Red Emma’s

For years, Teresa has passed from one job to the next, settling into long stretches of time, struggling to build her career in any field or unstick herself from an endless cycle of labor. The dreaded move from one gig to another is starting to feel unbearable. When a recruiter connects her with a contract position at AllOver, it appears to check all her prerequisites for a “good” job. It’s a fintech corporation with progressive hiring policies and a social justice-minded mission statement. Their new service for premium members: a functional fleet of driverless cars. The future of transportation. As her new-hire orientation reveals, the distance between AllOver’s claims and its actions is wide, but the lure of financial stability and a flexible schedule is enough to keep Teresa driving forward.

Joanne McNeil, who often reports on how the human experience intersects with labor and technology brings blazing compassion and criticism to WRONG WAY, examining the treacherous gaps between the working and middle classes wrought by the age of AI. Within these divides, McNeil turns the unsaid into the unignorable, and captures the existential perils imposed by a nonstop, full-service gig economy.

Joanne McNeil is the author of the novel WRONG WAY and LURKING: HOW A PERSON BECAME A USER. She has been a resident at Eyebeam, recipient of the Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation. She writes the column "Speculations" for Filmmaker magazine. Her writing has appeared in Dissent, New York magazine, the New York Times, and The Nation.

M.R. Sauter is a professor at the University of Maryland College of Information Studies, and the author of THE COMING SWARM: DDOS ACTIONS, HACKTIVISM, AND CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE ON THE INTERNET.  They have held research fellowships at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society, and New America. Their work has appeared in The Atlantic, Real Life Mag, e-flux, New Media and Society, io9, Vice, the Los Angeles Times, and the MIT Technology Review, among other venues.