So it turns out Apple could have destroyed Uber in a heartbeat two years ago. Because Uber was implementing tracking methods that Apple doesn’t permit, and conniving to hide them from Apple. And Tim Cook let them off the hook. BARN CHEATIN PAWWWWWWWWWLLLLLL. But it should hammer home the point that Uber might well be the worst company in all of Silly Con Valley, barring neither Facebook nor Theranos.
Really, though, Uber should be destroyed for so many reasons. Privacy violations, underhanded business practice, turning “get forgiveness instead of permission” into a business strategy. But mostly, Uber should be destroyed for its role in proliferating the so-called “gig economy,” where you work for a company without actually having the status of an employee. “You can work as much or as little as you want” is basically a reversion to piece-work of the type more associated with the era of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
Because make no mistake, this is a reversion to Gilded Age economics. In fact, the gig economy is basically about facilitating “distributed servantry.” People who would balk at employing a butler and a chauffeur and a cook and a footman have no problem using Uber and Taskrabbit and Fiverr and Doordash and Instacart and Amazon Prime (yeah, I went there) to have things done for them. It’s like the My Weekly Reader vision of sixty years ago where we’d all have robots doing our menial labor – but instead of robots, it’s people, at $5 a pop or $10 an hour or whatever the market will bear. And if you’re not willing to work for that little, somebody else probably is. It’s why the powers that be aren’t bothered about structural unemployment, because structural unemployment means continual downward pressure on wages.
We’re past the point at which we need to start thinking about the changing nature of work. If a freakin’ magical-realist podcast can get this, anyone should be able to: automation and technology means productivity. Better health means longer lives. More people living longer with more automation means fewer jobs. And Ed at Gin & Tacos nails it: when blue collar manufacturing gets replaced with 30-hour part time retail, and Amazon and self-checkout stands at Safeway have nuked retail, what’s left to take? Silicon Valley wants everyone to code, but how many coders do you need? And how many can you make out of people who spent the last twenty years turning a wrench or pushing financial records? In a world where we value human beings first by wealth and then by work, what happens to people who don’t have either one?
And for all their talk about job creation, Uber’s long-term plans don’t involve human drivers. They’re counting on self-driving vehicles, to the point they’re willing to steal from Waymo to do it. Steal from Google, lie to Apple, ignore regulators, break laws. Uber is leading the way in allowing the Eloi to abstract away the Morlocks and call it “disruption” and they’re playing dirty as hell to do it. They need to be made to pay the price, but the Feds won’t do it. Somebody has to, and Apple could have been the heavy – yes, they’re going to accuse you of being a bully and dictating the marketplace and etc etc schwa schwa schwa whatever. You can’t win either way if you’re Apple, so as long as you’re going to catch hell anyway, why not do the right thing?
But that may be expecting too much of an Auburn booster.