This post is mostly about how frustrating it is to monetize any skills one obtains. Being a digital marketer by trade, I’m at the nexus of suck when it comes to these sort arrangements and, consequentially, I’m the one destroying the fabric of what it means to “know a guy.”
How Local Businesses Get Squeezed by Referrals
I’m not trying to lionize old-timey America. I just want to make that clear. There have always been phone books, billboards, newspapers, radios etc. to saturate one’s range of options when deciding on who is the right person for a task.
There used to be a specific, cosmic warmth in “Knowing a Guy.”
If your transmission started slipping (wood-grain gripping,) you didn’t open an app and scroll through five-star reviews from bots named “mlf-hunterxx420.” You went to see a guy named Rick. You knew Rick because your cousin bought a bumper from him, or because you saw him at the same dive bar every Friday. The transaction wasn’t guaranteed by a Terms of Service agreement; it was guaranteed by the fact that if Rick screwed you over, he’d have to look you in the eye at the grocery store next week.
That was social capital. It was inefficient, messy, and unscalable. And that “inefficiency” was exactly the point, you got to keep that credit!
For most of the modern era, we mediated these needs through public infrastructure. The phone book, the classifieds, the bulletin board at the laundromat—these were open indexes. They were flawed, yes, but they were transparent. If you looked up “Rick’s Plumbing,” you found Rick. You called Rick. Rick picked up the phone. The directory didn’t pretend to be your friend, and it didn’t demand a cut of the conversation. Rick had already negotiated with the directory to his liking and that’s as far as it went.
Today, that direct line of communication has been strip-mined by the Walled Garden Economy.
We have accepted the inevitability that social capital must be monetized. It is the logical conclusion of a service economy running out of easy growth. Platforms like Thumbtack, Angi (formerly Angie’s List, poor Angie,) Google Local Service Ads and Yelp have effectively enclosed the digital commons, inserting themselves between the town and the tradesman. They act not as matchmakers, but as toll collectors on the only road into town.
It is a shift that economists like Yanis Varoufakis describe not as capitalism, but as Technofeudalism.
In this new structure, Rick is no longer an independent entrepreneur. He is a vassal. He owns his truck and his wrench (the means of production), but he does not own his access to the market. Even though he can still go around town and drum up business face-to-face, hot leads waiting in your area is just too alluring. The Platform has bought every keyword, dominated every search result, and suffocated organic discovery so thoroughly that Rick cannot survive outside its walls.
He is forced to enter the fiefdom. And once inside, he realizes he isn’t selling to a customer but buying permission to speak to one.
This creates a digital monopsony. To Rick, the diverse, chaotic demand of the entire town is flattened into a single, tyrannical buyer: The Algorithm. The Algorithm dictates the price of the lead. The Algorithm decides if he is “responsive” enough to be shown. The Algorithm hides his phone number and anonymizes his identity until the rent is paid.
We have replaced the messy, human work of “reputation” with a sanitized simulation of it. We trade the friction of finding Rick for the convenience of a “verified” badge, not realizing that the badge is just a receipt for paid reach.
This is why the advice to “slow down” or “build real relationships” feels so hollow. You can’t slow down when the rent is due. Rick operates under the crushing pressure of a system that demands he pay for every single interaction. He cannot afford the inefficiency of a handshake because the Platform charges him $45 just to bid on the handshake.
The tragedy isn’t that technology changed how we find help. It’s that we allowed technology to turn our neighbors into content, and our neighborhoods into extraction zones. We have optimized the “Guy” out of the economy, and all that’s left is the Gig.
Looking for a solution? Well too bad. It’s a systemic issue. If I had to throw some sort of advice here it’s position yourself as a true artisan and do something other people can’t. The margin-buffer of exceptional work buys you time and lets you nurture higher quality clients.
I certainly feel the rip tide every day.
