international economy more open, when politics is moving in the exact opposite direction,” he said. “I do think that’s a meaningful contribution to the world.”

Buterin is a striking figure, tall and very lean, with long, fidgety fingers, sharp elfin features, and vivid blue eyes, which, on the rare occasions when he allows them to meet yours, convey a depth and warmth that you don’t expect, in light of the flat, robotic cadence and tone of his speech. People often joke about him being an alien, but they usually apologize for doing so, because there’s a gentleness about him, an air of tolerance and moderation, that works as a built-in rebuke to such unkind remarks. As we spoke, on the first afternoon of the Montreal conference (the crypto life is a never-ending enchainment of conferences, and is pretty much wall-to-wall dudes), he aligned some items in front of him: pens, Post-its, phone. He forgoes most social niceties and overt expressions of emotion but, when he finds questions or assertions agreeable, is generous with notes of encouragement: “Yep, yep, yep”; “Right, totally”; “Yes, yes, exactly.” Arguable remarks elicit a mechanical “Hmm.” He seems to anticipate your question before you even know quite what it is, but he forces himself to allow you to finish. He has a dry sense of humor.

He said, “I definitely don’t have the kind of single-minded C.E.O. personality that a lot of Silicon Valley V.C.s lionize—that thing of being ambitious and wanting to win at all costs, like, basically, Mark Zuckerberg.” He was dressed that day, as on the day before and the day after, in a gray turtleneck, black track pants, and laceless Adidas sneakers over turquoise socks. He often wears T-shirts with unicorns and rainbows. He likes to cite Lambos—as in Lamborghini, the cryptobro trophy ride of choice—as shorthand for the excessive trappings of wealth, which do not interest him. He’s about as indifferently rich as a man can be. Although he sold a quarter of his bitcoin and ether well before the prices began to soar last year, he is said to be worth somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred million dollars. (He recently gave away a couple of million dollars to a life-extension research project.) He has no assistants or entourage. He owns little and travels light. “Recently, I reduced my bag size from sixty litres to forty,” he said. “Forty is very tolerable. You can go on fifteen-kilometre walks with it.” The Adidas, he said, were his only pair of shoes. “Actually, I have another pair that’s in one of the many places I call home.” These are friends’ apartments, where he sometimes sleeps for a few nights at a stretch—in Toronto, San Francisco, Singapore, Shanghai, Taipei. He especially likes East Asia. He speaks fluent Mandarin.

After Montreal, he was headed to Berlin and then Switzerland. His home, really, is the Internet. At one point, I referred to an Ethereum outpost in San Francisco, which I’d read about, as a “base of operations,” and he rejected the term: “Home. Base of operations. The more you invent your own life style, the more you realize that the categories that have been invented are ultimately, at best, imperfect devices for understanding the world, and, at worst, fake.”

I’d been trying for months to talk to Buterin. In January, I reached out to his father, Dmitry, who reported back that Vitalik was not interested in an interview. “He is trying to focus his time on research,” Dmitry said. “He’s not too excited that the community assigns so much importance to him. He wants the community to be more resilient.” Dmitry Buterin, forty-six, is from Grozny, in Chechnya. He studied computer science in Moscow and then started a financial-software business, before emigrating to Canada, when Vitalik was six. Dmitry settled in Toronto, with Vitalik; Vitalik’s mother, a financial analyst, chose Edmonton. Vitalik, when he was three, got an old PC and began fiddling around with Excel. By ten or eleven, he was developing video games. “Vitalik was a very smart boy,” his father said. “It was not easy. His mind was always racing. It was hard for him to communicate. He hardly spoke until he was nine or ten. I was concerned, but at some point I realized it is what it is. I just gave him my love.”

He also gave Vitalik his first glimpse of Bitcoin. It was 2011, somewhat early, but Dmitry was an avowed anarcho-capitalist, a cynical child of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. For many others like him, especially in those early days, the first encounter with Bitcoin was like a religious epiphany—powerful, life-altering, a glimpse of an entirely different and perhaps more agreeable way of ordering human affairs. “Bitcoin looks like money’s dream of itself,” the technology journalist Brian Patrick Eha wrote, in “How Money Got Free.”

“Before Bitcoin came along, I was happily playing World of Warcraft,” Vitalik told me. He had already been nursing some inchoate ideas about the risks and intrinsic unfairness of centralized systems and authority. He once told a journalist, “I saw everything to do with either government regulation or corporate control as just being plain evil. And I assumed that people in those institutions were kind of like Mr. Burns, sitting behind their desks saying, ‘Excellent. How can I screw a thousand people over this time?’ ” Bitcoin scratched this itch. But in many ways what drew him in was the elegance of the system, invented, it seemed, by a rogue outsider out of thin air. It suited a world view, a dream of a fluid, borderless, decentralized financial system beyond the reach of governments and banks, inclined as they inevitably are toward corruption and self-dealing, or at least toward distortions of incentive. Buterin said, “If you look at the people that were involved in the early stages of the Bitcoin space, their earlier pedigrees, if they had any pedigrees at all, were in open source—Linux, Mozilla, and cypherpunk mailing lists.” These were subversives and libertarians, ranging in political affinity from far left to weird right, as often as not without institutional or academic stature or access. “I found it immensely empowering that just a few thousand people like myself could re-create this fundamental social institution from nothing.”

In the eighties, cryptographers and computer scientists began trying to devise a foolproof form of digital money, and a way to execute transactions and contracts without the involvement (or rent-seeking) of third parties. It was the man, woman, or group of humans known as Satoshi Nakamoto who, with Bitcoin in 2008, solved the crux—the so-called double-spend problem. If you have ten dollars, you shouldn’t be able to pay ten dollars for one thing, then spend the same ten for another. This requires some mechanism for keeping track of what you have, whom you gave it to, and how much they now have. And that was the blockchain.

Definitions of blockchain are as various as the metaphors—bingo, Google Docs, a giant room of transparent safes—that people use to try to illustrate them. Broadly speaking, a blockchain is an evolving record of all transactions that is maintained, simultaneously and in common, by every computer in the network of that blockchain, be it Ethereum, Bitcoin, or Monero. Think, as some have suggested, of a dusty leather-bound ledger in a Dickensian counting house, a record of every transaction relevant to that practice. Except that every accountant in London, and in Calcutta, has the same ledger, and when one adds a line to his own the addition appears in all of them. Once a transaction is affirmed, it will—theoretically, anyway—be in the ledger forever, unalterable and unerasable.

Historically, records have been stored in one place—a temple, a courthouse, a server—and kept by whoever presided. If you distrust central authority, or are queasy about Google, this won’t do at all. With blockchains, the records, under a kind of cryptographic seal, are distributed to all and belong to no one. You can’t revise them, because everyone is watching, and because the software will reject it if you try. There is no Undo button. Each block is essentially a bundle of transactions, with a tracking notation, represented in a bit of cryptographic code known as a “hash,” of all the transactions in the past. Each new block in the chain contains all the information (or, really, via the hash, a secure reference to all the information) contained in the previous one, all the way back to the first one, the so-called genesis block.

There are other words that are sometimes included in the definition of blockchain, but they are slippery, and grounds for endless parsing, asterisking, and debate. One is “decentralized.” (Some blockchains are more decentralized than others.) Another is “immutable”—the idea that, in theory, the past record can’t be altered. (This is different from having your crypto stolen or hacked, when it’s stored in an online “wallet.” That happens all the time!) Then there’s “privacy.” The aspiration is for a digital coin to have the untraceability of cash. Because bitcoin was, at the outset, the dark Web’s go-to tender for the purchase of drugs, sex, weaponry, and such, many assumed that it was private. But it isn’t. Every transaction is there in the ledger for all to see. It is, fundamentally, anonymous (or pseudonymous, anyway), but there are many ways for that anonymity to be compromised.

The odds are high that someone, somewhere, has attempted to make an explanation like this one to you. The chain-splainer is a notorious date spoiler and cocktail-party pariah. Here he comes—you’re trapped. You should have known better than to ask about mining.

Mining is a reward system—compensation for helping to maintain and build a blockchain. The work of establishing and recording what’s legit takes machinery, memory, power, and time. Cryptocurrency blockchains require that a bunch of computers run software to affirm (or reject) transactions—it’s a kind of automated convocation. During this ritual, the computers in the network are competing, via brute guesswork, to be the first to get the answer to a really difficult math problem. The more computational power you have, the more guesses you can make, and the more likely you are to get the answer. The winner creates a new block and gets a reward, in, say, bitcoin—new bitcoin, which has not previously been in circulation. (Satoshi ordained that there be a finite number of bitcoin ever created—twenty-one million—so that no one could inflate away the value of existing bitcoin, as, say, the Federal Reserve does with dollars. Other cryptocurrencies, including ether, don’t necessarily have finite supplies.)

This system is known as Proof of Work. The problem-solving exercise is proof that the computers are doing the work. This approach has serious and, some would say, fatal, flaws. First, it requires a tremendous amount of electricity. This year, it is said, the Bitcoin network will use as much energy as the nation of Austria, and produce as much carbon dioxide as a million transatlantic flights. Mining rigs—computers designed specifically to do this work—are thirsty machines. Mining farms tend to sprout up where juice is cheap (typically, in proximity to hydropower projects with excess capacity to unload) and where temperatures are low (so you don’t have to burn even more electricity to keep the rigs cool). There are open-air warehouses in remote corners of sub-Arctic Canada, Russia, and China, with machines whirring away on the tundra, creating magic money, while the permafrost melts. Second, a small number of mining conglomerates, or pools—many of them Chinese—have wielded outsized influence over the network and the decisions that get made. Last month, one of the biggest of these, Bitmain, confirmed plans to go public.

The alternative, which Zamfir and Buterin were working on in Montreal, is called Proof of Stake. In this scenario, the holders of the currency in question become the validators, who typically take a small cut of every approved transaction. Theoretically, the more crypto you have, the more influence you have, so PoW partisans consider PoS to be plutocratic as well—a new gloss on the old problem of too much in the hands of too few.

In 2013, Buterin travelled to San Jose for a Bitcoin meet-up, and felt that he’d encountered like-minded people for the first time in his life—a movement worth devoting himself to. “The people that I had been searching for the whole time were actually all there,” Buterin told me. Zooko Wilcox, a cryptographer, recalled Buterin telling him, “This is the first technology I’ve ever loved that loves me back.” Buterin had been writing blog posts about it for five bitcoins per post. Together, he and Mihai Alisie, a Romanian blockchain entrepreneur who’d read his posts, founded Bitcoin Magazine. Buterin had a knack for explaining things—at least to an audience already primed to understand. But, as he travelled around the world to Bitcoin meet-ups, he began to think that the technology was limited, that attempts to jury-rig non-money uses for this digital-money platform was the computational equivalent of a Swiss Army knife. You basically had to devise hacks. He envisaged a one-blade-fits-all version, a blockchain platform that was broader and more adaptable to a wider array of uses and applications. The concept behind Bitcoin—a network of machines all over the world—seemed to be a building block upon which to construct a global computer capable of all kinds of activities.

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The Prophets of Cryptocurrency Survey the Boom and Bust

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I Delivered Packages for Amazon and It Was a Nightmare

Technology I Delivered Packages for Amazon and It Was a Nightmare Amazon Flex allows drivers to get paid to deliver packages from their own vehicles. But is it a good deal for workers? Jun 25, 2018 Aygun Aliyeva / Shutterstock.com / Arsh Raziuddin / The Atlantic / GoogleMaps I’m sure I looked comical as I staggered down a downtown San Francisco street on a recent weekday, arms full of packages—as I dropped one and bent down to pick it up, another fell, and as I tried to rein that one in, another toppled. Yet it wasn’t funny, not really. There I was, wearing a bright-yellow safety vest and working for Amazon Flex, a program in which the e-commerce giant pays regular people to deliver packages from their own vehicles for $18 to $25 an hour, before expenses. I was racing to make the deliveries before I got a ticket—there are few places for drivers without commercial vehicles to park in downtown San Francisco during the day—and also battling a growing rage as I lugged parcels to offices of tech companies that offered free food and impressive salaries to their employees, who seemed to spend their days ordering stuff online. Technology was allowing these people a good life, but it was just making me stressed and cranky. “NOT. A. GOOD. DEAL,” I scrawled in my notebook, after having walked down nine flights of stairs, sick of waiting for a freight elevator that may or may not have been broken, and returned to my car for another armful of packages. Welcome to the future of package delivery. As people shop more online, companies like Amazon are turning to independent contractors—essentially anyone with a car—to drop parcels at homes and businesses. Flex is necessary because Amazon is growing so quickly—the company shipped 5 billion Prime items last year—that it can’t just rely on FedEx, UPS, and the Postal Service. Flex takes care of “last mile” deliveries, the most complicated part of getting goods from where they’re made to your doorstep. It also allows Amazon to meet increases in demand during the holiday season, Prime Day, and other busy times of the year, a spokeswoman told me in an email. But Flex operates year-round, not just during the holiday season, which suggests there’s another reason for it: It’s cheap. As the larger trucking industry has discovered over the past decade, using independent contractors rather than unionized drivers saves money, because so many expenses are borne by the drivers, rather than the company. Amazon has rolled out Flex in more than 50 cities, including New York; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Memphis, Tennessee. The company doesn’t share information about how many drivers it has, but one Seattle economist calculated that 11,262 individuals drove for Flex in California between October 2016 and March 2017, based on information Amazon shared with him to help the company defend a lawsuit about Flex drivers. On the surface, these jobs, like many others in the gig economy, seem like a good deal. But Flex workers get no health insurance or pension, and are not guaranteed a certain number of hours or shifts a week. They are not covered by basic labor protections like minimum wage and overtime pay, and they don’t get unemployment benefits if they suddenly can’t work anymore. And when workers calculate how much they’re pulling in on a daily basis, they often don’t account for the expenses that they’ll incur doing these jobs. “A lot of these gig-type services essentially rely on people not doing the math on what it actually costs you,” Sucharita Kodali, a Forrester analyst who covers e-commerce, told me . One Amazon Flex driver in Cleveland, Chris Miller, 63, told me that though he makes $18 an hour, he spends about 40 cents per mile he drives on expenses like gas and car repairs. He bought his car, used, with 40,000 miles on it. It now has 140,000, after driving for Flex for seven months, and Uber and Lyft before that. That means he’s incurred about $40,000 in expenses—things he didn’t think about initially, like changing the oil more frequently and replacing headlights and taillights. He made slightly less than $10 an hour driving for Uber, he told me, once he factored in these expenses; Flex pays a bit better. Miller’s wife has a full-time job with benefits, so his Flex earnings are helpful for paying off his family’s credit-card bills. But “if I were trying to make this work as a single guy on my own, it would be tough to do that,” he said. His costs might actually be lower than what most drivers spend: The standard mileage rates for use of a car for business purposes, according to the IRS, are 54.5 cents a mile in 2018. I became an Amazon Flex independent contractor by downloading an app, going through a background check, and watching 19 videos that explained in great detail the process of delivering packages. (I did not get paid for the time it took to watch these videos, nor was there any guarantee that I would be approved as a driver once I watched the videos.) The videos covered topics like what to do if a customer decides they don’t want their order anymore (“Isn’t this customer nuts?!,” Amazon asks), and how to deliver alcohol (asking customers how old they are, it turns out, is not an acceptable form of checking ID). Because the videos were followed by quizzes, I actually had to pay attention. After I was finally approved as a driver, a process that took weeks, I signed up for a shift. Flex drivers get work by opening the app and clicking on available shifts; current Flex drivers told me that newbies get offered the best hours and rates. My first shift was from 11:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on a Tuesday, delivering packages from an Amazon logistics center in South San Francisco, about 30 minutes from my apartment. Different shifts offer varying rates; my three-and-a-half-hour block was going to net me $70, according to the app, though of course I had to pay for my own fuel and tolls. The app would tell me where to pick up the packages, where to drop them off, and what route to take, so the task seemed pretty easy. I anticipated a few leisurely hours driving between houses in a sleepy San Francisco suburb, listening to an audiobook as I dropped packages on doorsteps, smelling the lavender and sagebrush that grace many front lawns here. My first hint that the afternoon was not going to be the bucolic day I had imagined came when I drove into the Amazon warehouse to pick up the packages. I was handed a yellow safety vest to wear inside the warehouse so other drivers could see me, “compliments of Amazon,” a man told me, and was directed to a parking spot where a cart of packages awaited. I began loading them into my trunk, but paused when I saw the addresses printed on them. I was assigned 43 packages but only two addresses: two office buildings on Market Street, the main thoroughfare in downtown San Francisco. This meant driving into downtown San Francisco in the middle of a workday, stashing my car somewhere and walking between floors and offices in the two buildings. Readers weigh in on the pitfalls of the gig economy. “Where am I supposed to park?” I asked the two men who were guiding traffic in the warehouse, as I loaded giant boxes and slim white Prime envelopes into my overstuffed car. They both shrugged. “Lots of people just get tickets,” one told me. I was still feeling optimistic as I headed through 30 minutes of traffic to downtown San Francisco. I saw container ships on the horizon of the Bay as I drove up Highway 101, and for a moment, felt like an integral part of a global delivery chain that brought these packages from China, across the sea, to the port, over the roads, into the backseat of my car, and now to the people eagerly awaiting them. By some measures, delivering packages is one of the few “good” jobs left in America for people without college degrees. The Teamsters represent roughly 260,000 UPS workers, who make around $36 an hour . The American Postal Workers Union represents around 156,000 clerks and support workers, who make, on average, $75,500 annually, according to the union. The National Association of Letter Carriers, which did not respond to requests for comment, represents the actual Postal Service delivery workers. * Yet these union jobs are under pressure. “These are good jobs, and they can get much worse really fast,” Steve Viscelli, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania who writes about the trucking industry, told me. The Teamsters recently gave workers the go-ahead to call a strike amid ongoing contract negotiations, although the two sides said late last week they’d reached a tentative deal. The American Postal Workers Union is about to begin contract negotiations too. Workers are pushing back over weekend deliveries and the lower pay and benefits given to part-time workers. UPS now has a second tier of part-time workers who make as little as $10 an hour; the Postal Service has added workers it calls city carrier assistants who make less than regular mail carriers. And then, of course, there’s Flex. If the delivery workforce continues to shift toward nonunionized workers and independent contractors, the industry could go from one where workers can support a family to one where they are making less than minimum wage. That’s what happened in the long-haul trucking industry, according to Viscelli. The average long-haul trucker today makes about $40,000 , down from the equivalent of $100,000 in 1980. “There’s been a whole movement to try to contain costs and undercut labor costs by classifying drivers as independent contractors so companies don’t have to worry about wage laws,” says Shannon Liss-Riordan, an attorney who has filed numerous lawsuits against tech companies for misclassifying workers as independent contractors. Amazon Flex employees sometimes make below the minimum wage in the city where they live—including in Seattle, where the minimum wage is $15 an hour—and they do not receive time-and-a-half for the hours they work over 40 hours a week, according to a lawsuit Liss-Riordan filed on behalf of Flex workers in U.S. District Court in Washington State. (Amazon said it does not comment on pending litigation.) For some people, being an independent contractor is one of the best parts of driving for Flex. Jeremy Brown, a 36-year-old Flex driver in Milwaukee, told me that he likes the freedom of being his own boss. If he wakes up in the morning and doesn’t feel like driving for Flex, he can go back to sleep, or spend his time leading the music worship service at his church, or homeschooling his kids. He makes enough money—around $120 a day, when he factors in expenses—from Flex that his family relies on it for the bulk of their income. Brown often finishes his two-hour shifts in a shorter time than Amazon has estimated they will take. But if it takes a Flex driver longer to complete their deliveries than Amazon has calculated it will, they don’t get paid for the extra time. (An Amazon spokeswoman told me that “the vast majority” of blocks are completed within or in less than the estimated time.) If the driver gets into a car accident, the driver, not Amazon, is responsible for medical and insurance costs. If a driver gets a speeding ticket, the driver pays. (UPS and FedEx usually pay their trucks’ tickets, but Amazon explicitly says in the contract Flex drivers sign that drivers are responsible for fees and fines.) Because of the way Flex works, drivers rarely know when blocks of time will become available, and don’t know when they’ll be working or how much they’ll be making on any given day. Brown likes to work two shifts delivering groceries for Amazon, from 4:30 to 6:30 a.m. and 6:30 to 8:30 a.m., but the morning we talked, no 4:30 shifts were available. He sometimes wakes up at 3 a.m. and does what Flex workers call the “sip and tap,” sitting at home and drinking coffee while refreshing the app, hoping new blocks come up. He does not get paid for the hour he spends tapping. Twice in the last year, he’s been barred from seeing new blocks for seven days because Amazon accused him of using a bot to grab blocks—he says he just taps the app so frequently Amazon assumes he’s cheating. When he is barred from seeing blocks, he has no recourse but to repeatedly email Amazon, which has never led to his suspension being lifted. Amazon also does not break down how much he receives in tips and how much he receives in pay from the company—for all he knows, people are tipping him $20 and Amazon is paying him less than minimum wage. And he doesn’t have a boss he can ask what’s going on. Kelly Cheeseman, an Amazon spokeswoman, told me that Flex is a great opportunity for people to be their own boss and set their own schedule. If workers prefer to be full-time employees, rather than independent contractors, the company has a “wide variety” of full- and part-time opportunities, she said. (Of course, many of the full-time jobs are physically challenging as well. Chris Miller, the Cleveland worker, told me that he preferred working as a contractor to working as an employee for Amazon, which is infamous for high levels of stress and pressure among employees.) Cheeseman said that most Flex workers are doing the job as a side gig to make money when they’re in school or raising kids. But Nikolay Akunts, a driver who administers a Facebook group for Flex workers in the San Francisco Bay Area, told me that 70 to 80 percent of the drivers in the group are doing so full-time. (Akunts drives for Flex in Sunnyvale, California, from 4:30 to 8:30 a.m. and then goes to his full-time job at a software company.) Even people who work for Flex full-time know they can’t always depend on the app to make money. Akunts said that people often get “deactivated,” which means they receive a message telling them they can no longer drive for Flex. Sometimes, the workers don’t know why they’ve been terminated and their contract annulled, he told me. It can take as long as a month to get reinstated. Akunts, who likes working for Flex and makes a lot of money doing so, told me that he’s one of the only drivers left after three years delivering packages in Sunnyvale who hasn’t been deactivated or quit. “Amazon keeps you on a high standard,” Akhunts said. If someone ordered a grocery delivery but doesn’t answer the phone, Akunts keeps trying—the customer might be in the shower or on the other line, he said. This dedication to the customer, he said, is what Amazon expects from its workers. When I arrived at the Market Street address where the first batch of packages were supposed to be delivered, I swiped “I’ve arrived” on the Flex app. The app informed me that I should actually be delivering the packages at the freight elevator on Ellis Street, in the back of the building—a two-minute walk, but a traffic-choked 10-minute drive, away. Once I arrived there, I discovered there was nowhere to park legally. I was already nearly an hour into my shift and hadn’t delivered a package yet, so I parked at a red parking meter reserved for trucks with six wheels or more from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. and started to make trips to the building, my arms full of parcels. Flex drivers often fill their cars to the brim before delivering packages. (Alana Semuels / The Atlantic) I tried to move quickly so that I wasn’t leaving my car unattended for very long, but after walking in circles through the building, I reemerged onto Ellis Street and encountered a parking enforcement officer about to write me a ticket. I explained my difficulty: that I was delivering for Amazon, but there was nowhere to park, since I didn’t have commercial plates. What was I supposed to do? My only option, since I was driving a personal car, he said, was to park in a garage, or deliver the packages at night. But lots of people risk it and park illegally in meters, he told me—the number of parking citations issued in the first three months of the year for people parking illegally at red and yellow meters grew 29 percent from 2016, according to data provided to me by the city. I eventually convinced him not to give me a ticket, which would have cost $110 and wiped out my earnings for the day, but even as he pulled away, he warned me that another officer could be coming by soon and wouldn’t hesitate to write me one. Later, when I returned to the warehouse, I encountered a few Flex drivers who had two people in the car, presumably so one could drive and watch out for traffic enforcement officers while the other hopped out to deliver packages. Parking headaches weren’t the only problem. One of the packages I had to deliver was a huge box weighing more than 30 pounds. Because of the limited parking, I ended up walking two blocks with it, resting every 100 steps or so. At one point, a friendly police officer tried to lift it for kicks and groaned audibly. The security guard at the front door of the office building chastised me for carrying the box, and told me that I should be using a dolly to transport it. (None of the 19 videos I had to watch to be a Flex driver recommended bringing a delivery cart or a dolly.) Had I injured myself carrying the package, I would not have been able to receive workers’ compensation or paid medical time off. I also would have been responsible for my own medical care. Brown, the Milwaukee Amazon Flex driver, is the sole provider for his family, and uses BadgerCare, the Wisconsin health-insurance program for low-income residents, for his family’s health insurance. And then there was the fact that the Flex technology itself was difficult to use. Flex workers are supposed to scan each package before they deliver it, but the app wouldn’t accept my scans. When I called support, unsure of what to do, I received a recorded messaging saying support was experiencing technical difficulties, but would be up again soon. Then I got a message on my phone telling me the current average wait time for support was “less than 114,767 minutes.” I ended up just handing the packages to people in the offices without scanning them, hoping that someone, somewhere, was tracking where they went. (Amazon says it is constantly taking driver feedback into consideration to improve Flex.) Two of the small offices I was supposed to deliver packages to were locked, and there was no information about where to leave the deliveries. When I finally reached support and asked what to do with those undeliverable packages, I was told I could either drive them back to the warehouse in South San Francisco, 35 minutes away through worsening traffic, or keep trying to deliver them until the recipients returned. When I tried to use the app to call the recipients, it directed me to the wrong phone numbers; I eventually called a phone number printed on an office door and left a message. But there was no efficient way to register my problems with Amazon—I was on my own. All my frustration really hit when I went to the second office building on Market Street, home to a few big tech companies. One of them took up multiple floors, smelled strongly of pizza, and had dog leashes and kibble near the front door. Young workers milled around with laptops and lattes, talking about weekend plans. They were benefiting from the technology boom, sharing in the prosperity that comes with a company’s rapid growth. Technology was making their jobs better—they worked in offices that provided free food and drinks, and they received good salaries, benefits, and stock options. They could click a button and use Amazon to get whatever they wanted delivered to their offices—I brought 16 packages for 13 people to one office; one was so light I was sure it was a pack of gum, another felt like a bug-spray container. Until then, I had been, like them, blithely ordering things on Amazon so I wouldn’t have to wait in line at a store or go searching for a particular product (even though I knew, from talking to warehouse workers , that many of the jobs that get those packages to my door aren’t good ones). But now, technology was enabling Amazon to hire me to deliver these packages with no benefits or perks. If one of these workers put the wrong address on the package, they would get a refund, while I was scurrying around trying to figure out what they meant when they listed their address as “fifth floor” and there was no fifth floor. How could these two different types of jobs exist in the same economy? Gig-economy jobs like this one are becoming more and more common. The number of “non-employer firms” in the ground-transportation sector—essentially freelancers providing rides through various platforms—grew 69 percent from 2010 to 2014, the most recent year for which there is data available, according to a Brookings analysis of Census Bureau and Moody’s data. Big cities like San Francisco, Boston, and Denver led the growth, according to Mark Muro, a senior fellow and policy director at the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings. Regular payroll employment in ground-transportation companies grew at a much slower rate, Brookings found. People are worried that automation is going to create a “job apocalypse,” but there will likely be thousands more driving and delivery jobs in upcoming years, according to Viscelli. Technology has allowed people to outsource the things they don’t want to do; they can now have someone else go grocery shopping for them, pick up their takeout, bring them packages in under two hours so they don’t have to go to a store. “We’re going to take the billion hours Americans spend driving to stores and taking things off shelves, and we’re going to turn it into jobs,” Viscelli said. “The fundamental question is really what the quality of these jobs is going to be.” This shift could create even more congestion in cities as hundreds of small passenger cars flood the streets. It also could fundamentally change people’s relationship with their employers—think of people like Chris Miller, the Ohio Flex driver, who for years was a full-time employee at various radio stations, and now is on his own. “It concerns me that this could be the way of the world,” he told me. There are efforts to make some of the people who drive for Flex employees rather than independent contractors, a move that worker advocates say could go a long way in improving the quality of these jobs. The lawsuit filed by Shannon Liss-Riordan in Washington State, for example, argues that Flex drivers are employees, not independent contractors, because they receive unpaid training about how to interact with customers and handle deliveries, they must follow Amazon’s instructions about where to make deliveries, and they can be terminated if they don’t follow the company’s policies. Liss-Riordan filed the lawsuit on behalf of five plaintiffs, but is hoping to add more. The California Supreme Court ruled in April that businesses must use an “ABC” standard when deciding how to classify workers. The standard, already in use in Massachusetts and New Jersey, means a worker is an independent contractor only if the work is done without direction and control from the employer, outside the course of the employer’s usual business, and is done by someone who has his or her own independent business doing that kind of work. This may make it harder for employers to classify workers as contractors—but still, it will be hard for Amazon Flex workers in California to change their classification. They will have to file a formal complaint or take the matter to court, assuming Amazon and other gig-economy companies do not reclassify them on their own. Liss-Riordan says one of the biggest obstacles in getting workers to take legal action over their classification is that many Flex workers agree, upon signing up to deliver packages, to resolve disputes with Amazon through arbitration. Companies can now use arbitration clauses to prevent workers from joining together to file class-action lawsuits, because of a May Supreme Court ruling . (A new lawsuit now in front of the Supreme Court argues that transportation workers are exempt from that rule.) Looking back through the many things I’d agreed to when signing up for Flex, I found that I, too, was governed by a binding arbitration agreement. The only way to opt out of this arbitration agreement would have been to inform Amazon I did not want to be covered by it within 14 days of signing the agreement. For me, being an independent contractor meant that the job was lonely, with no colleagues to share stories with, and no boss to ask about the many confusing aspects of being a first-day driver. (Flex drivers complained to me that even when they do contact support with a complaint, they often receive back a form letter, making them feel like they are working for a robot rather than a company that employs actual humans.) Many drivers take to Facebook to share stories and tips, but I only found those pages much later. My only interactions, aside from the parking enforcement officer, were with the people receiving the packages, who often said a distracted “thank you” as they tore open their packages, and with receptionists, who would nod me to mail rooms overflowing with brown boxes. Being an independent contractor also meant that the job was hard to leave behind, even when I was done for the day. A few hours after I’d finished my shift, I received a call on my cellphone from a woman to whom I’d tried to deliver a package earlier that day. There had been no instructions about where to leave the package, but she told me she had frequently asked Amazon to leave her packages with another office. As she began chastising me—and Amazon—for my failures, I told her I wasn’t responsible anymore and hung up the phone. Even weeks after I’d stopped driving for Flex, I kept getting new notifications from Amazon, telling me that increased rates were available, tempting me to log back in and make a few extra bucks, making me feel guilty for not opening the app, even though I have another job. And I didn’t even have to put up with the early, unpaid hours of the “sip and tap” drivers who depended on Flex for work that they never knew for sure was coming the next day. Flex was not a good deal for me. My shift lasted slightly longer than the three-and-a-half hours Amazon had told me it would, because I had to return two undeliverable packages to the South San Francisco warehouse. On my traffic-choked drive there, I passed a billboard showing a man who had made millions through Bitcoin sitting on a beach. My tech-economy experience was far less lucrative. In total, I drove about 40 miles (not counting the 26 miles I had to drive between the warehouse and my apartment). I was paid $70, but had $20 in expenses, based on the IRS mileage standards. I had narrowly avoided a $110 parking ticket, which felt like a win, but my earnings, added up, were $13.33 an hour. That’s less than San Francisco’s $14 minimum wage. I eagerly awaited my paycheck, which was supposed to be deposited into my bank account the Friday after my shift. It never came. Something had gone wrong with the way I entered my bank-account number into the app, and when I wrote to support to report this, I received a form letter back that said I was emailing Amazon from the wrong email address. I’m still corresponding with Amazon to figure out exactly how to get paid—more time spent trying to eke out a meager wage in the gig economy. We want to hear from you. Please email your response to [email protected] . * This article previously misstated which workers are represented by the American Postal Workers Union. We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to [email protected]. Alana Semuels is a staff writer at The Atlantic . She was previously a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times .