The Sharing Economy Is a Lie: Uber, Ayn Rand and the Truth about Tech and Libertarians

Uber, Capitalism's darling!
In my nearly 60 years as an adult, I think I can count the cab rides
I've taken, on my fingers and toes with a couple left over. And I
usually took cabs only when the boss was picking up the tab.
But I also understood the struggle most cabbies had in making a living
wage. My cousin drove cab for many years in Yakima, a small city in
Eastern Washington. Matt drove 12 hour shifts, 6 days a week. He
earned about the same as I earned working 40 hours a week in the
drapery factory. A hand to mouth living, at best. Since "Cheap" has
been my middle name, you can imagine how soon I'll be hailing an Uber
driver. But hey! I won't try to talk anyone out of being shaken
down. After all, we are the nation's Consumers. And we do need to do
our part in supporting our Capitalist Nation. I mean, if we don't
step up to the plate, who can we get to keep the Ruling Class in
Martini's?

Carl Jarvis
On 2/2/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
> Home > The Sharing Economy Is a Lie: Uber, Ayn Rand and the Truth about
> Tech
> and Libertarians
> ________________________________________
> The Sharing Economy Is a Lie: Uber, Ayn Rand and the Truth about Tech and
> Libertarians
> By Richard Eskow [1] / Salon.com
> February 1, 2015
> Horror stories about the increasingly unpopular taxi service Uber have been
> commonplace in recent months, but there is still much to be learned from
> its
> handling of the recent hostage drama in downtown Sydney, Australia. We're
> told that we reveal our true character in moments of crisis, and apparently
> that's as true for companies as it is for individuals.
> A number of experts have challenged the idea that the horrific explosion of
> violence in a Sydney café was "terrorism," since the attacker was mentally
> unbalanced and acted alone. But, terror or not, the ordeal was certainly
> terrifying. Amid the chaos and uncertainty, the city believed itself to be
> under a coordinated and deadly attack.
> Uber had an interesting, if predictable, response to the panic and mayhem:
> It raised prices. A lot.
> In case you missed the story, the facts are these: Someone named Man Haron
> Monis, who was considered mentally unstable and had been investigated for
> murdering his ex-wife, seized hostages in a café that was located in
> Sydney's Central Business District or "CBD." In the process he put up an
> Islamic flag - "igniting," as Reuters [2] reported, "fears of a jihadist
> attack in the heart of the country's biggest city."
> In the midst of the fear, Uber stepped in and tweeted this announcement:
> "We
> are all concerned with events in CBD. Fares have increased to encourage
> more
> drivers to come online & pick up passengers in the area."
> As Mashable [3]reports, the company announced that it would charge a
> minimum of $100 Australian to take passengers from the area immediately
> surrounding the ongoing crisis, and prices increased by as much as four
> times the standard amount. A firestorm of criticism quickly erupted -
> "@Uber_Sydney [4] stop being assholes," one Twitter response began - and
> Uber soon found itself offering free rides out of the troubled area
> instead.
> What can we learn from this incident? Let's start by parsing that tweet:
> "We are all concerned with events in CBD ..."
> That opener suggests that Uber, as part of a community under siege, is
> preparing to respond in a civic manner.
> "... Fares have increased to encourage more drivers to come online & pick up
> passengers in the area."
> But, despite the expression of shared concern, there is no sense of civitas
> to be found in the statement that follows. There is only a transaction,
> executed at what the corporation believes to be market value. Lesson #1
> about Uber is, therefore, that in its view there is no heroism, only
> self-interest. This is Ayn Rand's brutal, irrational and primitive
> philosophy in its purest form: altruism is evil, and self-interest is the
> only true heroism.
> There was once a time when we might have read of "hero cabdrivers" or "hero
> bus drivers" placing themselves in harm's way to rescue their fellow
> citizens. For its part, Uber might have suggested that it would use its
> network of drivers and its scheduling software to recruit volunteer drivers
> for a rescue mission.
> Instead, we are told that Uber's pricing surge was its expression of
> concern. Uber's way to address a human crisis is apparently by letting the
> market govern human behavior, as if there were (in libertarian economist
> Tyler Cowen's phrase) "markets in everything" - including the lives of a
> city's beleaguered citizens (and its Uber drivers).
> Where would this kind of market-driven practice leave poor or middle-income
> citizens in a time of crisis? If they can't afford the "surged" price,
> apparently it would leave them squarely in the line of fire. And come to
> think of it, why would Uber drivers value their lives so cheaply, unless
> they're underpaid?
> One of the lessons of Sydney is this: Uber's philosophy, whether
> consciously
> expressed or not, is that life belongs to the highest bidder - and
> therefore, by implication, the highest bidder's life has the greatest
> value.
> Society, on the other hand, may choose to believe that every life has equal
> value - or that lifesaving services should be available at affordable
> prices.
> If nothing else, the Sydney experience should prove once and for all that
> there is no such thing as "the sharing economy." Uber is a taxi company,
> albeit an under-regulated one, and nothing more. It's certainly not a "ride
> sharing" service, where someone who happens to be going in the same
> direction is willing to take along an extra passenger and split gas costs.
> A
> ride-sharing service wouldn't find itself "increasing fares to encourage
> more drivers" to come into Sydney's terrorized Central Business District.
> A "sharing economy," by definition, is lateral in structure. It is a
> peer-to-peer economy. But Uber, as its name suggests, is hierarchical in
> structure. It monitors and controls its drivers, demanding that they
> purchase services from it while guiding their movements and determining
> their level of earnings. And its pricing mechanisms impose unpredictable
> costs on its customers, extracting greater amounts whenever the data
> suggests customers can be compelled to pay them.
> This is a top-down economy, not a "shared" one.
> A number of Uber's fans and supporters defended the company on the grounds
> that its "surge prices," including those seen during the Sydney crisis, are
> determined by an algorithm. But an algorithm can be an ideological
> statement, and is always a cultural artifact. As human creations,
> algorithms
> reflect their creators.
> Uber's tweet during the Sydney crisis made it sound as if human
> intervention, rather than algorithmic processes, caused prices to soar that
> day. But it doesn't really matter if that surge was manually or
> algorithmically driven. Either way the prices were Uber's doing - and its
> moral choice.
> Uber has been strenuously defending its surge pricing in the wake of
> accusations (apparently justified [5]) that the company enjoyed windfall
> profits during Hurricane Sandy. It has now promised the state of New York
> that it will cap its surge prices (at three times the highest rate on two
> non-emergency days). But if Uber has its way, it will soon enjoy a
> monopolistic stranglehold on car service rates in most major markets. And
> it
> has demonstrated its willingness to ignore rules and regulations. That
> means
> predictable and affordable taxi fares could become a thing of the past.
> In practice, surge pricing could become a new, privatized form of taxation
> on middle-class taxi customers.
> Even without surge pricing, Uber and its supporters are hiding its full
> costs. When middle-class workers are underpaid or deprived of benefits and
> full working rights, as Uber's reportedly are [6], the entire middle-class
> economy suffers. Overall wages and benefits are suppressed for the
> majority,
> while the wealthy few are made even richer. The invisible costs of ventures
> like Uber are extracted over time, far surpassing whatever short-term
> savings they may occasionally offer.
> Like Walmart, Uber underpays its employees - many of its drivers are
> employees, in everything but name - and then drains the social safety net
> to
> make up the difference. While Uber preaches libertarianism, it practices a
> form of corporate welfare. It's reportedly celebrating Obamacare [7], for
> example, since the Affordable Care Act allows it to avoid providing health
> insurance to its workforce. But the ACA's subsidies, together with Uber's
> often woefully insufficient wages, mean that the rest of us are paying its
> tab instead. And the lack of income security among Uber's drivers creates
> another social cost for Americans - in lost tax revenue, and possibly in
> increased use of social services.
> The company's war on regulation will also carry a social price. Uber and
> its
> supporters don't seem to understand that regulations exist for a reason.
> It's true that nobody likes excessive bureaucracy, but not all regulations
> are excessive or onerous. And when they are, it's a flaw in execution
> rather
> than principle.
> Regulations were created because they serve a social purpose, ensuring the
> free and fair exchange of services and resources among all segments of
> society. Some services, such as transportation, are of such importance that
> the public has a vested interest in ensuring they will be readily available
> at reasonably affordable prices. That's not unreasonable for taxi services,
> especially given the fact that they profit from publicly maintained roads
> and bridges.
> Uber has presented itself as a modernized, efficient alternative to
> government oversight. But it's an evasion of regulation, not its
> replacement. As Alexis Madrigal [8] reports, Uber has deliberately ignored
> city regulators and used customer demand to force its model of inadequate
> self-governance (my conclusion, not his) onto one city after another.
> Uber presented itself as a refreshing alternative to the
> over-bureaucratized
> world of urban transportation. But that's a false choice. We can streamline
> sclerotic city regulators, upgrade taxi fleets and even provide users with
> fancy apps that make it easier to call a cab. The company's binary
> presentation - us, or City Hall - frames the debate in artificial terms.
> Uber claims that its driver rating system is a more efficient way to
> monitor
> drivers, but that's an entirely unproven assumption. While taxi drivers
> have
> been known to misbehave, the worldwide litany of complaints against Uber
> drivers - for everything from dirty cars and spider bites [9] to assault
> with a hammer [10], fondling [11] and rape [12] - suggest that Uber's
> system
> may not work as well as old-fashioned regulation. It's certainly not
> noticeably superior.
> In fact, prosecutors in San Francisco and Los Angeles [13] say Uber has
> been
> lying to its customers about the level and quality of its background
> checks.
> The company now promises it will do a better job at screening drivers. But
> it won't tell us [14] what measures its taking to improve its safety
> record,
> and it's fighting the kind of driver scrutiny [14] that taxicab companies
> have been required to enforce for many decades.
> Many reports suggest that beleaguered drivers don't feel much better about
> the company than victimized passengers do. They tell horror stories [15]
> about the company's hiring and management practices. Uber unilaterally
> slashes drivers' rates [16], while claiming they don't need to unionize.
> (The Teamsters [17] disagree.)
> The company also pushes sketchy, substandard loans [18] onto its drivers -
> but hey, what could go wrong?
> Uber has many libertarian defenders. And yet, it deceives the press [19]
> and
> threatens to spy on journalists [20], lies to its own employees [21], keeps
> its practices a secret and routinely invades the privacy of civilians -
> sometimes merely for entertainment. (It has a tool, with the Orwellian name
> the "God View [22]," that it can use for monitoring customers' personal
> movements.)
> Aren't those the kinds of things libertarians say they hate about
> government?
> This isn't a "gotcha" exercise. It matters. Uber is the poster child for
> the
> pro-privatization, anti-regulatory ideology that ascribes magical powers to
> technology and the private sector. It is deeply a political entity, from
> its
> Nietzschean name to its recent hiring of White House veteran David Plouffe.
> Uber is built around a relatively simple app (which relies on
> government-created technology), but it's not really a tech company. Above
> all else Uber is an ideological campaign, a neoliberal project whose real
> products are deregulation and the dismantling of the social contract.
> Or maybe, as that tweeter in Sydney suggested, they're just assholes.
> Either way, it's important that Uber's worldview and business practices not
> be allowed to "disrupt" our economy or our social fabric. People who work
> hard deserve to make a decent living. Society at large deserves access to
> safe and affordable transportation. And government, as the collective
> expression of a democratic society, has a role to play in protecting its
> citizens.
> And then there's the matter of our collective psyche. In her book "A
> Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in
> Disaster," Rebecca Solnit wrote of the purpose, meaning and deep
> satisfaction people find when they pull together to help one another in the
> face of adversity. But in the world Uber seeks to create, those surges of
> the spirit would be replaced by surge pricing.
> You don't need a "God view" to see what happens next. When heroism is
> reduced to a transaction, the soul of a society is sold cheap.
>
> Share on Facebook Share
> Share on Twitter Tweet
> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [23]
> [24]
> ________________________________________
> Source URL:
> http://www.alternet.org/economy/sharing-economy-lie-uber-ayn-rand-and-truth-
> about-tech-and-libertarians
> Links:
> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/richard-eskow
> [2]
> http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/15/us-australia-security-idUSKBN0JS0W
> X20141215
> [3] http://mashable.com/2014/12/14/uber-sydney-surge-pricing/
> [4] https://twitter.com/Uber_Sydney
> [5] http://gothamist.com/2012/11/04/uber.php
> [6]
> http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-drivers-say-theyre-making-less-than-mini
> mum-wage-2014-10
> [7]
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/11/17/why-uber-loves-ob
> amacare/
> [8]
> http://fusion.net/story/33680/the-inside-story-of-how-the-uber-portland-nego
> tiations-broke-down/
> [9]
> http://consumerist.com/2014/07/30/uber-passenger-complains-of-spider-bite-in
> -filthy-car/
> [10]
> http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2014/09/30/uber-driver-hammer-attack-l
> iability/
> [11] http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-nikki-williams-2014-12
> [12]
> http://www.businessinsider.com/an-uber-driver-allegedly-raped-a-female-passe
> nger-in-boston-2014-12
> [13]
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/09/uber-california-lawsuit_n_6298206.h
> tml
> [14]
> http://consumerist.com/2014/12/18/uber-reportedly-revamping-security-wont-sa
> y-exactly-what-its-doing/
> [15] http://qz.com/299655/why-your-uber-driver-hates-uber/
> [16]
> http://www.salon.com/2014/09/03/uber_unrest_drivers_in_los_angeles_protest_t
> he_slashing_of_rates/
> [17]
> http://www.fastcompany.com/3037371/the-teamsters-of-the-21st-century-how-ube
> r-lyft-and-facebook-drivers-are-organizing
> [18]
> http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/11/06/3589715/uber-lending-investigati
> on/
> [19]
> http://pando.com/2014/10/29/uber-prs-latest-trick-impersonating-its-drivers-
> and-trying-to-scam-journalists/
> [20]
> http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/11/17/uber_exec_suggests_using_p
> ersonal_info_against_journalists.html
> [21] http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/04/technology/uber-lyft/
> [22]
> http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/10/03/god-view-uber-allegedly-s
> talked-users-for-party-goers-viewing-pleasure/
> [23] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on The Sharing Economy Is
> a Lie: Uber, Ayn Rand and the Truth about Tech and Libertarians
> [24] http://www.alternet.org/
> [25] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>
> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
> Home > The Sharing Economy Is a Lie: Uber, Ayn Rand and the Truth about
> Tech
> and Libertarians
>
> The Sharing Economy Is a Lie: Uber, Ayn Rand and the Truth about Tech and
> Libertarians
> By Richard Eskow [1] / Salon.com
> February 1, 2015
> Horror stories about the increasingly unpopular taxi service Uber have been
> commonplace in recent months, but there is still much to be learned from
> its
> handling of the recent hostage drama in downtown Sydney, Australia. We're
> told that we reveal our true character in moments of crisis, and apparently
> that's as true for companies as it is for individuals.
> A number of experts have challenged the idea that the horrific explosion of
> violence in a Sydney café was "terrorism," since the attacker was mentally
> unbalanced and acted alone. But, terror or not, the ordeal was certainly
> terrifying. Amid the chaos and uncertainty, the city believed itself to be
> under a coordinated and deadly attack.
> Uber had an interesting, if predictable, response to the panic and mayhem:
> It raised prices. A lot.
> In case you missed the story, the facts are these: Someone named Man Haron
> Monis, who was considered mentally unstable and had been investigated for
> murdering his ex-wife, seized hostages in a café that was located in
> Sydney's Central Business District or "CBD." In the process he put up an
> Islamic flag - "igniting," as Reuters [2] reported, "fears of a jihadist
> attack in the heart of the country's biggest city."
> In the midst of the fear, Uber stepped in and tweeted this announcement:
> "We
> are all concerned with events in CBD. Fares have increased to encourage
> more
> drivers to come online & pick up passengers in the area."
> As Mashable [3]reports, the company announced that it would charge a
> minimum
> of $100 Australian to take passengers from the area immediately surrounding
> the ongoing crisis, and prices increased by as much as four times the
> standard amount. A firestorm of criticism quickly erupted - "@Uber_Sydney
> [4] stop being assholes," one Twitter response began - and Uber soon found
> itself offering free rides out of the troubled area instead.
> What can we learn from this incident? Let's start by parsing that tweet:
> "We are all concerned with events in CBD ..."
> That opener suggests that Uber, as part of a community under siege, is
> preparing to respond in a civic manner.
> "... Fares have increased to encourage more drivers to come online & pick up
> passengers in the area."
> But, despite the expression of shared concern, there is no sense of civitas
> to be found in the statement that follows. There is only a transaction,
> executed at what the corporation believes to be market value. Lesson #1
> about Uber is, therefore, that in its view there is no heroism, only
> self-interest. This is Ayn Rand's brutal, irrational and primitive
> philosophy in its purest form: altruism is evil, and self-interest is the
> only true heroism.
> There was once a time when we might have read of "hero cabdrivers" or "hero
> bus drivers" placing themselves in harm's way to rescue their fellow
> citizens. For its part, Uber might have suggested that it would use its
> network of drivers and its scheduling software to recruit volunteer drivers
> for a rescue mission.
> Instead, we are told that Uber's pricing surge was its expression of
> concern. Uber's way to address a human crisis is apparently by letting the
> market govern human behavior, as if there were (in libertarian economist
> Tyler Cowen's phrase) "markets in everything" - including the lives of a
> city's beleaguered citizens (and its Uber drivers).
> Where would this kind of market-driven practice leave poor or middle-income
> citizens in a time of crisis? If they can't afford the "surged" price,
> apparently it would leave them squarely in the line of fire. And come to
> think of it, why would Uber drivers value their lives so cheaply, unless
> they're underpaid?
> One of the lessons of Sydney is this: Uber's philosophy, whether
> consciously
> expressed or not, is that life belongs to the highest bidder - and
> therefore, by implication, the highest bidder's life has the greatest
> value.
> Society, on the other hand, may choose to believe that every life has equal
> value - or that lifesaving services should be available at affordable
> prices.
> If nothing else, the Sydney experience should prove once and for all that
> there is no such thing as "the sharing economy." Uber is a taxi company,
> albeit an under-regulated one, and nothing more. It's certainly not a "ride
> sharing" service, where someone who happens to be going in the same
> direction is willing to take along an extra passenger and split gas costs.
> A
> ride-sharing service wouldn't find itself "increasing fares to encourage
> more drivers" to come into Sydney's terrorized Central Business District.
> A "sharing economy," by definition, is lateral in structure. It is a
> peer-to-peer economy. But Uber, as its name suggests, is hierarchical in
> structure. It monitors and controls its drivers, demanding that they
> purchase services from it while guiding their movements and determining
> their level of earnings. And its pricing mechanisms impose unpredictable
> costs on its customers, extracting greater amounts whenever the data
> suggests customers can be compelled to pay them.
> This is a top-down economy, not a "shared" one.
> A number of Uber's fans and supporters defended the company on the grounds
> that its "surge prices," including those seen during the Sydney crisis, are
> determined by an algorithm. But an algorithm can be an ideological
> statement, and is always a cultural artifact. As human creations,
> algorithms
> reflect their creators.
> Uber's tweet during the Sydney crisis made it sound as if human
> intervention, rather than algorithmic processes, caused prices to soar that
> day. But it doesn't really matter if that surge was manually or
> algorithmically driven. Either way the prices were Uber's doing - and its
> moral choice.
> Uber has been strenuously defending its surge pricing in the wake of
> accusations (apparently justified [5]) that the company enjoyed windfall
> profits during Hurricane Sandy. It has now promised the state of New York
> that it will cap its surge prices (at three times the highest rate on two
> non-emergency days). But if Uber has its way, it will soon enjoy a
> monopolistic stranglehold on car service rates in most major markets. And
> it
> has demonstrated its willingness to ignore rules and regulations. That
> means
> predictable and affordable taxi fares could become a thing of the past.
> In practice, surge pricing could become a new, privatized form of taxation
> on middle-class taxi customers.
> Even without surge pricing, Uber and its supporters are hiding its full
> costs. When middle-class workers are underpaid or deprived of benefits and
> full working rights, as Uber's reportedly are [6], the entire middle-class
> economy suffers. Overall wages and benefits are suppressed for the
> majority,
> while the wealthy few are made even richer. The invisible costs of ventures
> like Uber are extracted over time, far surpassing whatever short-term
> savings they may occasionally offer.
> Like Walmart, Uber underpays its employees - many of its drivers are
> employees, in everything but name - and then drains the social safety net
> to
> make up the difference. While Uber preaches libertarianism, it practices a
> form of corporate welfare. It's reportedly celebrating Obamacare [7], for
> example, since the Affordable Care Act allows it to avoid providing health
> insurance to its workforce. But the ACA's subsidies, together with Uber's
> often woefully insufficient wages, mean that the rest of us are paying its
> tab instead. And the lack of income security among Uber's drivers creates
> another social cost for Americans - in lost tax revenue, and possibly in
> increased use of social services.
> The company's war on regulation will also carry a social price. Uber and
> its
> supporters don't seem to understand that regulations exist for a reason.
> It's true that nobody likes excessive bureaucracy, but not all regulations
> are excessive or onerous. And when they are, it's a flaw in execution
> rather
> than principle.
> Regulations were created because they serve a social purpose, ensuring the
> free and fair exchange of services and resources among all segments of
> society. Some services, such as transportation, are of such importance that
> the public has a vested interest in ensuring they will be readily available
> at reasonably affordable prices. That's not unreasonable for taxi services,
> especially given the fact that they profit from publicly maintained roads
> and bridges.
> Uber has presented itself as a modernized, efficient alternative to
> government oversight. But it's an evasion of regulation, not its
> replacement. As Alexis Madrigal [8] reports, Uber has deliberately ignored
> city regulators and used customer demand to force its model of inadequate
> self-governance (my conclusion, not his) onto one city after another.
> Uber presented itself as a refreshing alternative to the
> over-bureaucratized
> world of urban transportation. But that's a false choice. We can streamline
> sclerotic city regulators, upgrade taxi fleets and even provide users with
> fancy apps that make it easier to call a cab. The company's binary
> presentation - us, or City Hall - frames the debate in artificial terms.
> Uber claims that its driver rating system is a more efficient way to
> monitor
> drivers, but that's an entirely unproven assumption. While taxi drivers
> have
> been known to misbehave, the worldwide litany of complaints against Uber
> drivers - for everything from dirty cars and spider bites [9] to assault
> with a hammer [10], fondling [11] and rape [12] - suggest that Uber's
> system
> may not work as well as old-fashioned regulation. It's certainly not
> noticeably superior.
> In fact, prosecutors in San Francisco and Los Angeles [13] say Uber has
> been
> lying to its customers about the level and quality of its background
> checks.
> The company now promises it will do a better job at screening drivers. But
> it won't tell us [14] what measures its taking to improve its safety
> record,
> and it's fighting the kind of driver scrutiny [14] that taxicab companies
> have been required to enforce for many decades.
> Many reports suggest that beleaguered drivers don't feel much better about
> the company than victimized passengers do. They tell horror stories [15]
> about the company's hiring and management practices. Uber unilaterally
> slashes drivers' rates [16], while claiming they don't need to unionize.
> (The Teamsters [17] disagree.)
> The company also pushes sketchy, substandard loans [18] onto its drivers -
> but hey, what could go wrong?
> Uber has many libertarian defenders. And yet, it deceives the press [19]
> and
> threatens to spy on journalists [20], lies to its own employees [21], keeps
> its practices a secret and routinely invades the privacy of civilians -
> sometimes merely for entertainment. (It has a tool, with the Orwellian name
> the "God View [22]," that it can use for monitoring customers' personal
> movements.)
> Aren't those the kinds of things libertarians say they hate about
> government?
> This isn't a "gotcha" exercise. It matters. Uber is the poster child for
> the
> pro-privatization, anti-regulatory ideology that ascribes magical powers to
> technology and the private sector. It is deeply a political entity, from
> its
> Nietzschean name to its recent hiring of White House veteran David Plouffe.
> Uber is built around a relatively simple app (which relies on
> government-created technology), but it's not really a tech company. Above
> all else Uber is an ideological campaign, a neoliberal project whose real
> products are deregulation and the dismantling of the social contract.
> Or maybe, as that tweeter in Sydney suggested, they're just assholes.
> Either way, it's important that Uber's worldview and business practices not
> be allowed to "disrupt" our economy or our social fabric. People who work
> hard deserve to make a decent living. Society at large deserves access to
> safe and affordable transportation. And government, as the collective
> expression of a democratic society, has a role to play in protecting its
> citizens.
> And then there's the matter of our collective psyche. In her book "A
> Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in
> Disaster," Rebecca Solnit wrote of the purpose, meaning and deep
> satisfaction people find when they pull together to help one another in the
> face of adversity. But in the world Uber seeks to create, those surges of
> the spirit would be replaced by surge pricing.
> You don't need a "God view" to see what happens next. When heroism is
> reduced to a transaction, the soul of a society is sold cheap.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [23]
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[24]
>
> Source URL:
> http://www.alternet.org/economy/sharing-economy-lie-uber-ayn-rand-and-truth-
> about-tech-and-libertarians
> Links:
> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/richard-eskow
> [2]
> http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/15/us-australia-security-idUSKBN0JS0W
> X20141215
> [3] http://mashable.com/2014/12/14/uber-sydney-surge-pricing/
> [4] https://twitter.com/Uber_Sydney
> [5] http://gothamist.com/2012/11/04/uber.php
> [6]
> http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-drivers-say-theyre-making-less-than-mini
> mum-wage-2014-10
> [7]
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/11/17/why-uber-loves-ob
> amacare/
> [8]
> http://fusion.net/story/33680/the-inside-story-of-how-the-uber-portland-nego
> tiations-broke-down/
> [9]
> http://consumerist.com/2014/07/30/uber-passenger-complains-of-spider-bite-in
> -filthy-car/
> [10]
> http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2014/09/30/uber-driver-hammer-attack-l
> iability/
> [11] http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-nikki-williams-2014-12
> [12]
> http://www.businessinsider.com/an-uber-driver-allegedly-raped-a-female-passe
> nger-in-boston-2014-12
> [13]
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/09/uber-california-lawsuit_n_6298206.h
> tml
> [14]
> http://consumerist.com/2014/12/18/uber-reportedly-revamping-security-wont-sa
> y-exactly-what-its-doing/
> [15] http://qz.com/299655/why-your-uber-driver-hates-uber/
> [16]
> http://www.salon.com/2014/09/03/uber_unrest_drivers_in_los_angeles_protest_t
> he_slashing_of_rates/
> [17]
> http://www.fastcompany.com/3037371/the-teamsters-of-the-21st-century-how-ube
> r-lyft-and-facebook-drivers-are-organizing
> [18]
> http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/11/06/3589715/uber-lending-investigati
> on/
> [19]
> http://pando.com/2014/10/29/uber-prs-latest-trick-impersonating-its-drivers-
> and-trying-to-scam-journalists/
> [20]
> http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/11/17/uber_exec_suggests_using_p
> ersonal_info_against_journalists.html
> [21] http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/04/technology/uber-lyft/
> [22]
> http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/10/03/god-view-uber-allegedly-s
> talked-users-for-party-goers-viewing-pleasure/
> [23] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on The Sharing Economy Is
> a Lie: Uber, Ayn Rand and the Truth about Tech and Libertarians
> [24] http://www.alternet.org/
> [25] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>
>
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