Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

by Jenny Odell

Peter Reinhardt, CEO of a carbon capture company, may have coined the expression “above the API” in a 2015 blog post called “Replacing Middle Management with APIs.” Describing automated processes at Uber (freelance drivers) and 99designs (freelance designers), he gives examples where a line of code is executed by humans: “The Uber API dispatches a human to drive from point A to point B. And the 99designs Tasks API dispatches a human to convert an image into a vector logo (black, white and color). Humans are on the verge of becoming literal cogs in a machine, completely anonymized behind an API.” Reinhardt worries that “as the software layer gets thicker, the gap between Below the API jobs and Above the API jobs widens.”