Did 'The SImpsons' Accurately Portray STEM Education and the Gig Economy? (avclub.com) 144
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:
On Sunday, The Simpsons aired The Miseducation Of Lisa Simpson, an episode in which Marge — with the help of a song from John Legend ("STEM, it's not just for dorks, dweebs and nerds / It'll turn all your dumb kids to Zuckerbergs") — convinces Springfield to use a windfall the town reaped by seizing shipwreck treasure to build the Springfield STEM Academy to "prepare kids for the jobs of tomorrow."
All goes well initially — both Lisa and Bart love their new school — until Lisa realizes there's a two-tiered curriculum. While children classified as "divergent pathway assimilators" (i.e., gifted) like Lisa study neural networks and C+++ upstairs, kids like Bart are relegated to the basement where they're prepared via VR and gamified learning for a life of menial, gig economy side-hustles — charging e-scooters, shopping for rich people's produce, driving ride-share.
The school's administrator was even played by Silicon Valley actor Zach Woods, who delivered one of the episode's harshest lines, notes The A.V. Club.
"Staging a Norma Rae-style revolt at how the 'non-gifted' students are being trained to do everyone else's dirty work, Lisa's brought up short with a startled 'Eep' by Woods' administrator asking, 'Isn't that the point of a gifted class?'"
All goes well initially — both Lisa and Bart love their new school — until Lisa realizes there's a two-tiered curriculum. While children classified as "divergent pathway assimilators" (i.e., gifted) like Lisa study neural networks and C+++ upstairs, kids like Bart are relegated to the basement where they're prepared via VR and gamified learning for a life of menial, gig economy side-hustles — charging e-scooters, shopping for rich people's produce, driving ride-share.
The school's administrator was even played by Silicon Valley actor Zach Woods, who delivered one of the episode's harshest lines, notes The A.V. Club.
"Staging a Norma Rae-style revolt at how the 'non-gifted' students are being trained to do everyone else's dirty work, Lisa's brought up short with a startled 'Eep' by Woods' administrator asking, 'Isn't that the point of a gifted class?'"
Did the Simpsons (Score:2)
It is a cartoon folks, sit back and enjoy your day and the humor
Just my 2 cents
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Although that is probably not as true is it has been in the earlier seasons, this does not mean that the points they make should be summarily dismissed as just jokes. There's even entire branches of humor that dedicate themselves to things like social criticism, e.g. satire, which date back many centuries in human cultures.
Of course not all criticism is always valid. And since criticism is subject of criticism itself a dialogue ensues.
The que
Re:Did the Simpsons (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it doesn't raise a valid criticism. Children who are uninterested in learning cannot be educated in advanced topics. They are not empty cups to be filled by the teachers. Bart is always going to need remedial classes. That isn't the teachers' fault, or the school's fault. Lisa is able to learn advanced topics; she is also interested in advanced topics. Like, Duh.
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I have a cycling buddy who is a bit slow. And by that I don't mean that his physical performance is low. Now and then he asks me about going back to school and earn higher degrees. But he's more of a hands on type and doesn't like a lot of theory, which is a problem if you want higher degrees.
I digress.
As the summary puts it, yes I know how inaccurate summaries around here are usually, in Simpsons episode seems give only two op
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Yeah, but if charging e-scooters is boring Bart already knows how to spraypaint. He doesn't need art class for that, and he wouldn't show interest if those classes were offered.
Bart's education would look about the same regardless of what type of stupid classes you make him do that are at his level. Looking in on his classes would never give an accurate view of the opportunities available.
Bart isn't slow. He could take the more advanced classes if he wanted to. But he fundamentally is not intellectually cur
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Hence there apparently is no "if he wanted to" scenario any more. The algorithm determined that he's not intellectually curious at the age of 10 an
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If he doesn't want to do anything, school can't fix that.
Your argument suffers from the Underpants Gnome fallacy, and is missing some important middle steps.
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Anyway, I'll again try to get my point across.
In a general sense the goal of our education systems is to provide children with the tools to prepare themselves to function in our societies. Among those things they are supposed to do it by giving them opportunities to make the most out of themselves. Of course if the children really don't want to take tho
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In real life they don't use an algorithm, they have magazines that professional school administrators subscribe to that tell what all the latest trends and fashions in education are. So the social commentary is pretty narrow; an unlikely hypothetical that would be easily resolved through school board elections.
Blaming video games has always been a weak excuse, many of the kids with interests also enjoy video games. The challenge with educational games has always been to make them interesting, and they gener
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Although I don't think they try to blame video games as a whole. In their story video games are used as a tool. Tools are not inherently good or bad it depends on how they're used within the context of what we define as good or bad.
And there they are using that tool in an immoral fashion to fit their narrative.
As an example Bart is tasked with charging e-scooters around the virtual town. For that he has to acquire spatial reasoning skills, which is the lesson he is sup
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Face it, someone has to clean the toilet.
Indeed, which is why real men clean their own toilet, what do you do?
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Well it is true, the world needs ditch diggers, too.
... and the people who can manufacture and program them.
Re: Did the Simpsons (Score:3)
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I’m still waiting for the inevitable news that the first voice cast member has died of old age.
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Well, technically Russi Taylor passed away at age 75. She wasn't a principal actor, but she had a number of recurring roles over 193 episodes, including super-nerd Martin Prince, the twin girls Sherri and Terri, and German exchange student Uter. She was the long-time voice for Minnie Mouse over the decades as well.
Also, Doris Grau played "Lunchlady Doris," but only for 22 episodes since she passed away in '95. They brought the character back after an absence, but with a different name.
Marcia Wallace was the
Re: Did the Simpsons (Score:3)
'The SImpsons'
Should actually read 'The Simpsons'
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Ok, next read Anabasis to us.
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ah, it's the ol' Slashdot read-a-roo
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That's what I think they were going for... STEM and STEAM are two similar things, both are trying to teach boys and girls how to be useful to the world while they're young.
The simpsons already did it (Score:2)
in 30 seasons they had ample time to do everything, monkeys on shakespeare style:
https://southpark.cc.com/full-... [cc.com]
The problem isn't doing people's dirty work (Score:1, Insightful)
Either all work has dignity or none does. And if all work has dignity then all workers deserve a living wage with healthcare and a retirement when you're too old to work.
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No matter how much people are paid someone like you will lie and say it’s less than minimum wage. There's always some bullshit reason an actual number is meaningless because you have to subtract whatever bullshit amount from it for whatever bullshit reason.
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As someone who has Rsilvergun as a foe, your comment is not very interesting or insightful.
Rent is overwhelming the problem and yes, raising the minimum wage doesn't fix the problem but it's something that can be changed over night.
The problem is, people need affordable housing and shouldn't have to choose between living 100 miles from work or in closet that's walking distance from work.
Fix just this problem and so many other problems also see improvement, like transportation, health, financial stability, a
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...and how the hell do you actually fix the problem of rent?!
While making sure you are building enough housing for your community is important, it is a very long-term strategy. If you want people to invest in building homes, it is going to take a profit motivator to happen.
So, you want to cut rents in half? So then the big apartment complex down the street decides to cash out and do a condominium conversion because that is the only way for them to recoup their investment. The individual landlord that has
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Let's start with prostitutes then. Oh wait, that's not even legal in many parts of the US...
Legal, Taxed & Regulated (Score:2)
Re: Legal, Taxed & Regulated (Score:2)
Nixon didn't start the drug war, he consolidated it. The drug war started after WWII, it just took the various flavors of authoritarians on both sides of the aisle 20-30 years to maneuver the levers for it into place.
Re: No, it pretty much was Nixon (Score:2)
Right, because it was the migrant farm workers that were copiously using amphetamines causing Johnson to ban them. Pull the other one, it's got bells on.
Re: Legal, Taxed & Regulated (Score:2)
They never gave up after they saw the amount of power the government could get after prohibition.
It wasn't about power (Score:2)
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There were two huge groups that were strongly against the Vietnam War, and the new War of Drugs was devised to attack both of them and undercut their support: Black people (who were disproportionately drafted and selected and shipped over to Vietnam) and Hippies (who didn't want to be drafted to be sent to an overseas war).
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Either all work has dignity or none does.
There might be an excluded middle somewhere there....I mean, at least our current president out to be considered.
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Or cashier operator. Or trucker - a job that consists of spending hour after hour sitting in a seat performing a job which is just slightly too difficult to automate. Lots of jobs lack dignity. That's why people get paid.
Re: The problem isn't doing people's dirty work (Score:2)
Earning you own way.
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Oh ye of little proof.
If a person's efforts aren't worth all those things, who are you going to steal from to provide them?
Re: The problem isn't doing people's dirty work (Score:2)
It is not from a lack of effort and there is no need to steal from anyone. It is a problem of supply and demand and unequal negotiations. We need garbage collectors which is a mostly unskilled job but because it is also a undesirable job the pay is better than average. My local city currently actually has a shortage of drivers even with decent pay and free training but they do not have an actual shortage. If they doubled the wage, they would not have any problem finding plenty of drivers. Instead, the
Inequality (Score:2)
That's the problem with the incessant complaining about "inequality". You can either have inequality, where some fraction of high-performers live up to (or towards) their full potential, or you can have more equality, where high-performers are kept back, stifled, and used for others' benefit.
Everyone can't be above average, regardless of dramatic wailing about the unfairness of nature and of parents who make good choices instead of bad ones. It will help if we bring up the average, so that even a below av
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Inequality isn't the problem. There's lots of research to suggest that some inequality is good. That same research suggests that *too much* inequality is bad.
There's also the issue of incentives. The Simpson's episode got it wrong. The problem isn't the gifted class. It's the kids over in the private school being trained to be "administrators", "leaders" and "managers", and the ones flipping coins all day and being deified as "visionaries" when one of them happens to get a run of five heads in a row.
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That same research suggests that *too much* inequality is bad.
Too much of anything is bad. That's the definition of "too much". Awesome citation of research though.
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Finding the optimum is tricky, and it depends on what you use for an objective function. It's become very common to use GDP, for example, something which was explicitly warned against by the inventor of GDP. But we don't discuss objective functions and optimization, we screech at each other like monkeys about lazy poor people and the greedy rich.
Here's an IMF report on inequality and economic performance: https://www.imf.org/external/p... [imf.org]
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False dilemma. No one is arguing for no inequality. Bernie Sanders isn't, the article isn't, etc. The question is "how do we treat everyone" And there are almost infinite gradations between "President Xi says jump, and you start jumping as you ask how high" and "Everyone has exactly the same everything because reasons."
The question is, should one of those low-performers be able to afford a good life on a forty-hour week? Own a home? Get healthcare?
The average can certainly go up and leave some people
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False dilemma.
There's no "false dilemma". Which politicians talk about a prosperous society that benefits us all? Which politicians talk instead about getting even with "billionaires"?
If you want to claim "false dilemma", then you have to choose to help everyone and stop trying to tear down one side.
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A false dilemma is "a type of informal fallacy in which something is falsely claimed to be an either/or situation, when in fact there is at least one additional option". You didn't address that in your reply. I'll chalk that up to you not being familiar with the term.
The rest of your comment makes that unlikely, unfortunately. It seems you wan to argue in bad faith. That said, I'll respond in case I am misunderstanding your tone on the internet.
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The issue is that the floor is below the cost of living and the slope of increasing rewards is much steeper than the slope of increasing ability. Beyond that, certain types of ability are rewarded well beyond value.
Re:Inequality (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to do it fairly, create equal chances, not equal outcomes. Giving everyone the same chance to do something is a good thing and will eventually lead to you having the best for every possible situation because the number of people competing for that position is higher.
Equal outcome eventually means that you're accepting the lowest common denominator.
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That's the problem with the incessant complaining about "inequality". You can either have inequality, where some fraction of high-performers live up to (or towards) their full potential, or you can have more equality, where high-performers are kept back, stifled, and used for others' benefit.
Everyone can't be above average, regardless of dramatic wailing about the unfairness of nature and of parents who make good choices instead of bad ones. It will help if we bring up the average, so that even a below average life is still a comfortable and happy one by recent historical standards.
The problem isn't that some people are above average. The problem is that most people are NOT above average, and yet bunches of them still receive rewards due to their ability (or their parent's ability) to manipulate the system. This doesn't serve anyone well, because of the Peter Principal even legit high achievers eventually reach a level where all of their effort is being spent on pulling along people who really shouldn't be at that level in the first place.
"Menial jobs" are those that will be left... (Score:5, Interesting)
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So you think the future of humanity is to be Morlocks to Eloi ai's?
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Well, think about it. Self-repairing machines are pretty hard to design and there's always the danger of overlooking things, while humans pretty much are already there, so using humans for tasks that involve a good chance of being damanged instead of machines only makes sense.
Plus, replacing humans is way cheaper. They get produced for free.
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The cost of the nutrients is probably pretty low, but education is a huge cost. It takes 7-8 years of hand-holding for a new human to become functional as child labor for simple tasks, while a new machine can come with every piece of functionality pre-programmed into it. The real estate cost to host a human is also likely to be higher.
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That first 7-8 years are basically covered by the parent-units, which are of zero cost to you. They do this for some hormonal reason, we assume, but frankly, we don't really care enough to investigate.
The only problem remaining is that you have to take into account that it will take about 7-10 years before you can use your human productively, but that can be taken care of with sensible planning.
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Possibly this is irrelevant in this scenario, but schemes like this surrender one of the virtues of human beings, which is the capability for mental evolution during the somewhat imperfect intergenerational transmission process.
The incoming waves of kids tend to be kind of faddish and stupid i
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... once machines figure out that the puny carbon units are pretty energy-efficient in doing simple, physical work in the harsh environment that is the surface of planet earth.
Yeah about that... where do you think all the manual labor went? Power tools has replaced the manual labor of the shovels and sledges almost entirely. Maybe there's some sarcasm here I totally missed, but it's close to the worst possible option. It's one of the points in the Matrix where I just went "lalalalala it's a movie pretend that makes sense", we're a terrible source of energy and work. One nuclear plant could probably replace all of humanity as batteries.
Re: "Menial jobs" are those that will be left... (Score:2)
The original plotline had human hooked into a neural network, but studio heads thought that would be too complicated and forced the change. Would have been interesting though if instead of the barren world present you saw a green world overtaking the ruins except where the machines had their manufacturing and power nodes.
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Nope (Score:5, Interesting)
'Isn't that the point of a gifted class?'"
My wife Sue could explain this much better, but she's dead, so I"ll give ia shot... Aside from IQ, many (most?) Gifted students process information differently and are often bored in regular/mainstream classes and can actually do poorly in that environment. Like students on the other end of the educational spectrum, gifted student often have special, or at lease different, intellectual and emotional needs than most main-stream students -- both in school and at home. Among other things, the book Gifted Grownups [goodreads.com] explores cases of gifted children that were mis/unidentified, or could not take advantage of (or didn't have access to) gifted/special education and are now adults. There are plenty of dishwashers out there with 160 IQs ...
Sue [tumblr.com] was one of the best Gifted teachers in Virginia, (awarded Gifted Teacher of the Year for Virginia Region 2 in October 2005, before she died in January 2006. Before becoming a Gifted Education teacher, she was an English teacher (BA/MA English from SUNY Albany) and taught every grade from 5th - College, where she taught student teachers. She helped build the secondary Gifted program in Virginia Beach, designing two of the courses, SuperThinkers and SPARKS which focus on ethics and critical thinking skills.
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'Isn't that the point of a gifted class?'"
My wife Sue could explain this much better, but she's dead, so I"ll give ia shot... Aside from IQ, many (most?) Gifted students process information differently and are often bored in regular/mainstream classes and can actually do poorly in that environment.
First off, my sympathies, man.
Okay, second, she was quite right. Best case study is my sister and I. We are both high and similar IQ (I'll spare the number because of the inevitable arguments about that) But she thrived in the school system, while I was horribly bored. She was straight A's, I was meh. It just didn't work for me. But the cool part of the experiment was that she was the chosen one. I was the n'er do well that would never amount to anything. So she went to college, I didn't. She never amo
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Two similar IQ's, two different outcomes.
Yup, IQ isn't the whole story with Gifted, usually it's just the start. Many people don't get that. Happy things eventually worked out for you both.
(And thanks.)
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Yeah, your sister is rich and never had to work a day in her life. ;-) What were you saying about who is smarter? (just kidding)
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Yeah, your sister is rich and never had to work a day in her life. ;-) What were you saying about who is smarter? (just kidding)
Ironically, she considers herself a feminist, while taking a decidedly old school path. But yeah, different strokes for different folks.
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Sounds like she's the type who thrived when everything was "on rails", but when the rails came off she didn't have any self-direction. The best outcome for her would have been an office job in a large corporation.
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Sounds like she's the type who thrived when everything was "on rails", but when the rails came off she didn't have any self-direction.
That's certainly what happened to me. A lot of the drive came from my parents. Valedictorian at a good high school, then I moved away to college, where I came close to academic probation. It took me time to find my own drive. I started doing sysadmin work at home for experiments, not at all what I was doing in my classes. Did the same at a campus IT job, and that eventually turned into my professional career.
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Lots of research was done in the past, when political correctness did not exist, about IQ. Sure, society was different and the IQ was measured in different ways, but those results cannot be all that irrelevant. That research is not discussed today because it was not politically correct and raised politically incorrect questions (demonstrated politically incorrect correlations) between IQ and ethnic groups and, to a lesser extend, gender.
Politically correct or not, I am firmly convinced that there is a relationship between intelligence and many different factors.
The problem is that it is useless information. In fact it is worse than useless - it is a tool of racist and sexist people to promote what they are as somehow superior.
The problem is that it is not possible to tell what any individual's intelligence is by simply looking at them. You have to interact with them. Everything about intelligence is based on the individual, and not an av
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Thank you for sharing that incredible story!
Bittersweet. I'm paraphrasing: Is it possible to love someone as much as you can miss them?
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I'll just try to keep it brief, at some point I was five years ahead of my math class and ran into people even more extreme than me. It's kinda surreal, at one point you're talking about university grade math then suddenly you're talking to a little kid who's totally failing to relate to his age-peers but doesn't fit in with his skill-peers either. Make no mistake, I was totally not high school level maturity in elementary school even though I could to the math, nor was I college level maturity in high sch
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When I was in school they used to call that the "Retarded Class".
First off.... (Score:2)
Fuck cancer. Sorry to hear about your wife. My wife taught at a gifted school in the Chicago area for a few years (middle school) and it was quite eye opening. Even among the gifted, there was a wide range of talents and IQs. Some were incredible muiscly, some at math, some at language, some at other things. She taught French, and one of her 5th graders translated a Star Wars novel into French as a project. One was programming perl, and this was around 2003 when things like that weren't as prevalent.
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That is really worth thinking about.
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This is the key and why the show was accurate. The school was divided into students who wanted to learn, were easy to teach, and self selected themselves, and students who were hard to teach and self selected themselves into playtime.
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Wow. That long ago? (Score:2)
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I hear it went downhill quite a bit, as the original writers pretty much all left.
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I come back to it every once in awhile. The show is on total autopilot, picking safe jokes and running off of your good memories of plots from the past, and your enjoyment of the characters. Pretty similar to the Peanuts comic strip in the last few decades of its run, for that matter.
Most of the time, an episode would have a guffaw-inducing joke, but 22-23 minutes is a long time to sit through something that only has one minor payoff.
I gave up on the show early in its run when, again, most of the original w
McCoders (Score:5, Informative)
Re:McCoders (Score:4, Informative)
Really? The average Silicon Valley "coder" makes $180,000 a year. Get a grip kid. Go see how the rest of the world lives.
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The average Silicon Valle
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$160K in an environment where everything is insanely expensive...houses START at $1M
Yeah, but.... there's a pretty wide amount of variety in between "sleeping in your car" like the GP mentioned and "buying a $1M house." Yes, rent can be expensive. But the coders are generally in a decent position. It's the people who AREN'T making $160k who are screwed, because even in IT heaven, there are a lot of non-IT jobs that still need to be done that don't pay even half of that amount, in an area where they have the same expenses as the IT guys. Those jobs don't pay market rates, still. If you thin
Re: McCoders (Score:2)
Really? There are people spread all across the state, the country, the world where this is a reality, and they do t even know how to program, or ... internet.
The real question is... (Score:2)
Umm... what's new? (Score:2)
That's how it's been for the past few hundred years. Is it new because now it's "on a computer"?
The problem isn't inequality... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're always going to have some stratification of society. There will always be the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor. The problem is that there used to be a much smoother transition area between these extremes.
I grew up in the Rust Belt, and for a few decades (late 40s through the late 70s mostly) there was ample opportunity for non-geniuses to make a good living doing basic factory work. If you got to the end of high school and weren't college material, you'd join a union and go work in one of the trades or on an assembly line making physical products. You'd get training through an apprenticeship and have income that increased throughout your life. You wouldn't be filthy rich, but you would at least have a little extra to consume goods and services now and then. You'd be able to raise a family and have a decent life without having to be overly intellectual.
Problem is, society starts unraveling when people who are worse off feel there's no future for them. After all the factories went to China, some workers retrained for service and corporate jobs. 20 years after that, they started offshoring all the basic corporate functions. People need more and more education for a comfortable life, and now knowledge work is being automated. Unless we want to give up the whole idea of work-earn-consume-repeat, we need to find something for millions of people to do that isn't Uber or Instacart or dog walking for less than minimum wage and no security.
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It's not just economic. A lot of those jobs are part of a local or family identity. There are families that used to work in the same factory or mine for generations, or fish the same area. When those jobs go, communities lose their identity. That also angers people. Society is in a period of transition, as it has been continually since the industrial revolution.
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It's almost like "free trade" enriched a few parasites while inducing a catastrophic economic collapse for everyone else.
It's not free trade, it's automation that has eliminated tons of jobs. The Big Lie was that if only we could get a handle on trade, all those jobs would come back to the Rust Belt. Those jobs are not coming back. You'll still factories, but not the workers they employed, because tasks that used to take three men only take one person now.
Prevent discrimination based on ability! (Score:2)
Everyone should be equal! Qualifications and tests are tools of the bourgeoisie, designed to keep the poor down!
Everyone should be able to be a doctor, not just ones that can pass medical school. "Passing" just means that they've been accepted by the status quo. Everyone should be pilots. Everyone should be mathematicians. Everyone should be teachers. Everyone should be leaders. Everyone should be able to operate power plants, machinery, drive, etc.
Then we will finally live in the society we deserve. Let us
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Everyone should be equal! Qualifications and tests are tools of the bourgeoisie, designed to keep the poor down!
OMG, is that you Harrison Bergeron?
including the only job that will be left (Score:2)
that even the machines don't want to do.....care for the elderly.
And soda pouring....
Re:Isn't that the point of an un-gifted class? (Score:5, Funny)
Sure it's all fun and games, until we pack them all up and send them off on the B ark, and then start dying off from unsanitized phones...
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You missed the point of that bit. Someone needs to flip burgers and be cashiers and driver cars. Those guys were in the C-Ark, so they were ok. The B Ark is for Social Media Experts and the like.
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BTW, A good test of which ark they belong in is to use the phrase "what? Am I expected to X my *own* Y?" and if it makes sense to say "no" then that person goes in the C Ark, and if it makes sense to say "yes", then they go in the B Ark. Scenario #1 is that you go to get a hamburger at McDonalds and say "what? Am i expected to flip my own burger?". The correct response is "no". Scenario #2 is you are going to make a telephone and was "what? Am I expected to clean my own telephone?". The correct response is
Re:Isn't that the point of an un-gifted class? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Gifted" in educational parlance is distinct from "academically advanced".
Many state ed departments differentiate these two categories by IQ, but really that's not the difference between the two. Gifted students by federal law are those that:
need services and activities not ordinarily provided by the school in order to fully develop those capabilities.
-- 20 U.S.C. 7801 [slashdot.org]
Gifted children are in effect a special needs group. Academically advanced students' needs can be met by advancing them a grade, or giving them some enrichment assignments. Gifted students really need a different style of education.
The kind of education they're talking about is really just enrichment for academically advanced kids. The reason it didn't work for Lisa is that she's *gifted*. An advanced student learns how to operate the academic rewards machine so he gets his metaphorical cheese pellets. A gifted student has to take the machine apart and see how it works.
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At that level there aren't going to be enough 'gifted' students to fill 1 classroom.
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At that level there aren't going to be enough 'gifted' students to fill 1 classroom.
Meh, I read it the other way around... why would any child from "No child left behind" to "Child prodigy" reach their full potential without intense individual attention, that generally isn't offered in any class anywhere.
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Exactly. In an ideal world, our educational system would *produce* gifted people. When something it should be producing happens *naturally*, of course it can't handle that.
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What's actually occurring is these gig-economy jobs pay less than minimum wage. People who do them would otherwise be *unemployed*, since they are by definition people who nobody considers employable at minimum wage.
Making $5 an hour and living in a car? Well, seeing as you couldn't actually land a minimum-wage job, then the alternative if we abolish the "gig economy" is that you make $0 an hour and sleep in an alley. That would just make the underlying problem worse but easier to sweep under the carpet.
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My point here is that the gig economy didn't cause anything, tech didn't cause anything. It's a symptom of underlying issues that were there already, and attacking those "jobs" isn't a solution. The solution is elsewhere, i.e. compare the social safety net in the USA to other advanced industrial economies. Those have gig economy jobs too, but they don't have the "living in my car eating gruel driving for my Masters" problem.