Two nights ago, I spent some time on my balcony – reading, writing, drinking beer, surfing the net, listening to music. Fun Fact: mosquitoes are attracted to beer drinkers and people with type o blood. I saw one or two mosquitoes buzzing around. I know one made it in to my apartment. Yesterday I counted over 25 mosquito bites, mostly on my ankles and feet. Some are bites on top of bites – which just seems greedy. Some are in stupid places like on my knuckle. Some are infuriatingly itchy. That will learn me to enjoy some outside time on a nice night. So… while I continue to look for jobs, sweat out the waiting part of my most recent job interview, look for freelance work, doomscroll the increasingly sad state of affairs in the world, and fret about the fact that I’m supposed to move in less than a month… I am also, quite literally, itching and can’t sit still.
The World of Freelance Editing and Writing
For the past few weeks I’ve been picking up jobs here and there as a freelance editor and writer. It’s been an interesting experience. I created profiles on two gig sites Fiverr and Upwork. Fiverr seems more geared towards designers who have a portfolio of work, and Upwork seems better for editors and writers. On Fiverr, you post a gig, and people reach out to you (if they can find you). On Upwork, some of that happens too, but you can actively bid on gigs. Upwork takes a 20% cut – which is pretty steep – that gig I took for $15/hour because it looked easy and I wasn’t doing anything else with my time earned me $12.hour. Multiply that out by 40 hours a week for 52 weeks and I’ll have earned $24k in a year, which means I can afford rent and maybe some groceries, but would have to cancel my healthcare and all other bills. I try not to take jobs for under $20/hour (which get knocked down to $15 after Upwork takes it’s cut). It’s good to be a middleman tech company.
The jobs have been interesting. I’ve written a eulogy and a dating profile. I’ve given feedback on a memoir for a guy who was the CEO of the aquarium that rescued the dolphin in A Dolphin Tale. I’m providing feedback on a self-help book written by a therapist. I wrote a letter about a broken elevator and I wrote up a job description for an internship for a finance tech startup. I wouldn’t mind doing more of this type of work – the variety keeps it interesting. Unfortunately, it’s taking me a lot of effort to land the few jobs I get, and I’m not earning very much. I’m still pretty new to all of it, and it takes a little bit of time to build up a decent online rating – which will command better pay.
There is also an icky side to the freelance world. For one, there are a lot of jobs that really try to exploit “hungry” writers. They’ll pay a penny a word and most want 1000 words. It takes me over an hour to write 1000 words, which means I get $10/hour ($8 after the Upwork vig). There are places that pay even less than that. Frankly it’s insulting – and points to one of my biggest beefs with capitalism – extract as much as you can out of people for as little as possible. I couldn’t, in good conscience, post a job that was going to pay someone $5 an hour. There’s also a lot of scam writing going on. The other day I bid on a job to review a book – it was listed as proofread and edit – so I thought they meant and editorial review. The reviews of the client/author were all positive, and the author reached out. I looked him up, he’s a legit author who writes for a finance magazine. Here is his response to my bid:
Thanks for your message.
Would you be interested in writing a 5 star book review for me on Amazon? I would pay you to buy the book (~$10) and then pay you say $10 extra for leaving a review I could give you (should take you 5 minutes on Amazon). You don’t need to read the book even. so $20 total.
Would you be interested?
I politely declined saying it’s not really my type of gig. According to the stats, this client has spent over $180k on Upwork projects. What the actual fuck? He spent $180k. Not all of his jobs have been fake book reviews, but quite a few have. How does a person get to a point where they are making enough money that they can spend $180k on these types of projects. It all feels like one big ponzi scheme in which some people are earning quite a bit of money while doing absolutely no work. I see a lot of ghostwriting gigs posted on the site, and so I could see a scenario in which a person pays a little bit of money to have a book written, and then spends more to boost it’s reviews, and suddenly they’re a bestselling author. How to game the system 101.
One of the people I have done some work for, asked me to answer three questions on a job interview application. I told him to send me what he had written up, and I’ll clean it up. He didn’t have anything written, he wanted me to actually answer the questions. I’ll admit, my line in the sand is an arbitrary one – cleaning up someone’s writing may not be terribly different from doing the actual writing, but this felt too fraudulent for me to take on… and I suspect, he’s not even the person applying for the job. If I had to guess, he has his own “creative services” operation, and then subcontracts the work out. It’s the American Dream – build a business in which you charge your clients $40/hour for a job, then turn around and hire someone at $15/hour to do the work. Don’t get me wrong, doing the same thing has crossed my mind. More and more, I feel like a sucker trying to earn money by actually working.
With everyone taking a cut and those at the top doing no actual work, you can see that by the time the money “trickles down” there’s very little left. A lot of jobs listed on this site are to write up content for web sites promoting products. I haven’t looked in to any of these sites, but I suspect they are for “dropshippers” – basically people who are selling knock-off goods. They never actually handle any of the products – they simply build a portal to sell products and then hire influencers to promote the products and writers to create fake reviews (this will only get worse as AI gets better at writing). It’s enough of a “thing” that the BBC ran an article Dropshipping: The hustlers making millions from goods they never handle. I suspect a similar things happens with Amazon and lots of retail. And it works because enough people get a piece of the action to keep it all somewhat quiet. It was recently reported that Jeff Bezos’ worth increased by over $70 billion during the pandemic. He’ll never know if a whole lot of shady reviews and fake sites are driving the growth, because Amazon is skimming a bit from everything. Everybody gets paid and the only thing sacrificed is ethics and trust.
It’s hard not to feel disheartened that we live in an increasingly fake world. Our technology has made it so easy to remain anonymous and to create fake accounts and fake people and yes, fake news. Trust seems to be crumbling everywhere. I don’t know what the solution is. I don’t know how we push a narrative and practice of authenticity. I know there have always been hustlers and tricksters, but it seems like capitalism has run amok. Honestly, part of me is a little jealous. I’m not smart enough to cash in, and even if I were, I’m not sure I’m morally corrupt enough to cash in. The net effect is that I feel like an outsider – the only one not in on the secret. And if I’m being honest, I don’t even want to cash in. If I did, I’d probably give almost all of it away. Anymore, I just want enough to live a decent life on my own terms and ignore all the other crap. I want to not concern myself with whether or not other people are being authentic, whether or not that review was real or written by someone who was paid to not read the book. And these are just the small things – the grifters and the charlatans… We have a president determined to overturn every policy of his predecessor because he can and determined to squeeze as much money out of the American people for his own and his friend’s profits…. and then there are also the real criminal people in positions of power causing genuine harm. This morning I read that ICE agents in El Paso, Texas have been accused of sexually molesting women imprisoned in the detention center there. Or I see the headlines about this celebrity and that celebrity jetting off to this place or that place… while the world is on lock down, they continue to play from Miami to Wyoming to wherever their money can take them. This is America. Again, I don’t know what to do about any of it. Closing my eyes won’t make it go away, but it feels like it’s all getting so much more brazen, so much louder.
One of the songs I’ve been listening to on heavy repeat is “It’s All So Incredibly Loud.” The song is about those few seconds of deafening silence after something hurtful and devastating is said. Looking out at a fake world full of a lot of inauthenticity, hurt, and suffering, the song seems appropriate for our times.