I see it more as a way for people to use public and private key pairs regularly so they get used to it, if they are using it for interacting on the web, its easier to explain how bitcoin works and is almost like a training wheels for bitcoin without the monetary aspect.

Controlling data with public keys, as for the gig economy, sure I can see that, but I don't like using that term because it feels like its all about centralised companies hosting gigs, I prefer the P2P economy where its peers with no middlemen