uber lyft

168 results back to index

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, business logic, call centre, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive load, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death from overwork, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Chrome, Greyball, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social software, SoftBank, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, Tim Cook: Apple, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, urban planning, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Wells, Attoh, and Cullen, “The Work Lives of Uber Drivers.” 42. Alex Rosenblat, “How Uber’s Alliance with Montréal Drivers Turns Labo[u]r’s Tactics On Its Head,” Uber Screeds, August 4, 2016, https://medium.com/uber-screeds/how-ubers-alliance-with-montr%C3%A9al-drivers-turns-labo-u-r-s-tactics-on-its-head-af490b252dae. 43. Alex Rosenblat, “Is Your Uber/Lyft Driver in Stealth Mode?” Uber Screeds, July 19, 2016, https://medium.com/uber-screeds/is-your-uber-driver-in-hiding-484696894139. 44. Mike Isaac, “Uber’s C.E.O. Plays with Fire,” New York Times, April 23, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/technology/travis-kalanick-pushes-uber-and-himself-to-the-precipice.html; Ali Griswold, “Oversharing: Waymo Hits Uber Where It Hurts, Instacart Talks Cash-Flow, and Airbnb Dorm Rooms,” Quartz, April 25, 2017. 45.

…

APPENDIX TWO RIDEHAILING BEYOND UBER Meet Lyft, the Younger Twin Uber may be the dominant player on the ridehail stage, but many Uber drivers work simultaneously for Lyft and other competitors. Lyft was founded in 2012 in the United States: by 2017, it had become available in forty states.1 Lyft achieved an $11 billion valuation by the fall of 2017.2 Recode reported that Second Measure, a research firm that tracks credit card purchases, determined that Lyft had 23.4 percent of the ridehail market share in the United States and Uber had 74.3 percent.3 The corporate practices of Uber and Lyft in managing drivers aren’t identical, but their similarities vastly outnumber their differences.

…

San Francisco County Transportation Authority, “TNCs Today: A Profile of San Francisco Transportation Network Company Activity,” June 2017, www.sfcta.org/sites/default/files/content/Planning/TNCs/TNCs_Today_112917.pdf. 5. Jessica, “New Survey: Drivers Choose Uber for Its Flexibility and Convenience,” Uber Newsroom, December 7, 2015, https://newsroom.uber.com/driver-partner-survey/. 6. Lyft, “Explore,” February 14, 2018, www.lyft.com/. 7. Uber, “Get there,” February 14, 2018, www.uber.com/. 8. Harry Campbell, “2018 Uber and Lyft Driver Survey Results—The Rideshare Guy,” February 26, 2018, The Rideshare Guy, https://therideshareguy.com/2018-uber-and-lyft-driver-survey-results-the-rideshare-guy/. Index Aasim (driver), 153–54 Abbott, Greg, 176 Abraham (driver), 124–25 acceptance of rides.

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

The report has frequently been referred to as a “paper,” but given that it was paid for by Uber and was not subjected to any external review the word “report” is more accurate. 55 For example, Ellen Huet at Forbes, Jacob Davidson at Time, Andrea Peterson at the Washington Post. 56 Peterson, “The Missing Data Point from Uber’s Driver Analysis.” 57 Baker, “Ubernomics.” 58 Guendelsberger, “Infographic.” 59 Booth, “Uber Whistleblower Exposes Breach in Driver-Approval Process.” 60 Biddle, “Uber Driver.” 61 Skinner, “California Prosecutors Say Uber’s Background Checks Missed Convicts.” 62 Said, “As Uber, Lyft, Sidecar Grow, so Do Concerns of Disabled.” 63 Wieczner, “Why the Disabled Are Suing Uber and Lyft.” 64 Trautman, “Will Uber Serve Customers With Disabilities?” 65 Strochlic, “Uber.” 66 Redmond, “Does Airbnb Have an ADA Problem?” 67 Peterson, “Uber Does Not Care about Racism, It Cares about Money.” 68 Wilonsky, “On the Same Day Dallas Task Force Begins Debating Car-for-Hire Rules, Cab Industry Sues Chicago over Uber, Lyft”; Peck, “Uber’s New Delivery Service Only Caters To D.C.’s White Neighborhoods.” 69 Hall and Krueger, “An Analysis of the Labor Market for Uber’s Driver-Partners in the United States.” 70 Edelman and Luca, Digital Discrimination: The Case of Airbnb.com. 71 Todisco, “Share and Share Alike?”

…

8 Schor, “Debating the Sharing Economy.” 9 Gannes, “Zimride Turns Regular Cars Into Taxis With New Ride-Sharing App, Lyft.” 10 Gustin, “Lyft-Off: Car-Sharing Start-Up Raises $60 Million Led by Andreessen Horowitz.” 11 Ibid. 12 Gannes, “Zimride Turns Regular Cars Into Taxis With New Ride-­Sharing App, Lyft.” 13 Gannes, “Lyft Sells Zimride Carpool Service to Rental-Car Giant Enterprise.” 14 Gannes, “Competition Brings Lyft, Sidecar and Uber Closer to Cloning Each Other.” 15 Lawler, “A Look Inside Lyft’s Financial Forecast For 2015 And Beyond.” 16 D’Onfro, “Uber CEO Founded The Company Because He Wanted To Be A ‘Baller In San Francisco.’” 17 Meelen and Frenken, “Stop Saying Uber Is Part Of The Sharing ­Economy.” 18 Scola, “The Black Car Company That People Love to Hate.” 19 Kalanick, “Uber Policy White Paper 1.0.” 20 Hall and Krueger, “An Analysis of the Labor Market for Uber’s Driver-Partners in the United States.” 21 Geron, “California Becomes First State To Regulate Ridesharing Services Lyft, Sidecar, UberX.” 22 Ferguson, “Recent Transportation Network Company Ordinances.” 23 California Public Utilities Commission, “Transportation Network Companies.” 24 Hirsch, “Taxi Trouble.” 25 Watters, “The MOOC Revolution That Wasn’t.” 26 Trafford, “Is John Tory Facing an Uber Battle at City Hall?”

…

“Competition Brings Lyft, Sidecar and Uber Closer to Cloning Each Other.” AllThingsD. Accessed May 22, 2015. http://allthingsd.com/20131116/competition-brings-lyft-sidecar-and-uber-closer-to-cloning-each-other-and-cabs/. ———. “Lyft Sells Zimride Carpool Service to Rental-Car Giant Enterprise.” AllThingsD, July 12, 2013. http://allthingsd.com/20130712/lyft-sells-zimride-carpool-service-to-rental-car-giant-enterprise/. ———. “Zimride Turns Regular Cars Into Taxis With New Ride-Sharing App, Lyft,” May 22, 2012. http://allthingsd.com/20120522/zimride-turns-regular-cars-into-taxis-with-new-ride-sharing-app-lyft/. Gans, Joshua.

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Boris Johnson, Burning Man, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collaborative consumption, data science, Didi Chuxing, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, East Village, fake it until you make it, fixed income, gentrification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, inflight wifi, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Necker cube, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, race to the bottom, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

Shutdowns for SideCar, RelayRides Highlight Hurdles for Car- and Ride-Sharing Startups,” Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2013, http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2013/05/15/n-y-shutdowns-for-sidecar-relayrides-highlight-hurdles-for-car-and-ride-sharing-startups/. 25. “Lyft Will Launch in Brooklyn & Queens,” Lyft Blog, July 8, 2014, https://blog.lyft.com/posts/2014/7/8/lyft-launches-in-new-yorks-outer-boroughs. 26. Brady Dale, “Lyft Launch Party with Q-Tip, Without Actually Launching,” Technical.ly Brooklyn, July 14, 2014, http://technical.ly/brooklyn/2014/07/14/lyft-brooklyn-launches/. 27. “Lyft Launches in NYC,” Lyft Blog, July 25, 2014, https://blog.lyft.com/posts/2014/7/25/lyft-launches-in-nyc. 28. Casey Newton, “This Is Uber’s Playbook for Sabotaging Lyft,” Verge, August 26, 2014, http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/26/6067663/this-is-ubers-playbook-for-sabotaging-lyft. 29.

…

“Family of 6-Year-Old Girl Killed by Uber Driver Settles Lawsuit,” ABC7 News, July 14, 2015, http://abc7news.com/business/family-of-6-year-old-girl-killed-by-uber-driver-settles-lawsuit/852108/. 18. “Uber’s Marketing Program to Recruit Drivers: Operation SLOG,” Uber, August 26, 2014, https://newsroom.uber.com/ubers-marketing-program-to-recruit-drivers-operation-slog/. 19. Laurie Segall, “Uber Rival Accuses Car Service of Dirty Tactics,” CNN Money, January 24, 2014, http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/24/technology/social/uber-gett/. 20. Mickey Rapkin, “Uber Cab Confessions,” GQ, February 27, 2014, http://www.gq.com/story/uber-cab-confessions. 21. Ryan Lawler, “Lyft Launches in 24 New Markets, Cuts Fares by Another 10%,” TechCrunch, April 24, 2014, https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/lyft-24-new-cities/. 22.

…

retorted Kalanick, who later couldn’t recall whether he was joking or if he had been responding to an actual rumor. For a brief period in 2014, Lyft had been ready to throw in the towel, and representatives approached Uber about combining the companies. Kalanick and Emil Michael went to dinner with Lyft president John Zimmer and Andreessen Horowitz partner John O’Farrell to discuss a deal, according to three people who were privy to the conversations. The meal was friendly, despite the heated rivalry. But Lyft’s expectations were high. In exchange for selling Lyft to Uber, Lyft’s backers wanted an 18 percent stake in Uber. Uber offered 8 percent; Kalanick wasn’t a fan of mergers to begin with and wasn’t about to hand over a fifth of his prize.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

He’d send his own employees to the events, where they would show up in jet black T-shirts—Uber’s signature color—carrying plates filled with cookies, each with the word “Uber” written in icing. Each Uber employee had a referral code printed on the back of their T-shirt. The codes were for Lyft drivers to enter when they signed up for Uber, earning them a bonus. Even when they weren’t crashing Lyft parties, Uber found ways to mess with Lyft. All around San Francisco, Uber bought street signs and billboards targeting Lyft. Each billboard showed a large, black disposable razor blade with “Uber” printed on the handle, poised above one of Lyft’s pink, cuddly trademark. In the text beside the graphic, Uber made its message clear: “Shave the ’Stache.”

…

Chapter 13: THE CHARM OFFENSIVE 119 “asshole culture”: Sarah Lacy, “The Horrific Trickle Down of Asshole Culture: Why I’ve Just Deleted Uber from My Phone,” Pando, October 22, 2014, https://pando.com/2014/10/22/the-horrific-trickle-down-of-asshole-culture-at-a-company-like-uber/. 119 a caricature of a “bro”: Mickey Rapkin, “Uber Cab Confessions,” GQ, February 27, 2014, https://www.gq.com/story/uber-cab-confessions?currentPage=1. 119 “face like a fist”: Swisher, “Man and Uber Man.” 120 the impending launch of “Uberpool”: “Announcing Uberpool,” Uber (blog), https://web.archive.org/web/20140816060039/http://blog.uber.com/uberpool. 120 their corporate blog: “Introducing Lyft Line, Your Daily Ride,” Lyft (blog), August 6, 2014, https://blog.lyft.com/posts/introducing-lyft-line. 121 Lacy tweeted: Sarah Lacy (@sarahcuda), “it troubles me that Uber is so OK with lying,” Twitter, August 20, 2014, 7:01 p.m., https://twitter.com/sarahcuda/status/502228907068641280. 121 tone-deaf response: “Statement On New Year’s Eve Accident,” Uber (blog), https://web.archive.org/web/20140103020522/http://blog.uber.com/2014/01/01/statement-on-new-years-eve-accident/. 122 read the headline: Lacy, “The Horrific Trickle Down of Asshole Culture. 122 Kalanick’s obsession with China: Erik Gordon, “Uber’s Didi Deal Dispels Chinese ‘El Dorado’ Myth Once and For All,” The Conversation, http://theconversation.com/ubers-didi-deal-dispels-chinese-el-dorado-myth-once-and-for-all-63624. 124 Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business: American Bar, “Salle Yoo,” https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/science_technology/2016/salle_yoo.authcheckdam.pdf. 126 “no fear in Silicon Valley”: Mike Isaac, “Silicon Valley Investor Warns of Bubble at SXSW,” Bits (blog), New York Times, March 15, 2015, https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/silicon-valley-investor-says-the-end-is-near/. 127 Manhattan’s Flatiron District: Johana Bhuiyan, “Uber’s Travis Kalanick Takes ‘Charm Offensive’ To New York City,” BuzzFeedNews, November 14, 2014, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johanabhuiyan/ubers-travis-kalanick-takes-charm-offensive-to-new-york-city. 128 hard-hitting news organization: Mike Isaac, “50 Million New Reasons BuzzFeed Wants to Take Its Content Far Beyond Lists,” New York Times, August 10, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/technology/a-move-to-go-beyond-lists-for-content-at-buzzfeed.html. 130 “Uber’s dirt-diggers”: Ben Smith, “Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt On Journalists,” BuzzFeedNews, November 17, 2014, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/bensmith/uber-executive-suggests-digging-up-dirt-on-journalists.

…

Though Sunil Paul’s efforts with Sidecar weren’t taking off, Lyft was gaining traction quickly. People loved the stupid pink mustaches. In theory, regulators were against Lyft’s antics; after all, the company was breaking rules. Uber had been recruiting drivers for some time, but within limits; all of Uber’s drivers were licensed livery vehicle operators registered with local transportation offices. Lyft turned that on its head. The mustachioed startup invited anyone with a car and an ordinary Class C driver’s license to start driving for Lyft. But as one Uber employee competing with Lyft at the time said, “The law isn’t what is written.

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination by Adam Lashinsky

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Benchmark Capital, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google X / Alphabet X, hustle culture, independent contractor, information retrieval, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, new economy, pattern recognition, price mechanism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, young professional

Sharing was a misnomer, given that Lyft’s drivers were out to make a buck every bit as much as Uber’s. But by promoting the fiction of a friendly gesture rather than a transaction, Lyft could make an argument, however thin, that its trips weren’t commercial. If so, Lyft reasoned they weren’t illegal taxi rides and didn’t fall under any regulator’s jurisdiction. In reality, Uber worked only with licensed livery drivers; Lyft’s drivers were freelancing amateurs. Yet Lyft had one critical similarity with Uber in that its smartphone app adopted the push-a-button/get-a-ride simplicity that catapulted Uber into the limelight.

…

If Kalanick was feeling the heat, it would only get worse for him and for Uber. The “Operation SLOG” campaign against Lyft had solidified a sense of Uber’s nefariousness among a growing slice of the tech-aware public. “Hopefully people understand what an evil company UBER is and boycott their service,” read one comment on The Verge, which published the exposé of Uber’s campaign against Lyft. Said another: “What can you expect when UBER’s CEO is another one of those Ayn-Rand loving libertarian nutjobs.” It became politically correct in some coastal cities to avoid Uber altogether. Then, in November 2014, Uber hosted a dinner in New York with influential journalists in which it hoped to put the company in a better light.

…

Lyft, in six U.S. cities a year after starting to offer ridesharing, sold its Zimride business to the car-rental company Enterprise Holdings, which continues to operate it and still caters to universities and companies. (Lyft, Zimride’s ridesharing product before the sale, became the company’s name.) Uber went through a product repositioning as well. UberX, initially promoted as an “eco-friendly” alternative to requesting a limo, became Uber’s taxi-beating offering. What had been Uber was now UberBlack, which in time became a tiny percentage of Uber’s business. Lyft may have had a new approach, but due to its head start with limos, Uber had a broader network in which to insert UberX. It operated in seventy-seven markets worldwide by the end of 2013. Size didn’t prevent Uber from feeling threatened by its pesky and preternaturally cheerful competitor.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

A BUSINESS MODEL MAP OF UBER AND LYFT One company at the center of many emerging trends is Uber, a center it shares with Lyft, its biggest competitor in the United States; Didi Chuxing in China; and other on-demand car companies around the world. Matt Cohler, an early Facebook employee turned venture capitalist who became an early investor in Uber, noted that the smartphone is becoming “a remote control for real life.” Uber and Lyft drive home the notion that the Internet is no longer just something that provides access to media content, but instead unlocks real-world services. Uber began as so many startups do, not as a transformative big idea but just with an entrepreneur “scratching his own itch.”

…

The regulatory friction of the traditional approach makes taxi costs higher and availability worse. Uber and Lyft drivers routinely make more money per hour than taxi drivers; meanwhile, customers generally have better experiences and lower prices. Those who complain that Uber and Lyft “aren’t following the rules” need to ask whether those rules are achieving their intended objective. That doesn’t mean that Lyft and Uber should get a free pass on providing employee benefits and labor protections. As we’ll see in Chapter 9, the right answer is to develop a social safety net and regulatory frameworks as flexible and responsive as the on-demand business model itself. Uber and Lyft (and Airbnb) have taken the approach of asking for forgiveness rather than permission for many of their innovations, relying on swift consumer adoption to give them allies against regulators.

…

Whatever you may think of Uber, it is hard to deny its impact on the economy. If we want to understand the future, we have to understand Uber. Like it or not, it is the poster child for many of the ways that technology is changing the world of work. Lyft, Uber’s smaller rival, is a more idealistic, worker-friendly company that, in practice, has the same business model. Each of the companies has introduced key innovations that were copied by the other. In many ways, they are co-inventing the future of urban transportation. We will consider them together throughout the book. 3 LEARNING FROM LYFT AND UBER IN THE SUMMER OF 2000, MY EXECUTIVE TEAM AND I DID SOME work with Dan and Meredith Beam, of BEAM inc., a strategy consulting firm, on a strategic planning process for our company.

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Slate, July 6, 2015. http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2015/07/airbnb_disrupting_hotels_it_hasn_t_happened_yet_and_both_are_thriving_what.html. 30. Jennifer Surane, “New York’s Taxi Medallion Business Is Hurting. Thanks to Uber and Lyft.” Skift, July 15, 2015. http://skift.com/2015/07/15/new-yorks-taxi-medallion-business-is-hurting-thanks-to-uber-and-lyft. 31. Josh Barro, “Taxi Mogul, Filing Bankruptcy, Sees Uber-Citibank Plot,” New York Times, July 22, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/23/upshot/taxi-mogul-filing-bankruptcy-sees-a-uber-citibank-plot.html?abt=0002&abg=1. 32. Andrey Fradkin, “Search Frictions and the Design of Online Marketplaces,” September 30, 2015. http://andreyfradkin.com/assets/SearchFrictions.pdf. 33.

…

Although often in the news because of the bruising battles it has waged with Uber for market share, Lyft projects a decidedly kinder and gentler feel than their larger competitor, even as they have graduated from the giant pink mustaches to a more subtle branding strategy. Their co-founder and president John Zimmer, with whom I have had many fascinating conversations over the years, has famously said that he doesn’t see Lyft as competing with Uber, but rather, as competing with “people driving alone.”13 “For me, personally, it was my interest in hospitality,” Zimmer told me, when I asked him about his motivation for starting Lyft. “There are two main pieces in hospitality success: providing an amazing, delightful experience, and having high occupancy.

…

Indeed, as Alison Griswold from Slate magazine documents, the hotel industry in 2014–15 enjoyed their highest-ever levels of occupancy and average daily room prices.29 The same is not true of Uber and Lyft’s impact on traditional taxicabs. The key difference is that, rather than being merely a differentiated service, Uber and Lyft also display higher quality across the board on most dimensions that customer value, except perhaps the ability to hail a car on the street. This does not negate the point I’m making—the increase in variety will increase consumption. However, the impact on the incumbents is likely to be negative more rapidly. Indeed, taxi drivers (most of whom in larger cities do not own their cars or “medallions”) switch to Uber every day; we have already seen evidence of a drop of about 30% in the price of a New York City yellow cab medallion.30 And in July 2015, Evgeny Freidman, the largest owner of yellow cab medallions in New York, filed a petition to put many of his medallion-owning companies into bankruptcy.31 And the eventual impact of on-demand transportation will likely be on the automobile industry as a whole, accelerated by autonomous cars becoming a mass-market commercial reality over the next decade.

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, general purpose technology, gig economy, Google Chrome, GPS: selective availability, Greyball, independent contractor, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Metcalfe’s law, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Network effects, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, web application, zero-sum game

Recognizing the threat from Sidecar and Lyft, which could offer lower prices because of the reduced licensing and insurance costs faced by nonprofessional drivers, Uber responded. In September, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick told an interviewer, “If somebody’s out there and has a competitive advantage in getting supply, that’s a problem. I’m not going to just let that happen without doing something about it. . . . Uber started out at the high end originally, but the question is can you create a low-cost Uber? Uber has to become a low-cost Uber as well.”10 In April 2013, Uber announced it would begin offering ride-sharing services from nonprofessional drivers using their personal vehicles in cities where Sidecar and Lyft operated and began rolling out the platform under the UberX name that summer.

…

By mid-2015, Uber had expanded to 300 cities around the world and had signed up its one-millionth driver, including over 150,000 active UberX drivers in the United States, and claimed to cover 75 percent of the U.S. population.11 Lyft had expanded to 65 cities with 100,000 drivers, all in the United States, by March 2015.12 With Uber and Lyft in the market, competition for drivers and riders was fierce. Both Uber and Lyft aggressively recruited drivers, offering cash bonuses of up to $500 or even $1,000 for drivers who switched from another ride-sharing platform, including Sidecar. Current drivers also received bonuses by referring drivers from another platform. Riders received credits for their first ride and additional credits when they referred other riders. Uber and Lyft periodically cut fares to attract riders.

…

Every taxi company in the world, for example, has fretted over how to adapt to Uber. Suppliers to the taxi industry, such as General Motors, also have feared that the market could tip to Uber. When Uber starts building its own self-driving cars, GM could be frozen out of the loop. GM’s response was to invest $500 million into Uber’s competitor Lyft to improve the prospects of a competitive industry. Within the taxi industry itself, firms across the world have been striving to fend off Uber’s advances. The single most successful strategy has been political: In numerous cities and even countries, taxi organizations have lobbied local governments to put Uber into a compromised position.

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, carbon footprint, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Part Nine: The 1990s Koch Funded Propaganda Program That Is Uber’s True Origin Story.” Naked Capitalism (blog). March 15, 2017. www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/03/can-uber-ever-deliver-part-nine-1990s-koch-funded-propaganda-program-ubers-true-origin-story.html. ———. 2019a. “Can Uber Ever Deliver? Part Nineteen.” Naked Capitalism (blog). April 15, 2019. www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/04/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-part-nineteen-ubers-ipo-prospectus-overstates-its-2018-profit-improvement-by-5-billion.html. ———. 2019b. “Can Uber Ever Deliver? Part Eighteen: Lyft’s IPO Prospectus Tells Investors That It Has No Idea How Ridesharing Could Ever Be Profitable.” Naked Capitalism (blog).

…

When we asked what he felt the future held, Danny was pessimistic. “I feel Uber is kind of letting us go. . . . Basically they’re going to lower the rates until we break.” Drivers’ complaints are borne out in company data. Between 2014 and 2016 Uber reduced drivers’ share of total revenue from 83 percent to 68 percent.72 Then, facing increased competition from Lyft, on account of boycotts, bad press, and driver exit, Uber raised its payments to drivers to 77 percent in 2018. Meanwhile, Lyft took the opportunity presented by Uber’s squeeze to increase its take, reducing drivers’ share from 82 percent to 73 percent between 2016 and 2018, excluding additional reductions in incentives.73 In 2019, as the ride-hail companies prepared for their IPOs, they were forced to provide some transparency in their SEC filings.

…

By breaking the law, Uber and Lyft destroyed that viability, and we’re now seeing their drivers subjected to a similar race-to-the-bottom.27 And what the ideological high ground can’t accomplish, money can. The biggest platforms, again with Uber in the lead, have employed an army of lobbyists and public relations firms to fight even minor changes. In response to a modest proposed California law to fill the gap in insurance coverage when a driver has the app on but isn’t on a fare, Uber hired fourteen of the fifteen biggest Sacramento lobbying firms.28 In 2017 Uber and Lyft had more lobbyists than Amazon, Microsoft, and Walmart combined.29 Airbnb has also been active trying to stop laws that limit rental activity or mandate the collection of hotel and occupancy taxes.

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

Julia Tomassetti, ‘Does Uber redefine the firm? The postindustrial corporation and advanced information technology’ (2016) 34(1) Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal 239, 293: Uber and Lyft sublimate their agency in the production of ride services into algo- rithms, programming, and technology management. The metaphor of the ‘platform’ transforms Uber and Lyft from subjects into spaces. It evokes a passive space to be inhabited by active agents—drivers and passengers. For example, Lyft argues that drivers’ ‘low ratings [are] given by passengers, not Lyft. Uber argued that passengers, and not Uber, controlled drivers’ work.

…

Through ‘partnership with governments and organisations who share [Uber’s] vision of opening up economic opportunity in every city’, promised David Plouffe, then Uber’s Senior Vice President, Policy and Strategy, in late 2015, the platform was ‘committed to creating 20,000 new jobs in Australia’: ‘Uber plans to create 200,000 new jobs in Australia in 2015’, Uber Blog (11 February 2015), https:// * * * Notes 155 newsroom.uber.com/australia/uber-plans-to-create-20000-new-jobs-in- australia-in-2015/, archived at https://perma.cc/EJV7-4ZD8 37. Brhmie Balaram, Fair Share: Reclaiming Power in the Sharing Economy (RSA 2016), 9–10. 38. Lyft, ‘Home page’, http://www.lyft.com, archived at https://perma.cc/ 897C-8HFL 39.

…

TaskRabbit, The TaskRabbit Handbook (on file with author), 9; Task Rabbit, ‘Community guidelines’, https://support.taskrabbit.com/hc/en-us/articles/ 204409440-TaskRabbit-Community-Guidelines, archived at https://perma. cc/VX4Q-77CT; Josh Dzieza, ‘The rating game: how Uber and its peers turned us into horrible bosses’, The Verge (28 October 2015), http://www.theverge. com/2015/10/28/9625968/rating-system-on-demand-economy-uber-olive- garden, archived at https://perma.cc/CVU4-GEV7; Benjamin Sachs, ‘Uber and Lyft: customer reviews and the right to control’, On Labor (20 May 2015), http://onlabor.org/2015/05/20/uber-and-lyft-customer-reviews-and-the- right-to-control/, archived at https://perma.cc/9TNM-Y95X 52. Josh Dzieza, ‘The rating game: how Uber and its peers turned us into horrible bosses’, The Verge (28 October 2015), http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/28/ 9625968/rating-system-on-demand-economy-uber-olive-garden, archived at https://perma.cc/CVU4-GEV7 53.

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, barriers to entry, basic income, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, job automation, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), low skilled workers, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, precariat, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telemarketer, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, very high income, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

But these are only the incidences that are caught on tape. Cameras are not required by Uber or Lyft, and many drivers, whether owing to the expense or to concerns about the legality of the cameras, don’t have them. It doesn’t help that Uber has lobbied for weaker insurance protections for workplace injuries.20 Uber has not entirely ignored worker risks—it’s just that any costs associated with protecting drivers are borne by workers or customers. During Uber’s 180 Days of Change campaign, part of an effort to improve the company’s public image and driver morale, Uber announced Driver Injury Protection insurance offered via Aon.

…

It’s hard to say, and it’s doubtful that Uber or Lyft will be researching or publicizing such statistics anytime soon. Officials with the Whisper website, an anonymous social media site that allows users to post secrets and confessions, say that they’ve “vetted accounts of several people who said they have had sex with an Uber or Lyft driver, and of drivers who said they had sex with customers. And based on things such as geo-location of the posts and direct inquiries, they said they have no reason to believe the posts are bogus.”28 When the former CEO of Uber calls the service “boob-er” because it improves his chances with the ladies, perhaps no one should be surprised when drivers or passengers treat a ride as more than a way home.29 Although the workplace protections dealing with safety and the right to unionize date back to the early industrial age and the beginning of the 1900s, American protections against sexual harassment are a direct outcropping of second-wave feminism.

…

So I was just saying, ‘All right, I made the right decision.’” Like many drivers, Hector drove for both Uber and Lyft, often deciding which app to activate based on the active guarantees and his own experience with passengers and demand. He described Lyft passengers as nicer, but also noted that Uber had more clients. Although his income appears to be higher than his earnings at the furniture rental center, the start-up costs of becoming a driver were considerable: trading in his car for an Uber-approved model, increasing his car note by $8,000: and the addition of roughly $4,000 in fees and insurance prepayments for his TLC license and registration.

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, financial independence, future of work, game design, gig economy, Hacker News, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, law of one price, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, post-work, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

One of his fellow protestors leaned out the back window announcing, in the tone and cadence that someone might use during a fire drill, “Do not use Uber. Use Lyft or Sidecar. Take a cab. Take the bus.” Another video Abe posted in the Uber Freedom Facebook group showed a driver pulling up to another car. He rolled down his window. “You work Uber?” the driver asked, in broken English. The other driver confirmed that yes, he did. “This weekend is a strike, you know? I work Uber too. This weekend, strike. Only Lyft, no Uber.” The other driver started to drive away, but the man filming the video kept yelling at him. “No Uber! Fuck Uber!” At a victory dinner later that night, Abe watched himself on the local news.

…

“The much-touted virtues of flexibility, independence and creativity offered by gig work might be true for some workers under some conditions,” she said in a speech at an annual conference for the New America Foundation in Washington, “but for many, the gig economy is simply the next step in a losing effort to build some economic security in a world where all the benefits are floating to the top 10 percent.”21 The speech wasn’t exactly about the gig economy: “The problems facing gig workers are much like the problems facing millions of other workers,” Warren noted. But the headlines were definitely about the gig economy: “Elizabeth Warren Takes on Uber, Lyft and the ‘Gig Economy’”;22 “Elizabeth Warren Calls for Increased Regulations on Uber, Lyft, and the ‘Gig Economy’”;23 “Elizabeth Warren Slams Uber and Lyft.”24 In her speech, Warren had acknowledged that talking about TaskRabbit, Uber, and Lyft was “very hip.” It seemed she was right. Sometimes politicians and labor leaders didn’t even need to frame their positions within the context of the gig economy to have them interpreted that way.

…

ADD TIP OPTION Though tips were customary in the livery and taxi businesses, Uber discouraged them. “You don’t need cash when you ride with Uber,” the company explained on its website. “Once you arrive at your destination, your fare is automatically charged to your credit card on file—there’s no need to tip.” Many customers assumed that the tip was included in the fare, which in 2016 Uber would clarify, as part of a lawsuit settlement, was not the case.6 Abe wanted Uber to go a step further and put an option to tip drivers in the app, as Uber’s competitor Lyft had already done. 3. RAISE THE CANCELLATION FEE TO $7 If a passenger summoned an Uber driver but then canceled the ride after the driver was on his way, the customer usually paid a fee between $5 and $10, of which drivers could keep some percentage.

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

They live in fierce and unfriendly competition, with Uber well ahead, having scaled much faster and expanded globally, leading to a valuation over ten times that of Lyft, but with Lyft posing a real threat in some of Uber’s biggest markets. The functionality of the two platforms is very similar. An Uber user feels thoroughly at home with the Lyft app and vice versa. But from the beginning, Uber and Lyft have positioned themselves very differently. Uber launched as “everyone’s private driver”—the pitch being that you, too, could slink into the back of a badass shiny black ride. Lyft came to life as “your friend with a car,” with a giant pink mustache amiably perched on the grille, riders hopping in the front seat and fist-bumping the driver a hello.

…

I think that’s the sense that you get, right from the onset, that Lyft does care.” Campbell explains that Uber seems at pains to keep itself at a distance from the lived experience of their drivers: “Uber actually had a policy where they don’t allow their corporate employees to be Uber drivers, where Lyft is almost the opposite. They highly encourage their employees to be drivers.” Lyft tries to show it cares, too, in how it offers drivers incentives. Lyft has always offered riders the opportunity to tip drivers; Uber only introduced this feature in 2017 under pressure from drivers and besieged by crisis. Lyft also takes a different approach to rewarding their most committed drivers, operating a sliding scale that reduces Lyft’s commission based on how many hours a driver works.

…

“your friend with a car”: Dimosthenis Kefallonitis, “Lyft.me, Your Friend with a Car,” Consumer Value Creation, January 22, 2014. Uber is defined by its remoteness: Alanna Petroff, “The Rise and Fall of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick,” CNNMoney, June 21, 2017. “The reason Uber”: Chris Smith, “Uber Wants to ‘Get Rid of the Dude in the Car’ with Driverless Taxi Service,” TechRadar, May 8, 2014. It all began when Uber: Caroline O’Donovan, “Uber Just Cut Fares in 80 North American Cities,” BuzzFeed, January 9, 2016. “In true Uber fashion”: Harry Campbell, “Uber to Cut Rates in More Than 100 Cities,” The Rideshare Guy (blog), January 8, 2016. www.therideshareguy.com.

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism by Robin Chase

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business climate, call centre, car-free, carbon tax, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion charging, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, decarbonisation, different worldview, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Shoup, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, Gini coefficient, GPS: selective availability, high-speed rail, hive mind, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, language acquisition, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, Post-Keynesian economics, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, vertical integration, Zipcar

One of the participants suggested that the huge valuations for Peers Inc companies gives these startups large amounts of “cheap” capital to play with, and therefore the ability to buy growth rather than earn it. Lyft and Uber are fierce competitors in the new app-based medallion-free taxi market. Both have experienced fast growth and expansion in the few years since their founding (Uber in 2009, Lyft in 2012). And now both are engaged in price wars, each reducing fares to attract passengers and lowering their commissions to attract peer drivers. Neither has any competitive intellectual property. Uber’s competitive advantage was once in the deals it had negotiated with local limo companies and individual drivers.

…

It is my experience with Zipcar and its competitors that customers choose based on a combination of convenience (the technology), price, and proximity. Both Uber and Lyft have business models and apps that appear to work; can the market sustain both? Buying (bribing) users too early in a company’s life cycle will just eat up a lot of money and won’t produce anything lasting. Doing so later is indeed possible, but it can be a very risky strategy depending on a company’s ability to defend that lead. I’ll talk more about the Uber/Lyft battle when I discuss the last phase, later in this chapter. In all cases, the “greasiest” platforms, those with the least friction, win out.

…

Of course, all users or potential users get to choose which applications they want (this is the free market at work). I can choose to put Lyft or Uber—or both—onto my smartphone. I can say no to a lift from any specific driver. This is critical not just to protect user choice but also to protect the potential for new applications. Peers providing services will stop participating if they think their potential for success, for fair treatment, is rigged from the outset. And this is why Mohammed, an Uber driver, told me he switched from working for a black car service to working for Uber: “I know I will get the call because I’m the closest car, not because I have seniority or am a friend of the dispatcher.”

Nothing But Net by Mark Mahaney

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Burning Man, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial engineering, gamification, gig economy, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), knowledge economy, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, medical malpractice, meme stock, Network effects, PageRank, pets.com, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, subscription business, super pumped, the rule of 72, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

I declared a preference for UBER over LYFT because it had a global presence (thus a larger TAM), while Lyft was purely a US service, and because Uber had a much stronger market share position than Lyft in the United States. The founders of Lyft (John Zimmer and Logan Green) were actively involved in running Lyft, which was a distinct positive, but I also had confidence in the management capabilities of Uber CEO Dara “Dog’s Breakfast” Khosrowshahi, which I thought somewhat mitigated the fact that Uber’s founders were no longer actively involved. Finally, I believed that Uber’s diversification into online food delivery was a distinct positive and would help generate premium revenue growth.

…

Although the Covid-19 crisis did have a materially negative impact on demand for the two leading US ridesharing services, Uber and Lyft shares were under pressure long before the pandemic because of the large losses both companies were running. In 2019, Lyft generated $2.6 billion in net income loss, while Uber generated $8.6 billion in net loss. These loss levels were practically unprecedented. And in the quarters post their IPOs, there was substantial uncertainty whether Uber and Lyft would ever be profitable. That uncertainty was exactly what Brown’s comments captured. It is striking that UBER then traded up almost 70% in 2020. As of early 2021, Uber’s share price had skyrocketed 300% since its mid-March 2020 lows, and it is now more than 30% above its IPO price.

…

And my most important lesson learned was the fourth sentence in that summary paragraph above: Valuation should not be the most important factor in the stock-picking decision process. Uber (UBER) IPO’d on Friday, May 10, 2019, at $45 and traded off 8% on its first day to below $42. Except for a brief period in late June 2019, it remained a broken IPO for 18 months, consistently trading below its IPO price. In mid-March 2020, in the wake of intense Covid-19 pandemic pressures on ridesharing demand and investor concerns about Uber’s liquidity, Uber’s share price broke below $15, almost 70% below its IPO price. Lyft (LYFT) IPO’d on Friday, March 29, 2019, at $72 and traded up 9% on its first day to $78.

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

Another startup called Pillow provides a similar service, as do Beyond Stays, GuestHop, Guesty, and many more. Uber also has spawned its own ecosystem of support services. Many people who might want to drive an Uber part-time don’t own a car. Well, thanks to Breeze, a San Francisco-based startup: no car, no problem. Breeze leases cars at $195 a week to aspiring Uber or Lyft drivers. In late 2013, Uber also began partnering with third-party lenders to offer vehicle financing to would-be drivers.2 Insurance is another big opportunity. Both Uber and Lyft provide insurance coverage while drivers are on a job, but when they’re not on the way to or driving a passenger, they are out of luck.

…

No, this isn’t the plot of a movie about high-stakes corporate espionage. This is Operation SLOG, Uber’s covert, ethically dubious, and possibly illegal attempt at poaching drivers from rival ride-hailing service Lyft. “SLOG” stands for Supplying Long-term Operations Growth, a name that hints at why Uber goes to such great lengths to recruit drivers. Uber understands that one of its core functions is to grow its network. Aggressive marketing is nothing new, but for a platform like Uber, the task goes beyond marketing. Uber has to attract two separate groups of users—drivers and passengers—and it has to balance the number of each in order to maintain an equilibrium between supply and demand.

…

As of the beginning of 2016, Airbnb’s place within the existing regulatory regime for the hotel industry is anything but settled. For Uber, the biggest legal issue is the classification status of its drivers. Uber drivers, which the company calls its “driver partners,” are currently so-called 1099 contract employees, named for Form 1099 that these employees have to file with the IRS. This classification status means that Uber doesn’t have to pay payroll taxes for these contractors and that it doesn’t have to provide long-term benefits such as health insurance and workers’ compensation. It also limits Uber’s legal liability for the actions of its drivers. Most other services marketplaces, including Handy, Lyft, Instacart, and Postmates, classify all or some of their workers as 1099 contractors rather than W-2 workers or contractors.

Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires With Minimum Investment by Sangeet Paul Choudary

3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, fake it until you make it, frictionless, game design, gamification, growth hacking, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, Paul Graham, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, search costs, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social software, software as a service, software is eating the world, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, TaskRabbit, the long tail, the payments system, too big to fail, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Wave and Pay

With a limited supply of drivers in a city and the cost for a driver to connect to an additional platform being so small, drivers multihome on both Uber and Lyft. This has naturally led to intense competition between the two companies, and Uber infamously resorted to a playbook to create interaction failure on Lyft using questionable tactics. Uber decided to target interaction failure on Lyft by contracting third-party agents to use disposable phones to hail Lyft taxies. Before the Lyft taxi arrived at its pickup location, the Uber-contracted agent would cancel the ride. With so many cancelations on the Lyft platform, drivers would become frustrated driving for Lyft and, in some cases, switch to Uber. A smaller number of drivers on the Lyft platform meant longer waiting times for traveler.

…

For more details, please visit http://platformthinkinglabs.com/about/sangeet-choudary/ TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface 1.0 AN INTRODUCTION TO INTERACTION-FIRST BUSINESSES 1.1 Building The Next Big Thing 1.2 The Platform Manifesto 1.3 The Rise Of The Interaction-First Business 1.4 The Platform Stack 1.5 The Inner Workings Of Platform Scale Conclusion 2.0 DESIGNING THE INTERACTION-FIRST PLATFORM Introduction 2.1 The New New Value 2.2 Uber’s Drivers, Google’s Crawlers And GE's Machines 2.3 Building An Interaction-First Platform Business 2.4 Uber, Etsy, And The Internet Of Everybody 2.5 Personalization Mechanics 2.6 The Core Interaction 2.7 Pull-Facilitate-Match 2.8 The Platform Canvas 2.9 Emergence 3.0 BUILDING INTERACTION-FIRST PLATFORMS Introduction 3.1 Interaction Drivers 3.2 Building User Contribution Systems 3.3 Frictionless Like Instagram 3.4 The Creation Of Cumulative Value 3.5 The Traction-Friction Matrix 3.6 Sampling Costs 3.7 Trust Drives Interaction 3.8 Uber Vs. Lyft And Interaction Failure 3.9 Interaction Ownership And The TaskRabbit Problem 4.0 SOLVING CHICKEN-AND-EGG PROBLEMS Introduction 4.1 A Design Pattern For Sparking Interactions 4.2 Activating The Standalone Mode 4.3 How Paypal And Reddit Faked Their Way To Traction 4.4 Every Producer Organizes Their Own Party 4.5 Bringing In The Ladies 4.6 The Curious Case Of New Payment Mechanisms 4.7 Drink Your Own Kool Aid 4.8 Beg, Borrow, Steal And The World Of Supply Proxies 4.9 Disrupting Craigslist 4.10 Starting With Micromarkets 4.11 From Twitter To Tinder 5.0 VIRALITY: SCALE IN A NETWORKED WORLD Introduction 5.1 Transitioning To Platform Scale 5.2 Instagram’s Moonshot Moment 5.3 Going Viral 5.4 Architecting Diseases 5.5 A Design-First Approach To Viral Growth 5.6 Building Viral Engines 5.7 The Viral Canvas 6.0 REVERSE NETWORK EFFECTS Introduction 6.1 A Scaling Framework For Platforms 6.2 Reverse Network Effects 6.3 Manifestations Of Reverse Network Effects 6.4 Designing The Anti-Viral, Anti-Social Network Epilogue Platform Scale (n): Business scale powered by the ability to leverage and orchestrate a global connected ecosystem of producers and consumers toward efficient value creation and exchange.

…

Producers and consumers who experience interaction failure become discouraged from participating further and eventually abandon the platform. THE UBER–LYFT WAR Interaction failure is especially important for on-demand platforms. Imagine a consumer requesting a service and never being served with a solution. Imagine, in turn, a producer receiving a request and preparing to fulfill that request, only to find that the request is canceled. In both cases, the respective consumer or producer may become discouraged and decide to abandon the platform. In some of the largest cities, drivers drive for both Uber and Lyft, as well as other competitors. It’s not uncommon for these drivers to switch between the two platforms multiple times a day.

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition by David Levinson, Kevin Krizek

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, collaborative consumption, commoditize, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, dematerialisation, driverless car, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Google Hangouts, high-speed rail, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the printing press, jitney, John Markoff, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Lyft, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Network effects, Occam's razor, oil shock, place-making, pneumatic tube, post-work, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, tacit knowledge, techno-determinism, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The future is already here, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Payment is automatic unless you want to change your payment. 190 Source various, including Oxford Dictionaries http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/taxi 191 Bregman, Susan (2015-04-23) Uber and Lyft claim carpooling success. TheTransitWire.com. http://www.thetransitwire.com/2015/04/23/uber-lyft-claim-carpooling-success/ 192 DeAmicis, Carmel (2015-07-18) How Didi Kuaidi Plans to Destroy Uber in China. Re/Code. http://recode.net/2015/07/18/how-didi-kuaidi-plans-to-destroy-uber-in-china/ 193 A longer discussion of our skepticism is here: Levinson (2014-12-01) "It is a Small Market After All" Transportationist blog. http://transportationist.org/2014/12/01/its-a-small-market-after-all-es-gibt-einen-kleinen-markt-uber-alles/ 194 French, Sally (2015-07-01) "An 8-year-old's take on 'Uber for kids'" MarketWatch https://secure.marketwatch.com/story/an-8-year-olds-take-on-uber-for-kids-2015-07-01 195 Zimmerman, Eilene (2016-04-13) "Ride-Hailing Start-Ups Compete in ‘Uber for Children’ Niche” New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/14/business/smallbusiness/ride-sharing-start-ups-compete-in-uber-for-children-niche.html 196 Hatmaker, Taylor (2014-09-08) "Taxi service by women for women launching in New York."

…

Lyft now does jitney (shared taxi, dollar van, informal transport) type services, dubbed Lyft Line. (Uber has the similar UberPool) These serve either one pickup going to multiple destinations, or multiple pickups going to one destination, or multiple origins to multiple destinations, and compete with both taxi and public transit. (Though it would not be exactly fixed routes, one could imagine regular runs with a known coterie of passengers). This is at a lower rate than the traditional single party taxi-like service. While these services are at the time of this writing only in San Francisco and New York, Lyft now claims that Lyft Line comprises 50% of Lyft's rides in San Francisco and 30% in New York.191 (Not all of Lyft Line customers wind up in a shared ride, they just indicate a willingness to for a lower fare, and get the lower fare regardless of whether another passenger can be found).

…

While these services are at the time of this writing only in San Francisco and New York, Lyft now claims that Lyft Line comprises 50% of Lyft's rides in San Francisco and 30% in New York.191 (Not all of Lyft Line customers wind up in a shared ride, they just indicate a willingness to for a lower fare, and get the lower fare regardless of whether another passenger can be found). The ease of making ride requests and payments is what drives many folks to choose Uber or Lyft over traditional taxis. We suspect differentiating status and class is another important element. Users are hip enough and wealthy enough to use the new technology and not have to sit where others from other classes have sat before. As these services become widespread, humans will undoubtedly develop new forms of elitism.

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In some cases, the gradual addition of new interactions is part of the long-term business plan that platform founders had in mind from the beginning. In early 2015, both Uber and Lyft began experimenting with a new ride-sharing service that complements their familiar call-a-taxi business model. The new services, known as UberPool and Lyft Line, allow two or more passengers traveling in the same direction to find one another and share a ride, thereby reducing their cost while increasing the revenues enjoyed by the driver. Lyft cofounder Logan Green says that ride-sharing was always part of the Lyft idea. The initial version of Lyft, he explains, was designed to attract an initial customer base “in every market.”

…

In the market for ride-sharing transportation services, the absence of distinct user needs and the presence of strong network effects explains the fierce rivalry between Uber and Lyft. Each side has ruthlessly poached the other’s drivers by offering referral bounties and cash incentives. Some of the alleged tactics border on the unethical. For example, Lyft has accused Uber of ordering, then cancelling, more than 5,000 rides in order to clog the Lyft service. Uber denied the specific charge. But there’s no doubt that both companies are convinced that only one is likely to survive their rivalry, and that each is determined to do whatever it takes to be the one left standing.23 As we’ve seen, the nature of competition in the world of platforms is very different from that in the world of traditional pipeline businesses.

…

Julie Bort, “An Airbnb Guest Held a Huge Party in This New York Penthouse and Trashed It,” Business Insider, March 19, 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/how-an-airbnb-guest-trashed-a-penthouse-2014-3?op=1#ixzz3dA5DDMZz; M. Matthews, “Uber Passenger Says Driver Struck Him with Hammer After He Told Him He Was Going the Wrong Way,” NBC Bay Area, October 8, 2014, http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Passenger-Hit-with-Hammer-by-Uber-Driver-278596821.html. 47. Airbnb, “Host Protection Insurance,” https://www.airbnb.com/host-protection-insurance, accessed June 15, 2015; A. Cecil, “Uber, Lyft, and Other Rideshare Drivers Now Have Insurance Options,” Policy Genius, https://www.policygenius.com/blog/uber-lyft-and-other-rideshare-drivers-now-have-insurance-options/, accessed June 14, 2015. 48.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

,” Guardian, June 19, 2018, Theguardian.com. 19 “Urban Air Mobility—Closer Than You Think,” Uber, June 27, 2019, YouTube.com. 20 “UBERAIR: Closer Than You Think,” Uber, November 8, 2017, YouTube.com. 21 “Fast-Forwarding to a Future of On-Demand Urban Air Transportation,” white paper from Uber Elevate, October 27, 2016, 62, Uber.com. 22 Elizabeth Rosner, Olivia Bensimon, and David Meyer, “We Pit the Uber Copter Vs. Public Transit in a Race to JFK—Here’s Who Won,” New York Post, October 6, 2019, Nypost.com; Ray Parisi, “Battle of the Airport Commute: CNBC Tests Lyft, Uber Copter, Blade Helicopter and Mass Transit in Race to NYC’s Busiest Airport,” CNBC, August 19, 2018, Cnbc.com. 23 Megan Rose Dickey, “This Is Uber’s Plan to Deliver on Flying ‘Cars,’” TechCrunch, February 10, 2018, Techcrunch.com. 24 Elon Musk, “The Future We’re Building—and Boring,” TED, April 2017, Ted.com. 25 André Gorz, “The Social Ideology of the Motorcar,” Le Sauvage, September–October 1973, Unevenearth.org. 26 Mimi Sheller, Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes, Verso Books, 2018, pp. 78–9. 7.

…

In September 2019, the decision was codified into law when California’s state legislature passed Assembly Bill 5, which set a deadline of January 1, 2020, for employers to reclassify their workers—and the emphasis was placed on companies in the gig economy, including Uber and Lyft. January 1 came and went without gig workers’ status changing, but they kept pushing lawmakers to ensure the law was observed. In May 2020, California’s attorney general and the city attorneys for San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego took Uber and Lyft to court for misclassifying their workers, and the following month the PUC ruled that drivers for Uber and Lyft were employees, not contractors. On August 10, a judge ruled that the companies had ten days to reclassify their workers as employees, but at the last minute the ruling was delayed until after the election on November 3.

…

Part Nine: The 1990s Koch Funded Propaganda Program That Is Uber’s True Origin Story,” Naked Capitalism (blog), March 15, 2017, Naked capitalism.com. 21 Corky Siemaszko, “In the Shadow of Uber’s Rise, Taxi Driver Suicides Leave Cabbies Shaken,” NBC News, June 7, 2018, Nbc news.com. 22 Doug Schifter, Facebook post, February 5, 2018, facebook.com/people/Doug-Schifter/100009072541151. 23 Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, “Resistance Is Futile,” Inc, July–August 2013, Inc.com. 24 Hubert Horan, “Can Uber Ever Deliver? Part One—Understanding Uber’s Bleak Operating Economics,” Naked Capitalism (blog), November 30, 2016, Nakedcapitalism.com. 25 Ibid. 26 Anthony Ha, “California Regulator Passes First Ridesharing Rules, a Big Win for Lyft, Sidecar, and Uber,” TechCrunch, September 19, 2013, Techcrunch.com. 27 Ken Jacobs and Michael Reich, “The Uber/Lyft Ballot Initiative Guarantees Only $5.64 an Hour,” UC Berkeley Labor Center, October 21, 2019, Laborcenter.berkeley.edu. 28 Wilfred Chan, “Can American Labor Survive Prop 22?

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

Most analysts predict that automation will be the decisive turning point in the battle for ride-hail supremacy. That’s why in 2019, even as Uber and Lyft rushed to their initial public offerings, they raced to put working AVs on the streets. Meanwhile, Google sister company Waymo beat them to the punch, quietly launching a massive fleet of 600 self-driving taxis in Phoenix. With up to 20,000 taxibots scheduled to enter service in the next few years, the company could soon be serving up to a million passengers a day by self-driving cab. The day Lyft started trading, its market cap peaked just south of $25 billion. Much-bigger Uber went public a few months later just shy of $100 billion.

…

Take San Francisco, for instance, ride-hail’s birthplace and the city where people have most eagerly embraced it. By 2016, one-quarter of all vehicle congestion citywide was blamed on Uber and Lyft’s fleets. Fully one-half of the increase in traffic since 2010 was attributed to the ride-hail giants. More alarming than the overall trend were the localized spikes. In the city’s downtown financial district, for instance, Uber and Lyft accounted for a whopping 73 percent of the increased traffic in recent years. Reprogramming mobility had eliminated a decade’s worth of painstaking work by transit agencies, cycling advocates, and walkability planners to reduce auto use.

…

As one journalist put it, “SoftBank is playing the ride-hailing version of Risk,” the classic board game of global conquest, “but it also owns a piece of all the players.” In North America, SoftBank’s money financed a more costly strategy—a price war of attrition waged against Lyft, Uber’s only substantial competition. In 2019, Uber and Lyft each floated initial public offerings, yet both continued to burn cash at extraordinary speed, spending more than half their current revenue on “driver incentives, passenger discounts, sales, and marketing to acquire passengers and drivers faster than the other.” As Silicon Valley guru Tim O’Reilly argued, the two giants were “locked in a capital-fueled deathmatch.”

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, business logic, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Didi Chuxing, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greensill Capital, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plant based meat, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, supply chain finance, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, Zenefits, Zipcar

Further afield was the potential investment in the ride-hailing company Lyft. Neumann told his deputies he hoped to buy Lyft, and he met repeatedly with John Zimmer, its president and co-founder, about a possible investment by WeWork. It would have been a rather strange marriage: two aging startups, both bleeding money, with one investing the venture capital dollars it raised from SoftBank into the other. (When Masayoshi Son later found out about the talks, he was furious with Neumann and forced him to shut the discussions down. SoftBank was a backer of Lyft’s rival Uber. Neumann told aides he preferred Lyft, in part because it was still run by its founders.

…

It quickly became clear that stock market investors didn’t just want a company that showed fast growth. Losses—to the surprise of many in Silicon Valley—were seen as a bad thing. Uber lost $3.8 billion in the twelve months before its IPO, a record for a U.S. startup. Even the far smaller Lyft was a broken water main of cash, losing more than $1 billion in the year before its IPO, a record before Uber. While companies like Uber loved to compare themselves to Amazon, Amazon lost far less in its first decade combined than Uber lost in the year before its IPO. These losses were without precedent. And suddenly they were a black mark. The bankers at JPMorgan and Goldman realized WeWork wouldn’t be immune to the market chill.

…

Now, however, startups were finding that they could afford to stay private for years longer, thanks to the giant roster of investors trying to get into hot startups. By 2016, Uber was already seven years old, with no defined plans on when to go public. WeWork was six. Airbnb was eight. Staying private meant an easier life for a founder—without the scrutiny one faced from the press and investors over quarterly earnings reports. The lack of scrutiny let problems fester inside these companies. Companies like Uber and Lyft got used to losing money without much concern from their investors. The entire culture of many of these startups was based on revenue growth, not on curtailing excessive spending.

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator

A few months later, in 2012, Zimride held an internal hackathon in an attempt to increase user retention and engagement. The solution they came up with was Lyft. The following year, the company switched its name (and focus) and sold its remaining Zimride assets to Enterprise Rent-A-Car. Lyft and Sidecar, competing with each other, gained a lot of traction in San Francisco. They proved that consumers were willing to jump in an unlicensed taxi to go from point A to B (Uber’s black cars were licensed). At this point, Uber had raised $11 million from VCs, Zimride/Lyft had raised $6 million, and Sidecar had raised $10 million. When Lyft and Sidecar became popular, Uber realized the larger opportunity afforded by the gig economy, transitioned from the luxury service to the affordable service, and launched UberX.

…

Most importantly, they couldn’t raise as much capital as Uber and Lyft did. “We were unable to compete against Uber, a company that raised more capital than any other in history and is infamous for its anti-competitive behavior,” said Sidecar’s CEO, Sunil Paul. “The legacy of Sidecar is that we out-innovated Uber but still failed to win the market. We failed—for the most part—because Uber is willing to win at any cost and they have practically limitless capital to do it.”6 Sidecar shut down operations on New Year’s Eve in 2015, and General Motors acquired its remaining assets and intellectual property. Uber went on to raise billions of dollars to become the dominant force in the ridesharing industry.

…

Uber went on to raise billions of dollars to become the dominant force in the ridesharing industry. Today, Lyft and Uber have raised billions of dollars from investors in public and private markets. Despite its lower sales and market share, Lyft has remained persistent over the last ten years, establishing itself as a more ethical alternative to Uber, which has suffered a long list of scandals and controversies. The two companies also perform differently by location, with Lyft seeing more success in cities like Detroit and San Francisco, while Uber outperforms in Miami and Houston. Neither company has turned a profit—likely because of intense price competition with one another.

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

By March 25, 2019, Rideshare Drivers United: Alexia Fernández Campbell, “Thousands of Uber Drivers Are Striking in Los Angeles,” Vox, March 25, 2019, https://www.vox.com/2019/3/25/18280718/uber-lyft-drivers-strike-la-los-angeles; Bryce Covert, “‘It’s Not Right’: Why Uber and Lyft Drivers Went on Strike,” Vox, May 9, 2019, https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/5/9/18538206/uber-lyft-strike-demands-ipo. On May 8, 2019, days before Uber: Covert, “Why Uber and Lyft Drivers Went on Strike,” https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/5/9/18538206/uber-lyft-strike-demands-ipo; Ben Chapman, “Uber Drivers in UK Cities Go on Strike in Protest over Pay and Workers’ Rights,” Independent, May 7, 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/uber-drivers-strike-london-birmingham-glasgow-nottingham-pay-rights-a8898791.html.

…

On August 22, 2017, more than one hundred: Marie Targonski-O’Brien, “Uber, Lyft Drivers Crowd LAX, Protest Low Pay,” KCET, August 22, 2017, https://www.kcet.org/shows/socal-connected/uber-lyft-drivers-crowd-lax-protest-low-pay. Between 2013 and 2017: “The Online Platform Economy in 2018: Drivers, Workers, Sellers, and Lessors,” JPMorgan Chase & Co. Institute, April 2019, https://institute.jpmorganchase.com/institute/research/labor-markets/report-ope-2018.htm. “Most of us as drivers”: Targonski-O’Brien, “Uber, Lyft Drivers Crowd LAX, Protest Low Pay,” https://www.kcet.org/shows/socal-connected/uber-lyft-drivers-crowd-lax-protest-low-pay.

…

On May 8, 2019, days before Uber: Covert, “Why Uber and Lyft Drivers Went on Strike,” https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/5/9/18538206/uber-lyft-strike-demands-ipo; Ben Chapman, “Uber Drivers in UK Cities Go on Strike in Protest over Pay and Workers’ Rights,” Independent, May 7, 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/uber-drivers-strike-london-birmingham-glasgow-nottingham-pay-rights-a8898791.html. On May 10, its first day: Lucinda Shen, “Uber Is One of the Worst Performing IPOs Ever,” Fortune, May 10, 2019, https://fortune.com/2019/05/10/uber-ipo-worst-performing-percentage/; Danielle Abril, “Lyft Stock Tumbles Two Days after Its IPO,” Fortune, April 1, 2019, https://fortune.com/2019/04/01/lyft-stock-drops-after-ipo/. There are real changes that can be enacted: Rideshare Drivers United homepage, accessed May 21, 2020, https://drivers-united.org/. Uber has more than 3.9 million drivers: “Company Info,” Uber, accessed May 21, 2020, https://www.uber.com/newsroom/company-info/; Steve Minter, “Who Are the World’s Biggest Employers?”

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick believes that driverless cars pose an existential risk to Uber,[117] and they are working hard to catch up with others in the area. Their big fear is that if someone else develops driverless cars first and launches a fleet of vehicles, they would be able to offer rides at a fraction of the cost that Uber charge, where the bulk of the ride cost is the cost of the driver. In May 2017, Uber’s biggest rival in the US, Lyft, announced a partnership with Waymo, just as Waymo and Uber were embroiled in a legal battle over Intellectual Property concerning LiDAR.[118] Baidu China's top online search firm Baidu said in 2015 it aims to put self-driving vehicles on the road in three years and mass produce them within five years, after it set up a business unit to oversee all its efforts related to automobiles.[119] In a surprise follow up announcement, Baidu revealed it would make its driverless cars technology, including its vehicle platform, hardware platform, software platform and cloud data services, freely available to others, particularly car manufacturers, to develop autonomous vehicles.[120] A Baidu driverless car prototype.

…

The new player in the mix of urban life is cars on demand, either on a trip basis with a driver with a service like Uber or Lyft, or on a usage basis - with a service like Zipcar - essentially rental by the hour or by subscription. Taxis have long been a popular way to get around when driving yourself doesn’t suit or isn’t possible. But the modernisation of taxis via the smartphone has given the concept a new lease of life. As of May 2017, leading on-demand provider Uber operates in over 580 cities and saw over $20 billion of bookings in 12 months. Rival company Lyft provides over 20 million rides per month. Ride sharing is currently responsible for about 4 percent of the miles traveled by car globally and Morgan Stanley believe the number will be nearly 30 percent by the year 2030.[59] We’ll look at ownership and its alternatives in more detail in Chapter 5.

…

A January 2013 Columbia University study[176] suggested that with a fleet of just 9,000 autonomous cars, Uber could replace every taxicab in New York City, and that passengers would wait an average of 36 seconds for a ride that costs about $0.50 per mile. Such convenience and low cost would make car ownership a dubious financial choice. A 2010 report from UC Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center[177] found that one car-share vehicle could remove 9 to 13 vehicles from the road, either because households decided to ditch their personal automobile or significantly delay the purchase of one. One survey suggests that every car added to the fleets of Uber and Lyft leads to 32 fewer car sales, meaning potential “lost sales” by 2020 of over 1 million cars.[178] While that only looks at changes in car purchasing in selected urban areas, and doesn’t take account of any changing usage patterns, brought about by driverless cars, that might increase VMT, it is enough to make car manufacturers sit up and take notice.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

It was late into the evening on Election Night, November 2020, and drivers who had organized to try to stop the passage of California’s Prop 22—which would keep them from being classified as employees, prevent them from obtaining benefits, and bar them from organizing—were gathered online to watch the results come in. “It’s not looking good,” said Nicole Moore, Uber driver, organizer, and president of Rideshare Drivers United, a Los Angeles–based association that advocates for ride-hail drivers. She was stating the obvious: anything short of a miracle and the proposition, backed by a record $200 million campaign by Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and InstaCart, would pass into law. It had been a whiplash decade for the world of on-demand app work. In the early 2010s, the wages had started out relatively high, the schedules flexible, the gigs interesting, as Uber and Lyft and their ilk actively sought to attract workers to the platform.

…

In the early 2010s, the wages had started out relatively high, the schedules flexible, the gigs interesting, as Uber and Lyft and their ilk actively sought to attract workers to the platform. But the reason pay was so high, it turned out, was that the start-ups were juiced by war chests of venture capital that backed the app companies as they cornered key markets. Uber succeeded in persuading livery cab drivers to switch to the platform, signed them up by the thousands, and encroached aggressively on taxi drivers’ turf. After Uber had a foothold, the wages fell. Uber, Lyft, InstaCart, and DoorDash have never been continuously profitable, despite their astronomical valuations and continued waves of investment. In order to claw their way toward a positive cash flow after a decade of operating, they started slashing pay.

…

Their story is not unlike that of the nineteenth-century stockingers, on multiple levels. Many stockingers had to rent their frames from the master hosiers, while many Uber drivers have to rent their cars from Uber—the machine owner gets paid twice so that the worker might have the benefit of working. Both stockingers and drivers, in many cases, have barely enough left over to pay for food and shelter when the day was done. So, some of Uber and Lyft’s most dedicated drivers began organizing. They shared tips and strategies on Reddit and online message boards, undertook informal efforts like coordinating with each other to decline rides at a given location until the app’s algorithm offered them fairer prices, and formed groups like Gig Workers Rising and Rideshare Drivers United.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Tim Harford, “An Economist’s Dreams of a Fairer Gig Economy,” Financial Times, December 20, 2015. 44. Nick Wingfield and Mike Isaac, “Seattle Will Allow Uber and Lyft Drivers to Form Unions,” New York Times, December 14, 2015. 45. Chris Johnston, “Uber Drivers Win Key Employment Case,” BBC News, October 28, 2016. 46. Jessica Floum, “Uber Settles Lawsuit with SF, LA over Driver Background Checks,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 7, 2016. 47. Rich Jervis, “Austin Voters Reject Uber, Lyft Plan for Self-Regulation,” USA Today, May 8, 2016. 48. Sam Levin, “Elizabeth Warren Takes on Airbnb, Urging Scrutiny of Large-Scale Renters,” Guardian, July 13, 2016. 49.

…

Yes, the drivers don’t have to commit all their time to Uber, but then Uber isn’t committing anything to the drivers either. This is emblematic of an increasingly unequal economy where, in truth, multibillion-dollar start-ups like Uber and Lyft share none of their stratospheric value with their workers. Indeed, a July 2017 report about the gig economy by the British MP Frank Field alleges that some self-employed UK drivers are earning only £2.50 an hour working for sharing economy companies like Parcelforce and webuyanycar.com.30 “In reality, there is no utopia at companies like Uber, Lyft, Instacart and Handy, whose workers are often manipulated into working long hours for low wages while continually chasing the next ride or task,” that 2017 New York Times editorial argues.31 Or, as the New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino bluntly put it, commenting on the cult of work celebrated by on-demand companies such as the freelance marketplace Fiverr, “The gig economy celebrates working yourself to death.”32 My own experience as a heavy Uber user chimes with these conclusions.

…

Chantel McGee, “Only 4 Percent of Uber Drivers Remain on the Platform a Year Later, Says Report,” CNBC, April 20, 2017. 34. More, Utopia, 82. 35. Hannah Levintova, “Meet ‘Sledgehammer Shannon,’ the Lawyer Who Is Uber’s Worst Nightmare,” Mother Jones, December 30, 2015. 36. Kapp, “Uber’s Worst Nightmare.” 37. Barney Jopeson and Leslie Hook, “Warren Lashes Out Against Uber and Lyft,” Financial Times, May 19, 2016. 38. Ellen Huet, “What Really Killed Homejoy? It Couldn’t Hold On to Its Customers,” Forbes, July 23, 2015. 39. Carmel Deamicis, “Homejoy Shuts Down After Battling Worker Classification Lawsuits,” Recode, July 17, 2015. 40. Anna Louie Sussman and Josh Zumbrun, “Gig Economy Spreads Broadly,” Wall Street Journal, March 26–27, 2016. 41.

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

Figure 4.1: Cow Clicker Screenshot. Courtesy of Ian Bogost, http://bogost.com/games/cow_clicker/. Figure 4.2: The cartoon maps Uber provides for its drivers and passengers via the Google Play Store. Figure 4.3: Uber’s homepage offers a message of simultaneous elitism and equality (image from July 2014). Source: Uber, http://mascola.com/insights/ubers-lost-positoning-luxury-car-service/. Figure 4.4: Lyft advertising takes a very different tack from Uber. Source: http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/lyft-hopes-accelerate-first-integrated-ad-campaign-159619. Figure 4.5: Amazon Mechanical Turk Interface for Managing Workers. © 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates.

…

The company only recently abandoned its directive that drivers festoon their cars with quirky pink moustaches, and many drivers still assume passengers will sit companionably in the front seat, rather than the rear. Figure 4.4 Lyft advertising takes a very different tack from Uber. For companies like Lyft and more deliberately intimate interface layer systems like the dating app Tindr, the “sharing economy” is not about money at all, but about that experience of companionship. If these business models are founded on exploiting certain kinds of alienated labor and attention, their customer experience promises relief from that alienation. Even as Uber and Lyft collect their invisible commissions on unseen transactions, the affective experience is one of a specially branded community.

…

“Radio 4 Revives Hitchhiker’s Game,” 4. 32. Belsky, “The Interface Layer.” 33. Kleinman, “You’re Allowed to Tip Your Uber Driver (and Maybe You Should)”; “Do I Need to Tip My Driver?” 34. Knack, “Pay As You Park.” 35. Stein, “Baby, You Can Drive My Car.” 36. Lawler, “Lyft-Off.” 37. See an extensive list of such incidents at: “The Comprehensive List of Uber Incidents, Assaults and Accusations.” 38. Wortham, “Ubering While Black”; Rivoli, Marcius, and Greene, “Taxi Driver Fined $25K for Refusing Ride to Black Family.” 39. Wortham, “Ubering While Black.” 40. Sandvig, “Seeing the Sort: The Aesthetic and Industrial Defense of ‘The Algorithm.’” 41.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Here again Uber pointed the way. The company had run an ingeniously underhanded dirty tricks campaign against its largest rival, Lyft, by ordering, then canceling, thousands of rides. The hope was that Lyft’s drivers, frustrated by the cancellations, would come work for Uber. Then there was Operation SLOG—“Supplying Long-term Operations Growth”—a “marketing program” revealed by the Verge that involved undercover recruiters equipped with “burner phones, credit cards, and driver kits,” charged with hailing rides on Lyft and then persuading the drivers to defect to Uber. “Not only does Uber know about this, they’re actively encouraging these actions day to day and, in doing so, are flat-out lying both to their customers, the media, and their investors,” one whistleblower told the Verge.

…

I sought to apply proven methods of corporate subversion to a market that was woefully neglected by established players in the tech industry. The idea was so simple, I was surprised it hadn’t been done yet. If Uber could use stealthy labor-organizing-style tactics in its campaign to poach drivers from Lyft, why shouldn’t Lyft retaliate by covertly funding an actual employee union drive at Uber? Come to think of it, why shouldn’t any company that wanted to gain an edge over a competitor do this? It made intuitive sense on a business level, especially given how focused most American companies were on near-term results.

…

The spurious notion Jill Lepore, “The Disruption Machine,” New Yorker, June 23, 2014; Samantha Murphy, “Facebook Changes Its ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ Motto,” April 30, 2014, mashable.com; Katy Waldman, “Let’s Break Shit: A Short History of Silicon Valley’s Favorite Phrase,” December 5, 2014, slate.com. No More Woof Marc Lallanilla, “Speak, Fido: Device Promises Dog Translations,” January 3, 2014, livescience.com. Here again Uber pointed the way Erica Fink, “Uber’s Dirty Tricks Quantified: Rival Counts 5,560 Canceled Rides,” August 12, 2014, cnn.com. Operation SLOG Casey Newton, “This Is Uber’s Playbook for Sabotaging Lyft,” August 26, 2014, theverge.com. launched with $50 million in cash Amy Schatz, “Pressing Fwd.us: How Silicon Valley’s $50 Million Bet on Immigration Stalled,” October 15, 2014, recode.net. spent nearly $2 million on lobbying Senate Office of Public Records via opensecrets.org.

The Network Imperative: How to Survive and Grow in the Age of Digital Business Models by Barry Libert, Megan Beck

active measures, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, diversification, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, future of work, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, late fees, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Oculus Rift, pirate software, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, software as a service, software patent, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Wall-E, women in the workforce, Zipcar

Daniel Ammann, GM’s president, said, “We think there’s going to be more change in the world of mobility in the next five years than there has been in the last 50,” and GM is getting ready for that change.1 From that perspective, Lyft is an excellent partner who will help GM turn their views of the market upside down. Lyft’s president John Zimmer stated, “We strongly believe that autonomous vehicle go-to-market strategy is through a network, not through individual car ownership.” According to executives at both GM and Lyft, they will start work on developing a network of self-driving vehicles—a challenge to Google, Tesla, and Uber, which are also devoting resources to this innovation.2 Openness Makes Space for Ongoing Change Will GM’s self-driving-car aspiration create value for the firm? Will its investment in Lyft lead to automotive leadership in ten years?

…

For example, Yelp, Facebook, LinkedIn, TripAdvisor, and Pinterest depend entirely on intangible contributions from the network. Other network companies access the physical assets of the network, such as Uber making use of customers’ cars, or Airbnb making use of customers’ real estate. The task of managing external assets, however, is entirely different from managing those owned by your firm. To maintain and grow access to a network’s assets, you must carefully manage the sentiment and engagement of the network itself. If Uber doesn’t keep its drivers happy, there are other ride-sharing networks such as Lyft and Sidecar ready to take them into the fold. Let’s reflect on your organization and pinpoint where you lie on the spectrum from tangible to intangible.

…

—Mark Fields, CEO, Ford Motor Company VISUALIZING YOUR ORGANIZATION AS A DIGITAL NETWORK, even in a small portion of the business, is a similar leap to the one made fifteen or more years ago by every great leader telling her teams and boards, “We need to get our organization online.” Most people did not know what that meant, but the best made the leap. To be sure, every industry is undergoing a change, including those grounded in physical assets—transportation and lodging. You’ve heard of Uber, and probably Lyft, and maybe even their car-sharing grandparent Zipcar—not to mention Getaround, RelayRides, Greenwheels, GoCar, and many more. Car sharing and driving-as-a-service are available in more than a thousand cities around the world. The accessibility and convenience of these options are a threat to the car industry as well as the taxi and limousine industries, as millennials seem happy to get around without either a driver’s license or car ownership.

Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber by Susan Fowler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Burning Man, cloud computing, data science, deep learning, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Grace Hopper, Higgs boson, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, microservices, Mitch Kapor, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, work culture

I was constantly daydreaming about working somewhere that had a real impact on the world, at a company where people were excited to come into work and passionate about solving problems, a company that had an HR department, a company where my manager wouldn’t say inappropriate things to me and joke about reading my personal text messages. And I wondered if this job at Uber could end up being more than just a job, if it could be the beginning of a real career in engineering. While I counted down the days until my interview, I asked more Uber drivers about their experiences. I tried to pry from them the worst, most awful things they’d experienced or seen, but the worst thing they ever said about driving for Uber was that they were worried the company would cut fare prices to stay competitive with Lyft, its rival. * * * — Uber’s corporate headquarters was located at 1455 Market Street, a building it shared with Square and several other companies, but that wasn’t its only office in San Francisco.

…

This time I pushed them even harder than I had before, asking them if they knew any other drivers who were having bad experiences. But they were universally positive and said the same thing I’d heard before: fares were down because of intense competition with Lyft, but they were sure Uber would bring them back up; in general, they liked driving for Uber. Feeling reassured, I put aside my wariness about the Project Euler and equity incidents and accepted the job. * * * — I was one of the first new employees to show up at Uber’s headquarters on orientation day, November 30, 2015. I walked into 1455, stopped at one of the lobby desks to obtain a temporary badge, and made my way up in the elevator.

…

Amid the chaos, taxi drivers in New York City went on strike, refusing to pick up passengers from Kennedy Airport in protest against the ban. Drivers for Lyft joined them in solidarity. Uber, however, didn’t participate in the strike. There was an uproar, and the #DeleteUber hashtag began to trend on Twitter. In the early days of #DeleteUber, an estimated 200,000 users deleted their accounts—a number that continued to grow as Twitter and the media covered Uber’s connections to the Trump administration. Alongside other CEOs like Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick had joined Trump’s economic advisory council shortly after the election; now, in light of the Muslim ban, Uber’s employees and customers were pressuring him to resign.

Virtual Competition by Ariel Ezrachi, Maurice E. Stucke

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Arthur D. Levinson, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, cloud computing, collaborative economy, commoditize, confounding variable, corporate governance, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, deep learning, demand response, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, electricity market, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental economics, Firefox, framing effect, Google Chrome, independent contractor, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, light touch regulation, linked data, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, Milgram experiment, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, nowcasting, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search costs, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, yield management

Sarah Ashley O’Brien, “NYC Uber Drivers Protest Rate Cuts,” CNN Money (February 1, 2016), http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/01/technology/uber-nyc -protest/index.html?sr =twCNN020116uber-nyc-protest0317PMVODtopPhoto &linkId=20849630; Lyft, Nashville Drivers Make Up to $6000/Month Driving Your Car, https://www.lyft.com/drive-for-lyft?im=& inc= 6000& t=month &kw=Nashville%20Drivers& utm _ source =bing& utm _medium= search& utm _campaign=Driver_BNA _v2 _ Search _Brand _ All_Lyft& utm _term=lyft%20 com%20driver&adgroup =lyft _driver&device = c& matchtype =b. Uber, “Dynamic Pricing 101 | Uber,” YouTube (December 2014), https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=76q7PDnxWuE. Annie Lowrey, “Is Uber’s Surge-Pricing an Example of High-Tech Gouging?,” New York Times Magazine, January 10, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014 /01/12/magazine/is-ubers-surge-pricing-an-example-of-high-tech-gouging .html?

…

The super-platform at any moment may favor its own operations downstream over those provided by Uber. To put it differently, Uber’s biggest nightmare is not some obnoxious taxi commissioner seeking to hold on to a crumbling monopoly by refusing Uber entry into his city, nor is it another carservice platform like Lyft. The real fright comes from super-platforms like Google and Apple. Consumers may benefit from Uber’s fright when Uber improves ser vice, maintains competitive prices, and increases its investment in research and development. But Uber also sees the long shadow of the super-platforms, and realizes that it will likely be at a significant competitive disadvantage over the long run.

…

Matt Weinberger, “Microsoft Could See an Opportunity to Poke Google in the Eye with Uber Investment,” Business Insider UK (July 31, 2015), http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-and-google-are-uber-investors -2015-7. Nathaniel Mott, “Uber Should Fear the Company Formerly Known as Google,” Gigaom (August 11, 2015), https://gigaom.com/2015/08/11/uber-vs -alphabet-google/. Weinberger, “Microsoft Could See an Opportunity to Poke Google in the Eye with Uber Investment.” Douglas MacMillan, “GM Invests $500 Million in Lyft, Plans System for Self-Driving Cars,” Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2016, http://www.wsj.com /article _email/gm-invests-500-million-in-lyft-plans-system-for-self-driving -cars-1451914204-lMyQjAxMTI2NTA2NDEwODQyWj.

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Green and Zimmer connected, and in 2012 began to offer short rides in San Francisco. They called the new venture Lyft. Anyone could be a driver. In contrast to the upmarket “private driver” black car of early Uber, they provided Lyft drivers with pink mustaches to affix to the front of their cars. “Friendliness” and fist bumps were Lyft’s mode, a studied contrast to Uber’s ersatz limousine. Uber wasted no time in striking back, launching its own service with ordinary drivers. “We chose to compete,” Kalanick wrote in a blog post.3 And compete Uber did, and fiercely so. Its new business model was UberX, which adopted Lyft’s model and enrolled nonprofessional drivers who could work as little or as much as they wanted.

…

They would be contractors, not employees. In other words, it’s a BYOC model—Bring Your Own Car. Uber drivers, 60 percent of whom have other jobs, have become prime examples for what became known as the “gig economy.” Both Uber and Lyft also rolled out modern versions of carpooling services that match up a rider with another rider in close proximity headed to nearby destinations. Uber and Lyft rolled forward, opening in city after city. Customers, initially many of them millennials, were quickly won over. In its quest to expand, Uber went to war with local taxicab drivers and owners and transportation regulators, all of whom opposed it as an unregulated taxi company.

…

In San Francisco alone, Uber’s revenues were in the billions, compared to less than $200 million for taxis. By 2017, Uber was operating in 540 cities around the world; Lyft, 290 in the United States. In the United States, Uber had about 70 percent of ride hailing and Lyft, 30 percent. Internationally, in addition to DiDi, other major players have emerged, including Gett in Europe and Ola in India. Overall, ride hailing could be a very big industry. But the industry still had a major challenge—to prove that it could be profitable. In May 2019, Uber went public with an $82 billion valuation. But the costs of running it were greater than its revenues. What became apparent in the IPO was that it was losing money—billions of dollars.

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier, Benoit Reillier

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, blockchain, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Diane Coyle, Didi Chuxing, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, multi-sided market, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, search costs, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, Y Combinator

You may then have to acquire them, decide not to enter in these international markets, or invest more to catch up at a later stage. Companies such as Rocket Internet are famous for such strategies. Creating barriers to growth: Some competitors prevent access to new markets. Tencent has repeatedly blocked the Uber app on WeChat in 2015,15 with a ban in December 2015 days after Tencent-backed Didi Chuxing announced a global partnership with Lyft, GrabTaxi and Ola.16 Competitive pressure was too hard for Uber, and it led Uber China to merge with Didi.17 Mature platforms have a range of strategic options available to deal with increased competitive pressures, but we’ll focus here on two generic responses: (i) creating a platform-powered ecosystem; (ii) adding sides to their existing business models.

…

Eisenmann, G. Parker and M. Van Alstyne, Platform Envelopment, Harvard Business School Working Paper, 2010. Platform maturity: profitable growth 135 15 http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/06/uber-is-still-blocked-on-wechat-in-china-and-thesituation-is-getting-worse/ 16 http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/03/lyft-adds-grabtaxi-and-ola-to-its-faction-of-alliesagainst-uber/. 17 www.wsj.com/articles/china-s-didi-chuxing-to-acquire-rival-uber-s-chinese-operations1470024403. 18 Cainiao was formed by a consortium of existing logistics companies to give the project a running start. Alibaba itself took a 48% stake. 19 See https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/14/alibaba-backed-logistics-firm-cainiao-landsfunding-at-a-reported-7-7b-valuation/. 20 Internet.org is a partnership between Facebook and six companies (Samsung, Ericsson, MediaTek, Opera Software, Nokia and Qualcomm).

…

The rise of platforms enabling the sharing economy movement – both in terms of renting other people’s cars or sharing rides with them – will no doubt have a profound impact on future demand for cars. Some observers are predicting a future where personal car ownership becomes a distant memory and an economic aberration. Recent moves by General Motors (who invested $500 million in Uber’s competitor Lyft and is forging strategic alliances with other platforms) suggest that some companies are taking notice and trying to secure orders from companies that will be tomorrow’s customers. Lyft is unlikely to become a car manufacturer and compete against GM, yet it is one of the companies disrupting the transportation market, which will definitely have an effect on demand for cars. These ‘second order’ effects can be missed if the assessment of possible platform disruption is too narrowly focused on the emergence of direct competitors.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

The case inspired the judges in the two cases, Edward Chen and Vince Chhabria, to grapple thoughtfully with the question of where power lurks in a new networked age. It was no surprise that Uber and Lyft took the rebel position. Like Airbnb, Uber and Lyft claimed not to be powerful. Uber argued that it was just a technology firm facilitating links between passengers and drivers, not a car service. The drivers who had signed contracts were robust agents of their own destiny. Judge Chen derided this argument. “Uber is no more a ‘technology company,’ ” he wrote, “than Yellow Cab is a ‘technology company’ because it uses CB radios to dispatch taxi cabs, John Deere is a ‘technology company’ because it uses computers and robots to manufacture lawn mowers, or Domino Sugar is a ‘technology company’ because it uses modern irrigation techniques to grow its sugar cane.”

…

The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing’s allegations against Airbnb are contained here: www.dfeh.ca.gov/​wp-content/​uploads/​sites/​32/​2017/​06/​04-19-17-Airbnb-DFEH-Agreement-Signed-DFEH-1-1.pdf (accessed September 2017). Airbnb’s response to California’s charges is also contained in the above document. For Judge Chen’s ruling on Uber, see his “Order Denying Defendant Uber Technologies, Inc.’s Motion for Summary Judgment” in O’Connor v. Uber, Case No. C-13-3826 EMC, United States District Court for the Northern District of California, Docket No. 211. For Judge Chhabria’s ruling on Lyft, see his “Order Denying Cross-motions for Summary Judgment” in Cotter v. Lyft, Case No. 13-cv-04065-VC, United States District Court for the Northern District of California, Dockets No. 69 and 74. On Bill Gates’s faith in technology’s leveling powers, see his book The Road Ahead (New York: Viking, 1995).

…

Therefore, the argument that Lyft is merely a platform, and that drivers perform no service for Lyft, is not a serious one. The judges believed Uber and Lyft to be more powerful than they were willing to admit, but they also conceded that the companies did not have the same power over employees as an old-economy employer like Walmart. “The jury in this case will be handed a square peg and asked to choose between two round holes,” Judge Chhabria wrote. Judge Chen, meanwhile, wondered whether Uber, despite a claim of impotence at the center of the network, exerted a kind of invisible power over drivers that might give them a case. In order to define this new power, he decided to turn where few judges do: the late French philosopher Michel Foucault.

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next by Tom Standage

accelerated depreciation, active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-city movement, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, City Beautiful movement, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, Ida Tarbell, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, prompt engineering, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, safety bicycle, self-driving car, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, tech bro, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbiased observer, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

Zimride’s founders had by this time hit upon the same idea and launched their own ride-hailing service, also accessed via a smartphone app, called Lyft. Starting in 2014, both companies introduced the option of shared trips, for riders willing to trade convenience for cost. Uber’s subsequent expansion into other countries around the world pitted it against local rivals using the same model: Ola in India, Didi Chuxing in China (itself the product of a merger between two Uber clones), Careem in the Middle East, and Grab in Southeast Asia. The ride-hailing market became fiercely competitive, prompting Uber to team up with local rivals in many parts of the world to avoid expensive price wars.

…

The possibility that cheap robotaxis could undermine car ownership explains why both ride-hailing firms, such as Uber and Lyft, and carmakers have been investing billions of dollars in autonomous-driving research. Any firm that develops a viable robotaxi would potentially be able to undercut both ride-hailing companies that rely on human drivers, and carmakers whose business model depends on selling people cars. Fear of this outcome has resulted in a constantly shifting web of alliances between AV start-ups, ride-hailing firms, and carmakers, as everyone tries to hedge bets. Waymo, for example, has partnerships with Lyft, Fiat Chrysler, and Jaguar Land Rover, while Toyota has invested in Uber’s AV unit.

…

Cars are also, by their nature, visible in public with their owners in a way that washing machines or wide-screen televisions, say, are not. In recent years, however, the idea that “you are what you drive” has come under pressure from various attempts to provide the benefits of cars without having to own them. Today a ride can be summoned when needed from a ride-hailing service such as Uber or Lyft. Car-sharing clubs make renting a car for a few hours, or a couple of days, quick and easy using a smartphone app. Some start-ups are experimenting with services that let drivers subscribe to a car, paying a monthly fee for use of a specific vehicle or a pool of shared cars. Lynk & Co., a Chinese firm that describes itself as “Netflix for cars,” says it will let users subscribe for as little as one month at a time.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

GDP also goes up when banks post financial profits, but it remains stagnant when digital innovations get introduced that make our lives easier. 40 “The Treasury's Living Standards Framework,” New Zealand Government, December 2019, https://treasury.govt.nz/sites/default/files/2019-12/lsf-dashboard-update-dec19.pdf. 41 “New Zealand's Ardern Wins 2nd Term in Election Landslide,” Associated Press, October 2020, https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-new-zealand-mosque-attacks-auckland-elections-new-zealand-b1ab788954f23f948d8b6c3258c02634. 42 “Uber and Lyft Drivers Guild Wins Historic Pay Rules,” Independent Drivers Guild, December 2018, https://drivingguild.org/uber-and-lyft-drivers-guild-wins-historic-pay-rules/. 43 I'm a New York City Uber Driver. The Pandemic Shows That My Industry Needs Fundamental Change or Drivers Will Never Recover,” Aziz Bah, Business Insider, July 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-lyft-drivers-covid-19-pandemic-virus-economy-right-bargain-2020-7?r=US&IR=T. 44 Humanity Forward, https://movehumanityforward.com/. 45 Data as a Property Right, Humanity Forward, https://movehumanityforward.com/data-property-right. 46 “Andrew Yang Is Pushing Big Tech to Pay Users for Data,” The Verge, June 2020, https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/22/21298919/andrew-yang-big-tech-data-dividend-project-facebook-google-ubi. 47 “A Modern Union for the Modern Economy,” Jeffrey M.

…

Uber Settles Driver Claims Before Disappointing IPO,” Forbes, May 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2019/05/13/worker-or-independent-contractor-uber-settles-driver-claims-before-disappointing-ipo/#7a157b93f39f. 18 “Uber and Lyft Drivers in California Will Remain Contractors”, Kate Conger, The New York Times, November 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/technology/california-uber-lyft-prop-22.html. 19 “Are Political Parties in Trouble?” Patrick Liddiard, Wilson Center, December 2018, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/happ_liddiard_are_political_parties_in_trouble_december_2018.pdf. 20 “A Deep Dive into Voter Turnout in Latin America,” Holly Sunderland, Americas Society / Council of the Americas, June 2018, https://www.as-coa.org/articles/chart-deep-dive-voter-turnout-latin-america. 21 “Historical Reported Voting Rates, Table A.1,” United States Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/voting-and-registration/voting-historical-time-series.html. 22 “How to Correctly Understand the General Requirements of Recruiting Party Members?”

…

A good place to start is probably with those gig workers who work exclusively for one platform or in one industry, such as drivers. It is what the Independent Drivers Guild in New York and Gig Workers Rising in California do. Both groups gather drivers who work primarily for Uber, Lyft, and other similar platforms and advocate for “better wages, working conditions, and respect.”50 It has led to some structural changes in the status and treatments of such drivers. In August 2020, a California court ordered ride-hailing and delivery apps such as Uber and Lyft to treat their drivers as employees.51 It would require these companies to provide a minimum wage, health insurance, and overtime pay and paid sick leave, media reported.52 However, the court battles on this legislation continued into the Fall, and as we saw earlier, voters rejected Proposition 22 in November 2020, overturning much of the previous legislation on the matter, making Uber, Lyft, and other drivers contract workers once more.53 (At the time of writing, it continues to be battled in court by the platforms in question.)

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

GDP also goes up when banks post financial profits, but it remains stagnant when digital innovations get introduced that make our lives easier. 40 “The Treasury's Living Standards Framework,” New Zealand Government, December 2019, https://treasury.govt.nz/sites/default/files/2019-12/lsf-dashboard-update-dec19.pdf. 41 “New Zealand's Ardern Wins 2nd Term in Election Landslide,” Associated Press, October 2020, https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-new-zealand-mosque-attacks-auckland-elections-new-zealand-b1ab788954f23f948d8b6c3258c02634. 42 “Uber and Lyft Drivers Guild Wins Historic Pay Rules,” Independent Drivers Guild, December 2018, https://drivingguild.org/uber-and-lyft-drivers-guild-wins-historic-pay-rules/. 43 I'm a New York City Uber Driver. The Pandemic Shows That My Industry Needs Fundamental Change or Drivers Will Never Recover,” Aziz Bah, Business Insider, July 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-lyft-drivers-covid-19-pandemic-virus-economy-right-bargain-2020-7?r=US&IR=T. 44 Humanity Forward, https://movehumanityforward.com/. 45 Data as a Property Right, Humanity Forward, https://movehumanityforward.com/data-property-right. 46 “Andrew Yang Is Pushing Big Tech to Pay Users for Data,” The Verge, June 2020, https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/22/21298919/andrew-yang-big-tech-data-dividend-project-facebook-google-ubi. 47 “A Modern Union for the Modern Economy,” Jeffrey M.

…

Uber Settles Driver Claims Before Disappointing IPO,” Forbes, May 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2019/05/13/worker-or-independent-contractor-uber-settles-driver-claims-before-disappointing-ipo/#7a157b93f39f. 18 “Uber and Lyft Drivers in California Will Remain Contractors”, Kate Conger, The New York Times, November 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/technology/california-uber-lyft-prop-22.html. 19 “Are Political Parties in Trouble?” Patrick Liddiard, Wilson Center, December 2018, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/happ_liddiard_are_political_parties_in_trouble_december_2018.pdf. 20 “A Deep Dive into Voter Turnout in Latin America,” Holly Sunderland, Americas Society / Council of the Americas, June 2018, https://www.as-coa.org/articles/chart-deep-dive-voter-turnout-latin-america. 21 “Historical Reported Voting Rates, Table A.1,” United States Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/voting-and-registration/voting-historical-time-series.html. 22 “How to Correctly Understand the General Requirements of Recruiting Party Members?”

…

A good place to start is probably with those gig workers who work exclusively for one platform or in one industry, such as drivers. It is what the Independent Drivers Guild in New York and Gig Workers Rising in California do. Both groups gather drivers who work primarily for Uber, Lyft, and other similar platforms and advocate for “better wages, working conditions, and respect.”50 It has led to some structural changes in the status and treatments of such drivers. In August 2020, a California court ordered ride-hailing and delivery apps such as Uber and Lyft to treat their drivers as employees.51 It would require these companies to provide a minimum wage, health insurance, and overtime pay and paid sick leave, media reported.52 However, the court battles on this legislation continued into the Fall, and as we saw earlier, voters rejected Proposition 22 in November 2020, overturning much of the previous legislation on the matter, making Uber, Lyft, and other drivers contract workers once more.53 (At the time of writing, it continues to be battled in court by the platforms in question.)

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

Unless you are violent, disruptive, or otherwise problematic, the driver can’t refuse you a ride based on your skin color or some star rating you’ve accumulated. You can also expect to pay a standard fare, unlike with Uber and Lyft, which are known to institute surge pricing to leverage high demand. Uber claims that surge pricing represents a market-based solution and offers a fair price based on availability. Except that Uber controls the market. They decide how many cars are on the road—the company has been caught asking drivers to stay off the road in order to drive up rates. At the same time, Uber has presented itself as a populist operation with a low threshold for entry. They’ve even established financing programs to help potential drivers get cheaper deals on cars from General Motors and Toyota.

…

The sharing economy includes some online labor outlets, such as TaskRabbit, in which independent contractors perform menial tasks, such as fetching groceries or assembling furniture, for small fees. Companies such as Lyft, Uber, and Sidecar provide taxi-type services, but they almost never call themselves taxi or transportation companies. This is because the transportation industry is highly regulated, something that Uber would like to disrupt. Government, with its pernicious regulatory apparatus, is simply making the market inefficient and costing consumers and businesspeople in both cash and intimacy with one another. (For a time, Travis Kalanick, Uber’s founder, used a cropped cover of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged for his Twitter avatar before replacing it with a drawing of Alexander Hamilton’s face.

…

Nov. 28, 2013. testosteronepit.com/home/2013/11/28/how-much-is-my-private-data-worth-google-just-offered-me.html. 330 How much Google pays for data: ibid. 330 Data managers: World Economic Forum. “Unlocking the Value of Personal Data: From Collection to Usage.” Feb. 2013. www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_IT_UnlockingValuePersonalData_CollectionUsage_Report_2013.pdf. 331 “the functional end of the app”: Liz Gannes. “Lyft and Uber Price Wars Leave Some Drivers Feeling Crunched.” Recode. April 30, 2014. recode.net/2014/04/30/lyft-and-uber-price-wars-leave-some-drivers-feeling-crunched. 339 Bradbury’s comments on the Internet: Jennifer Steinhauer. “A Literary Legend Fights for a Local Library.” New York Times. June 19, 2009. nytimes.com/2009/06/20/us/20ventura.html. 341 “I think in tweets”: David Roberts.

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Solyndra, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zenefits, Zipcar

There are 5.2 million people in the trucking industry who don’t drive trucks, as well as the millions who provide food, gasoline, accommodation, and other services for truckers. If truck drivers are no longer on the roads, all those people will feel the pain, too. Then you can look at the people who drive taxis, Ubers, and Lyfts. Many taxi drivers have already switched to driving for the ride-sharing companies, but when robotaxis and self-driving Ubers are widespread, many of those jobs will be at risk. Some observers believe that the advent of the autonomous era could have a measurable impact on capitalism as we know it. Revenue from fuel taxes will go down, presumably to be replaced by other sources of income.

…

Santa Clara–based graphics chipmaker Nvidia has added hundreds of engineers to its auto-focused teams in the past few years. “We didn’t start out to be an auto company,” Danny Shapiro, Nvidia’s senior director of automotive, told the Times. “But everything that is changing a car has nothing to do with the auto industry of the past.” Start-ups have spotted the opportunity, too, of course. Uber and Lyft, both based in San Francisco, are hogging the early spoils in the ride-sharing market. Younger companies like Mountain View’s Smartcar (infrastructure for the connected car), San Francisco’s Reviver (digital license plates), and Palo Alto’s Nauto (AI-powered autonomous driving) are pursuing other software-related opportunities.

…

Standing behind a table with another Volkswagen-branded signboard behind him, Müller, white-haired and lean, told reporters that the company had initiated the biggest transformation in its history. VW would reshape itself to become one of the world’s leading providers of sustainable transport. “The term evolution would be too weak for what we’re facing,” Müller declared. Three weeks earlier, following GM’s investment in Lyft and on the same day that Toyota announced a strategic partnership with Uber, VW had announced that it would invest $300 million in the ridebooking app Gett. Within days of that news, the German media were reporting rumors that VW planned to spend up to $11 billion on an advanced battery factory that would rival Tesla’s Gigafactory. (In March 2018, the company announced that it would spend $25 billion to secure batteries for electric-vehicle production at sixteen of its factories.)

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

These southeastern startups are also invested in by Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank, which has strategically put money behind one ride-hailing entrant in each region, including Didi in China. In a repeat of Uber’s saga in China, regional leader Grab—backed by Didi, SoftBank, and Alibaba—acquired Uber’s Southeast Asian business in 2018, then merged it. Don’t look for Didi to try entering the United States and compete with Uber on its home turf. Uber and Lyft are already too well entrenched, and battles for position have intensified with Lyft claiming a 35 market share next to dominant Uber, which faced several troubling scandals. With both now publicly traded companies, they could spark a sharing economy IPO parade.

…

Didi has been dealing with the crisis by introducing several safety measures in China that include verifying its drivers with facial recognition tests, installing emergency buttons for both drivers and passengers, and such extreme measures as using the driver’s phone to audio record trips—with the passenger’s consent—that are stored and then deleted at Didi within one week. Not sure if Uber will be trying this out in the United States. The Traffic Brain In some other realms, Didi sees a brighter horizon. The company is focusing on expanding outside China, investing more in AI systems and autonomous driving, conducting research at a Silicon Valley lab, and planning an electric vehicle network of 10 million by 2028. Like Uber and Lyft experimenting with new self-driving thrills, Didi is testing self-driving vehicles in four cities in China and the United States and has a grand plan to launch driver-less taxis soon.

…

China’s tech titans have invested in and acquired startups and cutting-edge emerging companies throughout leading hubs worldwide, formed Sand Hill Road venture capital units, set up R&D outfits close to engineering talent, and angled into Hollywood moviemaking in a bid for soft power. In this outward reach, China investment in US tech companies reached $51.4 billion from 2010 through 2018, led by megadeals in America’s top trophy startups Uber, Lyft, and Magic Leap.35 Recent US regulatory hurdles and a Beijing crackdown on high-priced, debt-laden deals have curbed the action. But the innovation engine keeps going, and so does venture capital from Silicon Valley and China funds to fuel it. In the wake of heightened regulations and uncertainty, Chinese tech deal makers are shifting to smaller, highly strategic transactions in the United States and turning to more welcoming markets internationally.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

Akerlof, “Writing the ‘The Market for “Lemons”’: A Personal and Interpretive Essay,” Nobelprize.org, November 14, 2003, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2001/akerlof-article.html. 207 “if this paper were correct”: Ibid. 207 50 million rides per month: Eric Newcomer, “Lyft Is Gaining on Uber as It Spends Big for Growth,” Bloomberg, last modified April 14, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-14/lyft-is-gaining-on-uber-as-it-spends-big-for-growth. 208 In 2013, California passed regulations: Tomio Geron, “California Becomes First State to Regulate Ridesharing Services Lyft, Sidecar, UberX,” Forbes, September 19, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/09/19/california-becomes-first-state-to-regulate-ridesharing-services-lyft-sidecar-uberx/#6b22c10967fe. 208 by August 2016, BlaBlaCar still did not require them: BlaBlaCar, “Frequently Asked Questions: Is It Safe for Me to Enter My Govt.

…

But by March of 2016, Uber was handling 50 million rides per month in the United States. The great majority of Uber’s ride suppliers were not professional chauffeurs; they were simply people who wanted to make money with their labor and their cars. So how did this huge market overcome severe information asymmetries? In 2013, California passed regulations mandating that transportation network companies (TNCs) such as Uber and Lyft conduct criminal background checks on their drivers. These checks certainly provided some reassurance, but they were not the whole story. After all, UberX and its competitor Lyft both grew rapidly before background checks were in place, and by August 2016, BlaBlaCar still did not require them for its drivers.

…

Medallion-holding incumbents found it difficult to reverse their losses, because Uber’s two-sided network effects, smooth user interface and user experience, and ample capital were formidable advantages. Attempts to build competing platforms such as Lyft in the United States and Hailo in Europe did not slow down the fast-growing startup. The only thing that could, it sometimes seemed, was regulation. Utility Players? The legality of the Uber platform has been challenged around the world, and new rules and statutes about transportation services have been proposed and passed. It is sometimes hard to avoid the impression that they were written with Uber and its platform peers in mind, and with the intent of handicapping them.

System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

A consortium of tech companies: Kari Paul and Julia Carrie Wong, “California Passes Prop 22 in a Major Victory for Uber and Lyft,” Guardian, November 4, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/04/california-election-voters-prop-22-uber-lyft; Andrew J. Hawkins, “An Uber and Lyft Shutdown in California Looks Inevitable—Unless Voters Bail Them Out,” Verge, August 16, 2020, https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/16/21370828/uber-lyft-california-shutdown-drivers-classify-ballot-prop-22. “I doubt whether”: Andrew J. Hawkins, “Uber and Lyft Had an Edge in the Prop 22 Fight: Their Apps,” Verge, November 4, 2020, https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/4/21549760/uber-lyft-prop-22-win-vote-app-message-notifications.

…

Big tech is also spending millions to lobby European regulators to ward off efforts to limit digital advertising, contributing to what some call a “Washingtonization of Brussels.” Those lobbying efforts are unlikely to abate anytime soon, even as those companies come under greater antitrust scrutiny. One of the recent battlefronts in tech companies’ push to influence regulation comes from California’s effort to reclassify gig economy workers, such as Uber and Lyft drivers and delivery people for companies such as DoorDash, as employees rather than contractors of the firms they work for. In 2019, the California legislature passed Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5), with the aim of reclassifying thousands of independent contractors as employees, thereby guaranteeing them numerous benefits such as minimum wage, unemployment insurance, and sick leave.

…

The bill was a textbook case of government seeking to contain a negative externality created by a profit-seeking company. Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, an author of the bill, described her motivation: “As lawmakers, we will not in good conscience allow free-riding businesses to continue to pass their own business costs onto taxpayers and workers.” Providing such benefits would cost the likes of Uber and Lyft millions of dollars. Their response was swift. First, they tried to get an injunction against the new law, delaying its effective date. They were denied. Then they threatened to shut down their operations in the state. In the meantime, they worked on producing a ballot initiative, Proposition 22, that defined “app-based transportation (rideshare) and delivery drivers as independent contractors and [the adoption of] labor and wage policies specific to app-based drivers and companies,” effectively exempting them from the requirements of AB 5.

Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars by Samuel I. Schwartz

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, car-free, City Beautiful movement, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Enrique Peñalosa, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the wheel, lake wobegon effect, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, longitudinal study, Lyft, Masdar, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, oil shock, parking minimums, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, skinny streets, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, TED Talk, the built environment, the map is not the territory, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, Wall-E, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

It’s not that they’re not important, but that they’re not integral to the ride-matching business model. Complaints that come from drivers are a little different. So long as Lyft and Uber and the others are in competition with one another, they’re going to be under pressure to cut prices, which inevitably comes out of the pockets of their drivers. And so long as they’re able to offer such great service by saturating neighborhoods with cars, they’re not just competing with other companies. Uber’s own drivers are, inevitably, competing with one another, and a significant number of them are working for what amounts to a little above minimum wage.

…

c According to Hal Johnson, UTA’s manager of Project Development, campus parking—ten thousand total spaces—was at 96 percent capacity in the fall of 2001. By 2013, that had dropped to 70 percent, entirely because of the number of students using the University Line. d At Uber, ridesharing—people traveling from roughly the same origin to about the same destination, while splitting the cost of the trip at a discount—is rare enough that it has its own name: uberPOOL. e Lyft, the Avis to Uber’s Hertz, operates in a third as many markets. f I’m considering trademarking the term: Total gridlock™. g If you’re thinking that creative industry is another Humpty Dumpty phrase, you’re right.

…

You don’t have to spend ten years learning the commuting ropes to know whether the train or bus you’re on is an express or a local, or even when it’s going to show up. You just need a smartphone. Smartphones are also all that’s needed to take advantage of other revolutionary new transportation options: ridesharing services like Via, car-sharing like Zipcar, and—especially—dispatchable taxi services like Uber and Lyft.c However, these and other cool new businesses didn’t create Millennial distaste for driving. They just exploited it. The question remains: why do Millennials find the automobile so much less desirable than their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents did? Woodbridge, Virginia, is a small suburb about twenty miles south of Washington, DC.

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

Bill Gurley, “A deeper look at Uber’s dynamic pricing model,” Above the Crowd, March 11, 2014, http://abovethecrowd.com/20l4/03/11/a-deeper-look-at-ubers-dynamic-pricing-model/; Matthew Panzarino, “Leaked Uber numbers, which we’ve confirmed, point to over $1B gross, $213M revenue,” TechCrunch, December 4, 2013, http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/04/leaked-uber-numbers-which-weve-confirmed-point-to-over-1b-gross-revenue-213m-revenue. 47. Salvador Rodriguez, “Lyft surpasses 1 million rides, expands to Washington, D.C.,” Los Angeles Times, August 9, 2013, http://articles.latimes.com/2013/aug/09/business/la-fi-tn-lyft-1-million-washington-dc-20130808. 48.

…

The service was so popular that in one year, Homeplus expanded its virtual stores to more than twenty bus stops. US start-up Instacart now offers customers in ten cities the ability to order goods from multiple stores through one website and get them delivered in one hour. Car-sharing services such as Zipcar and Lyft and transport services such as Uber are becoming increasingly popular among urban residents who have chosen not to purchase their own cars. The growing ubiquity of such shared services may be hard to replicate outside dense urban environments, but they are not unique to developed economies. In many emerging-market cities, similar services are already routinely offered though informal arrangements with mom-and-pop stores and service providers in local communities and neighborhoods.

…

Data-as-service start-ups are booming, and giants such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP have spent billions of dollars in the past several years snapping up companies that develop software for advanced data analytics. In fact, intangible digital assets—such as behavioral data on consumers and tracking data from logistics—can be the seeds of entirely new products and services. The disruption in taxi services is one example. Uber uses algorithms to determine “surge” prices in times of peak demand.46 Lyft, another on-demand ride-sharing start-up, employs a “happy hour” pricing model to lower rates in times of soft demand.47 Health care is another example of a sector where the marriage of data, analytical models, and decision-support tools—all key components of digital capital—can create immense economic value, improve customer experience, and create difficult-to-replicate capabilities.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

“Our Facilities,” Amazon, accessed November 26, 2021, www.aboutamazon.com/workplace/facilities; “Company Information,” Uber Newsroom, Uber, accessed November 26, 2021, www.uber.com/newsroom/company-info. 30. “The Rise of the Cheap Smartphone,” Economist, April 5, 2014, www.economist.com/business/2014/04/05/the-rise-of-the-cheap-smartphone. 31. “Forerunner 201,” Garmin, accessed November 22, 2021, https://buy.garmin.com/en-GB/GB/p/230. 32. “Uber’s Driver App, Your Resource on the Road,” Uber, accessed November 26, 2021, www.uber.com/za/en/drive/driver-app/; “Phone Software Recommendations and Settings,” Lyft Help, Lyft, accessed November 26, 2021, https://help.lyft.com/hc/e/articles/115013080508-Phone-software-recommendations-and-settings; “Requirements for Dashing,” DoorDash Dasher Support, DoorDash, accessed November 26, 2021, https://help.doordash.com/dashers/s/article/Requirements-for-Dashing; “Deliver with Deliveroo: Find Work That Suits You,” Deliveroo, accessed November 26, 2021, https://riders.deliveroo.co.uk/en/apply. 33.

…

You should make that choice consciously, because at work, you’ll have far less freedom… CHAPTER THREE GRIND AND PUNISHMENT EVERY WEEK BRINGS WORD OF ANOTHER COMPANY BRINGING GAMIFICATION to the workplace, whether it’s Amazon workers in India competing to deliver packages in order to score “runs” in a thirty-day, cricket-themed Delivery Premier League for rewards like smartphones and motorbikes, or United Airlines’ short-lived experiment to help staff “build excitement and a sense of accomplishment” by swapping their bonus with a lottery—available only for those with perfect attendance records, of course.1 Uber, Lyft, Domino’s, Instacart, Kroger, T-Mobile, Microsoft, Barclays, and Unilever all use gamification on millions of workers. At this point, it’d be easier to list the major companies that aren’t somehow gamifying their workers’ lives. I’ve long been skeptical of workplace gamification. More often than not, it doesn’t even try to make difficult or repetitive activities more fun, like I’ve done with my own games.

…

But that’s the default.”8 The problem is, if you don’t complete Uber’s quests (also described as “opportunities”) such as making an extra six dollars for a three-trip series, or earning bonuses by working certain regions, it gets harder to make a decent overall wage.9 According to a 2020 survey by Ridester, the median hourly pay (including tip) for Uber drivers in the US was $18.97.10 But Uber drivers aren’t employees, so they’re responsible for a vast array of costs, such as car payments and fuel, which Ridester estimated at between $7.50 and $15 per hour. That gets you to under $10 per hour, which is coincidentally a lot less than the $15 minimum wage paid to Amazon warehouse workers. Uber isn’t the only gig economy company that plays with its workers’ compensation. Lyft gives “streak bonuses” to drivers who accept all ride requests back-to-back.11 Delivery companies like Instacart, Postmates, and Shipt give bonuses as a reward for completing a minimum number of jobs in a week.12 Some workers in New York call this gamified system the patrón fantasma, or the phantom boss, notes Josh Dzieza for Curbed.13 To achieve maximum productivity at minimum cost, companies tweak the value and complexity of their bonuses constantly, which has the benefit of obfuscating workers’ overall compensation.

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland

affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer vision, creative destruction, driverless car, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, high net worth, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, open immigration, PalmPilot, rent control, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, young professional

And the younger generation seems not quite so interested in owning a car—and this is the good part of Uber and Lyft. Young kids don’t want a car, they just want mobility. I want the taxi market to capture that, and it’s kind of frustrating to see these other companies come in and sort of steal it. People talk about Uber being so high tech and so progressive, and I’m like, “Man, I have been doing this shit for fifteen years.” We were the first to accept credit cards, GPS-based dispatch, workers’ comp insurance for drivers. Then, the things I advocate for—clean vehicles, the greenhouse gas reduction mandate—they are all being undermined by Uber and Lyft, which don’t do any of those things.

…

The other night, I’m sitting in front of the Kabuki Theater in my hybrid taxi, not spewing. I see these two young women coming out of the theater, and I know what they are doing. They pull out their cell phone, and they call either Uber or Lyft, and they are kind of looking at me. I am sitting there, waiting. They kind of chat amongst themselves thinking, Well, maybe we should . . . But if you cancel an order with Uber or Lyft, they charge you. So, sure enough, two or three minutes later, up drives this big Chevy Tahoe, Cadillac Escalade, or whatever it was—some enormous vehicle—and these two girls go scurrying off across the street and hop inside.

…

He dove down, scrambled in the dust trying to find every coin. The light turned green, and we drove off. He disappeared into a sea of vehicles in my rearview mirror. And I thought, We’ve turned everything into a game. San Francisco—and the Bay Area in general—has become something of an arcade for the young and plugged in. Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit, Carbon, Rinse, Instacart, Alfred—a kingdom of cute one-word fiefdoms offering chauffer and butler services for the new tech titans. They are shuttled to their corporate campuses—like summer camp, a world of primary colors and playgrounds and cafés and endless amusement to keep them happy at work.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

v=UwMhGsKeYo4&t=3s. 21. Shontell, Alyson. “Uber is the world’s largest job creator, adding about 50,000 drivers per month, says board member.” Business Insider. March 15, 2015. http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-offering-50000-jobs-per-month-to-drivers-2015-3. 22. Uber Estimate. http://uberestimator.com/cities. 23. Nelson, Laura J. “Uber and Lyft have devastated L.A.’s taxi industry, city records show.” Los Angeles Times. April 14, 2016. http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-uber-lyft-taxis-la-20160413-story.html. 24. Schneider, Todd W. “Taxi, Uber, and Lyft Usage in New York City.” February 2017. http://toddwschneider.com/posts/taxi-uber-lyft-usage-new-york-city/. 25.

…

February 2017. http://toddwschneider.com/posts/taxi-uber-lyft-usage-new-york-city/. 25. “Scott Galloway: Switch to Nintendo.” 26. Deamicis, Carmel. “Uber Expands Its Same-Day Delivery Service: ‘It’s No Longer an Experiment’.” Recode. October 14, 2015. https://www.recode.net/2015/10/14/11619548/uber-gets-serious-about-delivery-its-no-longer-an-experiment. 27. Smith, Ben. “Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt on Journalists.” BuzzFeed. November 17, 2014. https://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/uber-executive-suggests-digging-up-dirt-on-journalists?utm_term=.rcBNNLypG#.bhlEEWy0N. 28. Warzel, Charlie. “Sexist French Uber Promotion Pairs Riders With ‘Hot Chick’ Drivers.”

…

If you’re a decathlete, the key is to find the event with the greatest variance in performance and own it. Uber is a great product, but I’d challenge you to identify (without knowing which ride-sharing platform you booked through) the difference between Uber, Lyft, Curb, and Didi Chuxing. The category is a 10x improvement over cabs and black cars, but there is an increasing sameness among ride-sharing players. This has likely been the case for a while, but Uber’s CEO frat rock (that is, shit for brains) behavior has prompted people to discover on their own that Lyft is the same thing. The Airbnb platform takes on greater importance as an arbiter of trust, as there is greater variance in the product—a houseboat in Marin vs. a townhouse in South Kensington.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

The Plight of the Gig Worker “Gig work” seems to have reached a new apex with the rise of companies like Uber. Consider the typical non-medallion taxi driver in New York, who might work for three or more companies at once: Uber, Lyft, and perhaps even an unlicensed cab firm. There is some truth to the claim that such people are essentially entrepreneurs, with all the freedom that working for themselves entails. With Uber, drivers set their own hours and are in a sense their own boss, something Kalanick always lauded as highly empowering. “There is a core independence and dignity you get when you control your own time,” he told me in 2015. Fair enough. But that’s about all Uber drivers are in control of.

…

In her book Uberland, the social scientist Alex Rosenblat rode five thousand miles with numerous Uber drivers in twenty-five cities across the United States and Canada. She found that, not surprisingly, while Uber itself took most of the upside of the business, drivers were often left to bear the cost and the downsides of the disruptive technology on their own. Lyft, Uber’s biggest competitor, has always been known as the kinder, gentler ridesharing company, in part because its CEO Logan Green has been more inclined to discuss the downsides of the sharing economy in a thoughtful and open way (that and the fact that he hasn’t been caught on a dashcam screaming at his own drivers).

…

After New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor did a front-page exposé about the topic in 2014, then-chairman Howard Schultz was forced to apologize and promise to clean up the company’s scheduling system.16 Yet, at Starbucks and, alas, at most other retailers, algorithmic scheduling has become the norm—just like “surge” pricing at Uber or Lyft. Clearly, the advent of the high-tech gig economy means different things to different kinds of workers. For the Uber driver or the delivery person, it may feel like a kind of neo-serfdom. They get no pension, health insurance, or worker-rights protection, and work at the mercy of metrics. Many of the drivers profiled in Rosenblat’s book struggle to make much more than minimum wage, after paying for their car, their gas, maintenance, self-employment taxes, and so on. Certainly, in my own interviews with Uber drivers, I’ve found that most see a tight trade-off between the benefits of their theoretical freedom and the fact that always-on technology can actually mean less flexibility than they might have in a higher-quality job.

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

They also get punished for being too slow; if the driver’s “time to accept orders,” “travel time to restaurant,” “travel time to customer,” or “time at customer” are longer than what the algorithm estimates they should be, the driver’s account can be deactivated.51 Uber drivers have even less time to respond to “trip requests,” ten to twenty seconds, and they also don’t know where they’re going until they’ve picked up the passenger. Until recently drivers got time-outs—short periods where they are locked out of the app—if they refused three trip requests in a row. Reliable data on how much pay Uber and Lyft drivers take home is hard to come by, but a recent driver-earnings survey found that drivers of Uber’s most popular service, Uber-X, made a median wage of $14.73 an hour in 2018 after tips but before gas, insurance, and repairs— substantially less than a living wage.52 Amazon warehouse workers are algorithmically managed in a different way.

…

The defeat in court of Deliveroo drivers in the UK who pursued employee rights and the April 2019 National Labor Relations Board advisory memo designating Uber drivers as independent contractors with no right to unionize show how entrenched the new app-work models have become in just a short time, and how difficult it will be to change expectations about work in the gig economy. But difficult does not mean impossible. As this book went to press, California legislators approved a landmark bill that forces app-based service companies (such as Uber and Lyft) to reclassify their workers as employees rather than independent contractors. Tech companies are sitting atop mountains of cash thanks to mass quantities of unpaid and underpaid work, a technological infrastructure that was developed with taxpayer money, and access to cheap credit for development and expansion, courtesy of low-interest rates engineered by the Federal Reserve.

…

A maid, masseuse, taxi driver, personal shopper, whatever you want—“there’s an app for that.” It’s not entirely clear how many people are working in these app jobs—piecework gigs mediated through a smartphone app. In the United States, estimates of “on-demand” app workers who earn money via online intermediaries such as TaskRabbit, Lyft, Uber, and Amazon Shopping vary widely. The Federal Reserve estimated that in 2017, 16 percent of adults earned money from app jobs, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 3.8 percent of workers (5.9 million people) were classified as contingent workers in 2017.44 Even absent concrete numbers, it is clear that the emergence of app jobs in the past decade is a significant development in the evolution of work in the United States.

Autonomous Driving: How the Driverless Revolution Will Change the World by Andreas Herrmann, Walter Brenner, Rupert Stadler

Airbnb, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, connected car, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, deep learning, demand response, digital map, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, fear of failure, global supply chain, industrial cluster, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer rental, precision agriculture, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Zipcar

It is an economic exchange; consumers are more interested in reducing costs and increasing convenience than they are in fostering social relationships with the company or other consumers. For example, we are currently seeing the rise of Uber in the short-term ride-sharing market. Uber’s core values are its pricing, reliability and convenience better, faster and cheaper than a taxi. In comparison, Lyft, which offers an almost identical service, positions itself as friendly we’re your friend with a car and part of your community greet your driver with a fist bump. Lyft has not seen at all as much growth as Uber; one reason is because they put too much emphasis on consumers’ desire to bond with each other rather than gain access to a vehicle.

…

Ford’s former CEO, Mark Fields, has announced that the autopilot is to be democratised by providing inexpensive mobility to as many people as possible. He plans to develop Ford into a mobility service, offering driving services with autonomous vehicles (similar to Uber) and producing the cars for such a service itself. General Motors has invested enormously in the mobility platform Lyft, announcing plans to set up an on-demand network of self-driving cars. John Zimmer, president of Lyft, expects car ownership in megacities to be of little importance in 10 years. In 2016, Lyft already organised about 14.6 million rides per month, three times as many as a year before. So far, Cadillac is the only General Motors brand equipped with the technology for autonomous driving.

…

Ownership Access and Sharing User as Use of one’s Rental car sharing, business-to-consumer (DriveNow, driver own car Car2Go) and peer-to-peer (Croove, Getaround) User as passenger Use of a taxi Ride sharing (Uber, Lyft) and carpooling (BlaBlaCar) Source: The authors. Note: Mobility apps can link up the various modes of transportation so that the user can identify the fastest and most convenient way to get from one place to another. The Sharing Economy 343 sharing (DriveNow, car2go, Flinkster, Mobility, ReachNow, ZipCar) and with peer-to-peer car sharing (Drivy, Tamyca, Croove, CarUnity, Sharoo, Turo, Getaround), users have to drive the cars themselves. With ride sharing (Uber, Lyft, myTaxi) or carpooling (BlaBlaCar), they are driven by a chauffeur.

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit by Marina Krakovsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Al Roth, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, buy low sell high, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, experimental economics, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kenneth Arrow, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Network effects, patent troll, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, power law, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, search costs, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social graph, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Y Combinator

You might say Maples prefers to back what is righteous rather than what is legal. Why does he love pitches in that legal gray area? “Those could be good businesses to fund because a lot of times there are not a lot of competitors,” he explains. (Even though Uber has a competing ride-sharing service, UberX, Maples points out that Lyft started before Uber launched UberX.) Whether the laws eventually side with the entrepreneur’s venture or against it is a huge risk—the kind that many people are afraid to take—but that is precisely what makes the bet attractive; if it turns out to be right, the gain will be enormous and, because it is a nonconsensus venture, it won’t be shared by many others.

…

The Truckless Trucking Company * * * Long before there was Lyft and before there was Uber, and well before mobile devices or even the Internet, there was C. H. Robinson. The company, founded back in 1905, in 2014 ranked #220 on the Fortune 500, the annual list of the highest-grossing companies in the United States. Its annual revenues of $12.7 billion put C. H. Robinson just ahead of household brands Toys ‘R’ Us and Nordstrom and well above Facebook and Harley-Davidson. If you haven’t heard of this behemoth from Eden Prairie, Minnesota, it’s only because its customers are other businesses: rather than arranging rides for busy urbanites, as Lyft and Uber do, C.

…

Bridges as Two-Sided Markets * * * Lacking both experience and theoretical knowledge, she didn’t realize that the bridge she was trying to build had the interesting properties of what economists call a two-sided market. These days, two-sided markets (sometimes called two-sided networks or two-sided platforms) are everywhere because many of today’s Internet start-ups are middlemen businesses of exactly this type: whether you’re talking about connecting homeowners with guests (Airbnb) or drivers with fares (Lyft and Uber) workers with small jobs (TaskRabbit) restaurants with diners wanting take-out meals (GrubHub, Eat24) or doctors with patients (ZocDoc), you’re describing a two-sided market. At the same time, and maybe not coincidentally, the study of two-sided markets has become a popular field among academics, with many opinions about what counts as a two-sided market.

Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It by Scott Kupor

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, carried interest, cloud computing, compensation consultant, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, family office, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, index fund, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Lean Startup, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Paul Graham, pets.com, power law, price stability, prudent man rule, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, VA Linux, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Among the reasons for this are that a VC can only sit on so many boards, so every time she fills up a slot on her dance card, she necessarily reduces her availability to invest in other companies. Another form of opportunity cost comes from conflicts: as a VC you can’t really invest in Facebook and Friendster or Lyft and Uber. Rather, the decision to invest in a company likely means that you are conflicted out of other companies that are directly competitive. To be clear, there is no prohibition against this, but the convention of the business makes this hard to do—as a VC you are lending your name and your firm’s brand to your investments, so it’s hard to invest in direct competitors without creating challenges for both companies in the marketplace.

…

Raising capital—This is an obvious one, but interestingly has declined in importance over the years as a major driver for companies to go public. It used to be that companies needed to go public because the private market tapped out pretty quickly when you started to contemplate raising $100 million-plus financing rounds. Now those are a dime a dozen, and we see some companies raising billions of dollars in the private marketplace—e.g., Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and Pinterest, among others. There’s an ongoing chicken-and-egg debate about what created this—did the big financial players start investing in the private markets because startups were delaying going public, or did startups start delaying going public because they could raise huge sums of money in the private markets?

…

Will it ultimately be big enough and material to accomplishing my objectives as a VC? We mentioned Airbnb earlier in the context of discussing market size to illustrate that the answer to this question might not always be obvious. Now let’s look at Lyft as a way to show how you can best position market size as an entrepreneur. When Lyft was getting started (Lyft actually started as another company called Zimride, a long-distance ride-sharing company), it wasn’t obvious how big the market for ride-sharing could be. A lot of people evaluating the financing opportunity started with the existing taxi market as a proxy for market size and made some assumptions about what percentage of that market a ride-sharing service could reasonably capture.

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World by Jevin D. West, Carl T. Bergstrom

airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, content marketing, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, deepfake, delayed gratification, disinformation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental economics, fake news, Ford Model T, Goodhart's law, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, invention of the printing press, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, meta-analysis, new economy, nowcasting, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pluto: dwarf planet, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, Socratic dialogue, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, stem cell, superintelligent machines, systematic bias, tech bro, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, When a measure becomes a target

Let’s consider more of the strange ways that percentages can behave. In late April 2016, Uber was delivering about 161,000 rides per day in New York City while Lyft was delivering about 29,000 a day. A year later, Uber was delivering 291,000 rides per day and Lyft about 60,000 rides per day. This was an overall increase of 161,000 rides per day, from 190,000 rides per day to 351,000 rides per day. Of those 161,000 extra rides, Lyft contributed about 31,000 of them. Thus Lyft is responsible for about 16 percent of the increase, and Uber for the rest. So far so good. Over the same period, the number of yellow taxi rides plummeted from 398,000 per day to 355,000.

…

Over the same period, the number of yellow taxi rides plummeted from 398,000 per day to 355,000. If we look at the total number of rides by yellow taxi, Uber, or Lyft, we see a net increase, from 588,000 to 696,000. That’s a net increase of 108,000 rides per day. We already know that Lyft increased its rides by 31,000 per day over this period. So it looks like we could say that Lyft is responsible for 31,000 / 108,000 × 100 = 29% of the increase in overall rides. But that is odd. We said Lyft is responsible for about 24 percent of the increase in rides that ride-hailing services provide, but now we’re saying that Lyft is responsible for about 34 percent of the increase in rides by ride-hailing or taxi.

…

Science 251 (1991): 1408–11. Tefft, B. C., A. F. Williams, and J. G. Grabowski. “Teen Driver Risk in Relation to Age and Number of Passengers, United States, 2007–2010.” Traffic Injury Prevention 14 (2013): 283–92. Todd W. Schneider (blog). “Taxi, Uber, and Lyft Usage in New York City.” Schneider, Todd. April 5, 2016. http://toddwschneider.com/​posts/​taxi-uber-lyft-usage-new-york-city/. “Truthiness.” Dictionary.com. http://www.dictionary.com/​browse/​truthiness. “Use this Equation to Determine, Diagnose, and Repair Trust.” First Round Review. 2018. http://firstround.com/​review/​use-this-equation-to-determine-diagnose-and-repair-trust/.

Moon Oregon Trail Road Trip: Historic Sites, Small Towns, and Scenic Landscapes Along the Legendary Westward Route by Katrina Emery, Moon Travel Guides

Airbnb, bike sharing, California gold rush, car-free, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donner party, glass ceiling, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mason jar, mass immigration, pez dispenser, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, trade route, transcontinental railway, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Works Progress Administration

The Forest Park Explorer (www.stladventurepass.com, Mon.-Fri. $2 adults, $1 seniors and children, Sat.-Sun. free) offers access to various attractions in the park as well as the nearby Delmar Loop district. It runs spring-summer 15-30 minutes on weekdays and every 15 minutes on weekends (9am-7pm daily May-Aug.). Uber (www.uber.com) and Lyft (www.lyft.com) also operate in St. Louis. Orientation Downtown Downtown St. Louis is a tight one square mile, bordered on its western edge by Tucker Boulevard, on its north by Cole Street, and on its south by Chouteau Avenue. It’s full of skyscrapers and office workers as well as hotels and restaurants, and the recently revamped Mississippi riverfront along Gateway Arch National Park on its eastern side.

…

Its 16 stops include Crown Center and the Power and Light District. To reach places farther south, like Westport or Country Club Plaza, drive or jump on the Kansas City Regional Transit bus (www.ridekc.org, $1.50 per ride, $3 day pass). The MAX line connects Country Club Plaza, and bus lines 39, 55, and 51 serve Westport. Uber (www.uber.com) and Lyft (www.lyft.com) also operate in Kansas City. One Day in Kansas City Morning Start the day with a delicious coffee and pastry from Messenger Coffee Co. + Ibis Bakery, then head to the City Market, where pioneers once traded goods. It’s full of fun vendors you can browse, with great shopping and more eats when you get hungry again.

…

Getting There and Around Lincoln is 41 miles (65 km) north of Beatrice on U.S. 77, about a 45-minute drive. Exit onto Rosa Parks Way and follow it for 2 miles (3.2 km), turning left onto South 10th Street into town. If you’re coming from Omaha, drive 50 miles (80 km) southwest on I-80. The drive from Omaha takes about an hour. Uber (www.uber.com) and Lyft (www.lyft.com) operate in Lincoln. Orientation Lincoln is laid out in an easily navigable grid of numbers (east-west) and letters (north-south). The numbers get higher as you head east, and the letters are alphabetically organized, beginning with A in the south and ending with Z in the north.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

It was a conscious statement that even starting from Uber’s exalted new valuation of $3.5 billion, the company had the scope to generate the 10x-plus multiple that Benchmark always targeted.[52] Over the next eighteen months, Gurley remained buoyant. The challenge from Hailo fizzled out as the firm failed to get the network flywheel started. Another challenger called Sidecar came to nothing. Only Lyft was putting up a fight, and Uber remained comfortably dominant. In the spring of 2014, Lyft raised a Series C of $250 million. Weeks later, Kalanick countered with a Series D that brought in a thumping $1.2 billion. Both Lyft and Uber spent the proceeds on subsidizing riders, but Gurley was unfazed. With capital from all manner of investors flooding into the Valley, Benchmark faced similar fundraising contests across its portfolio.

…

Didi responded by scorning Kalanick’s advances and going on the offensive not just in China but worldwide. It pumped $100 million into Uber’s rival Lyft. It announced technology-sharing alliances with Uber’s adversaries in other regions, including India and Southeast Asia. The blitzscaling wars had gone global. Gurley and David Bonderman were furious. Kalanick’s job was to cement his supremacy in his core markets, not burn capital in hostile territory. The CEO’s Napoleonic China adventure was exactly the sort of overreach that boards would traditionally have blocked, but Uber’s board had been neutered. As Gurley had foreseen in his essay, Uber was operating in such bountiful financial conditions that its value kept on rising even as Kalanick poured capital into a fight he would not win.

…

Toward the end of 2012, an Accel-backed service named Hailo launched a taxi-hailing app in Boston and Chicago, threatening to steal a march in a part of the market that was much larger than the expensive black-car segment. Determined not to let Hailo get ahead, Uber rolled out its own taxi service. Next, a startup called Zimride began experimenting with a cut-price service called Lyft, which allowed nonprofessional drivers to pick up passengers. At first, Kalanick expected the regulators to ban Lyft; surely uncertified amateur drivers, with no commercial insurance, would fall short of public-safety standards? Setting aside its normal practice of avoiding regulators, Uber lobbied the California Public Utilities Commission to shut down its rival, pointing out that its own professional black-car drivers were properly licensed.[49] But when the California regulators gave Lyft the green light, Kalanick did not wait.

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Okawa, for instance, became involved in the opposition to California Proposition 22, the Uber- and Lyft-funded ballot measure that worked against California’s AB5. AB5 had been a huge victory when it was signed into law in 2019: it gave employee status to gig workers and made it much harder for the megacorporations to claim their workers were independent contractors rather than employees. Okawa also joined a local organizing group, We Drive Progress. The group defined itself as a collective of “app-based drivers,” those “behind the wheel of every trip for Uber, Lyft, Instacart, and beyond.” Their protests were aimed at “fair wages, benefits, and our unions” as well as earning a “fair share” of “the billions these companies and their investors pocket.”

…

And while on a good day she’d make $180, she also had to pay to rent the car, which was $200 for the week, and then also gas, which averaged $90 per week. She was cashing out every day so she could put gas in the car every night. “I had to work constantly,” she recalled. After a year, Okawa started talking to other gig workers about the way these app-based companies treated their contractors. Uber and Lyft still classified ride-hailing drivers as contractors, so these companies didn’t pay into state unemployment funds. A University of California at Berkeley study found that they would owe the state $413 million, for the period from 2014 to 2019 alone, if they had correctly classified their drivers as employees.

…

For instance, in the co-op’s early days, driver-owners did emergency food deliveries for those fearing COVID, for instance, and also drove their first customers to early voting at the behest of Ocasio-Cortez. The Drivers Cooperative’s cofounder Erik Forman, an organizer and a teacher with a taxi license, was inspired to create the co-op, he said, when frustrated drivers “kept coming to me to ask why we don’t start our own app.” Uber and Lyft claim to take 20 to 25 percent off of drivers’ rides, but a recent investigation revealed in some instances that the companies pocket as much as half. As we read in the account of Saori Okawa’s driving life in chapter 10, that the companies take such large shares of the profits was a problem exacerbated by pandemic economic losses and risks.

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

“There were more and more people jumping on to Lyft and Uber, especially Uber, and then at one point, Uber was doing this special thing to try and get more passengers, where they did a discount or they took out the service charge for passengers,” Heather Smith, an Uber and Lyft driver, told me. (I agreed to withhold her real last name, to avoid retaliation by her employers.) “When I would look at my breakdown of payment, I was basically seeing them pay themselves and then take half the service charge and then pay me. I said, ‘Fuck it. Good-bye, Uber.’ ” She told me that she did make decent money mentoring new drivers for Lyft. “Well, they didn’t compensate for me doing the calls and stuff like that, but once I would meet with the person and do a mentor session, which is usually like thirty minutes, forty-five at the max, then I would be paid $35 just for that session,” she said.

…

“Was that enough to live on in Pittsburgh?” “No.” Companies like Uber can pay their workers so little because they are often not employees. On-demand, gig-economy firms usually do not hire their drivers or shoppers or delivery workers, instead classifying them as contractors and buying their services. That means that the companies are not subject to minimum-wage rules. They do not need to divert their workers’ paychecks into unemployment-insurance funds or Social Security. They are not required to offer health care to workers who spend full-time hours on the clock. Many Uber and Lyft drivers feel the companies had misled them, promising, if not employment in a traditional sense, a stake in something.

…

Uber is just the biggest and most visible of these players. Others include the freelance-services marketplace Fiverr, Uber’s ridesharing rival Lyft, the grocery delivery company Instacart, and the do-anything handyman service TaskRabbit, now part of Ikea. Nobody quite knows the size of the diverse and chaotic and fast-changing pool of workers serving these businesses, but estimates drift as high as 45 million. For all these start-ups, the basic business model is the same. The company offers a Web- or mobile-based platform, light and endlessly scalable to new consumers. That platform connects individuals offering a product or service to folks in search of that product or service, whether it be a ride, a sandwich, or a hand to change hard-to-reach lightbulbs.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

Lyft’, Bloomberg Second Measure, 2020 <https://secondmeasure.com/datapoints/rideshare-industry-overview/> [accessed 23 September 2020]. 54 ‘Gig Economy Research’, Gov.uk, 7 February 2018 <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gig-economy-research> [accessed 21 September 2020]. 55 Ravi Agrawal, ‘The Hidden Benefits of Uber’, Foreign Policy, 16 July 2018 <https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/16/why-india-gives-uber-5-stars-gig-economy-jobs/> [accessed 21 September 2020]. 56 Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, ‘Gig Economy Research’, Gov.uk, 7 February 2018 <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gig-economy-research> [accessed 21 September 2020]. 57 Directorate General for Internal Policies, The Social Protection of Workers in the Platform Economy, Study for the EMPL Committee, IP/A/EMPL/2016-11 (European Parliament, 2017). 58 Nicole Karlis, ‘DoorDash Drivers Make an Average of $1.45 an Hour, Analysis Finds’, Salon, 19 January 2020 <https://www.salon.com/2020/01/19/doordash-drivers-make-an-average-of-145-an-hour-analysis-finds/> [accessed 27 March 2021]. 59 Kate Conger, ‘Uber and Lyft Drivers in California Will Remain Contractors’, New York Times, 4 November 2020 <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/technology/california-uber-lyft-prop-22.html> [accessed 12 January 2021]. 60 Mary-Ann Russon, ‘Uber Drivers Are Workers Not Self-Employed, Supreme Court Rules’, BBC News, 19 February 2021 <https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56123668> [accessed 29 March 2021]. 61 ‘Judgement: Uber BV and Others (Appellants) v Aslam and Others (Respondents)’, 19 February 2021 <https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/docs/uksc-2019-0029-judgment.pdf> [accessed 19 March 2021]. 62 ‘Frederick Winslow Taylor: Father of Scientific Management Thinker’, The British Library <https://www.bl.uk/people/frederick-winslow-taylor> [accessed 29 March 2021]. 63 Nikil Saval, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace (New York: Anchor Books, 2015), p. 42. 64 Saval, Cubed, p. 56. 65 Alex Rosenblat, Tamara Kneese and danah boyd, Workplace Surveillance (Data & Society Research Institute, 4 January 2017) <https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/7ryk4>. 66 ‘In March 2017, the Japanese Government Formulated the Work Style Reform Action Plan.’, Social Innovation, September 2017 <https://social-innovation.hitachi/en/case_studies/ai_happiness/> [accessed 6 October 2020]. 67 Alex Hern, ‘Microsoft Productivity Score Feature Criticised as Workplace Surveillance’, The Guardian, 26 November 2020 <http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/nov/26/microsoft-productivity-score-feature-criticised-workplace-surveillance> [accessed 1 April 2021]. 68 Stephen Chen, ‘Chinese Surveillance Programme Mines Data from Workers’ Brains’, South China Morning Post, 28 April 2018 <https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2143899/forget-facebook-leak-china-mining-data-directly-workers-brains> [accessed 6 October 2020]. 69 Robert Booth, ‘Unilever Saves on Recruiters by Using AI to Assess Job Interviews’, The Guardian, 25 October 2019 <http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/25/unilever-saves-on-recruiters-by-using-ai-to-assess-job-interviews> [accessed 6 October 2020]. 70 Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, ‘Workplace Technology: The Employee Experience’ (CIPD: July 2020) <https://www.cipd.co.uk/Images/workplace-technology-1_tcm18-80853.pdf> [accessed 19 May 2021]. 71 Sarah O’Connor, ‘When Your Boss Is an Algorithm’, Financial Times, 7 September 2016 <https://www.ft.com/content/88fdc58e-754f-11e6-b60a-de4532d5ea35> [accessed 3 August 2020]. 72 Tom Barratt et al., ‘Algorithms Workers Can’t See Are Increasingly Pulling the Management Strings’, Management Today, 25 August 2020 <http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/article/1692636?

…

., 23 February 2021 <https://investors.upwork.com/news-releases/news-release-details/upwork-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2020-financial> [accessed 21 April 2021]. 53 Lijin Yeo, ‘The U.S. Rideshare Industry: Uber vs. Lyft’, Bloomberg Second Measure, 2020 <https://secondmeasure.com/datapoints/rideshare-industry-overview/> [accessed 23 September 2020]. 54 ‘Gig Economy Research’, Gov.uk, 7 February 2018 <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gig-economy-research> [accessed 21 September 2020]. 55 Ravi Agrawal, ‘The Hidden Benefits of Uber’, Foreign Policy, 16 July 2018 <https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/16/why-india-gives-uber-5-stars-gig-economy-jobs/> [accessed 21 September 2020]. 56 Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, ‘Gig Economy Research’, Gov.uk, 7 February 2018 <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gig-economy-research> [accessed 21 September 2020]. 57 Directorate General for Internal Policies, The Social Protection of Workers in the Platform Economy, Study for the EMPL Committee, IP/A/EMPL/2016-11 (European Parliament, 2017). 58 Nicole Karlis, ‘DoorDash Drivers Make an Average of $1.45 an Hour, Analysis Finds’, Salon, 19 January 2020 <https://www.salon.com/2020/01/19/doordash-drivers-make-an-average-of-145-an-hour-analysis-finds/> [accessed 27 March 2021]. 59 Kate Conger, ‘Uber and Lyft Drivers in California Will Remain Contractors’, New York Times, 4 November 2020 <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/technology/california-uber-lyft-prop-22.html> [accessed 12 January 2021]. 60 Mary-Ann Russon, ‘Uber Drivers Are Workers Not Self-Employed, Supreme Court Rules’, BBC News, 19 February 2021 <https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56123668> [accessed 29 March 2021]. 61 ‘Judgement: Uber BV and Others (Appellants) v Aslam and Others (Respondents)’, 19 February 2021 <https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/docs/uksc-2019-0029-judgment.pdf> [accessed 19 March 2021]. 62 ‘Frederick Winslow Taylor: Father of Scientific Management Thinker’, The British Library <https://www.bl.uk/people/frederick-winslow-taylor> [accessed 29 March 2021]. 63 Nikil Saval, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace (New York: Anchor Books, 2015), p. 42. 64 Saval, Cubed, p. 56. 65 Alex Rosenblat, Tamara Kneese and danah boyd, Workplace Surveillance (Data & Society Research Institute, 4 January 2017) <https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/7ryk4>. 66 ‘In March 2017, the Japanese Government Formulated the Work Style Reform Action Plan.’, Social Innovation, September 2017 <https://social-innovation.hitachi/en/case_studies/ai_happiness/> [accessed 6 October 2020]. 67 Alex Hern, ‘Microsoft Productivity Score Feature Criticised as Workplace Surveillance’, The Guardian, 26 November 2020 <http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/nov/26/microsoft-productivity-score-feature-criticised-workplace-surveillance> [accessed 1 April 2021]. 68 Stephen Chen, ‘Chinese Surveillance Programme Mines Data from Workers’ Brains’, South China Morning Post, 28 April 2018 <https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2143899/forget-facebook-leak-china-mining-data-directly-workers-brains> [accessed 6 October 2020]. 69 Robert Booth, ‘Unilever Saves on Recruiters by Using AI to Assess Job Interviews’, The Guardian, 25 October 2019 <http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/25/unilever-saves-on-recruiters-by-using-ai-to-assess-job-interviews> [accessed 6 October 2020]. 70 Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, ‘Workplace Technology: The Employee Experience’ (CIPD: July 2020) <https://www.cipd.co.uk/Images/workplace-technology-1_tcm18-80853.pdf> [accessed 19 May 2021]. 71 Sarah O’Connor, ‘When Your Boss Is an Algorithm’, Financial Times, 7 September 2016 <https://www.ft.com/content/88fdc58e-754f-11e6-b60a-de4532d5ea35> [accessed 3 August 2020]. 72 Tom Barratt et al., ‘Algorithms Workers Can’t See Are Increasingly Pulling the Management Strings’, Management Today, 25 August 2020 <http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/article/1692636?

…

The state of California passed Assembly Bill 5 in 2019, which mandated freelancers to be classified as employees and so have access to the requisite perks. Uber, Lyft and DoorDash were not keen. Through the most expensive lobbying effort in Californian history, they successfully got the state to pass Proposition 22, which granted them an exception – to keep classifying their drivers as independent contractors, albeit with some wage and health protections.59 A similar battle was underway across the Atlantic. In London, James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam, two drivers, took Uber to court, arguing that they weren’t self-employed but should be considered workers under British law.

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It by Tien Tzuo, Gabe Weisert

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, connected car, data science, death of newspapers, digital nomad, digital rights, digital twin, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fiat currency, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lean Startup, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, megaproject, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear winter, pets.com, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart meter, social graph, software as a service, spice trade, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, transport as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, Y2K, Zipcar

Oh, and guess what? Uber does in fact offer monthly subscriptions. Right now Uber is testing a flat-rate subscription service in several cities. Users can pay a monthly fee in exchange for bundles of reduced-rate trips with no surge pricing. In other words, Uber will cut you a deal on rides in exchange for steady business. The company may take a short-term profitability hit, but the goal is to gain long-term customer loyalty in a very young and turbulent market—and this customer loyalty is becoming more and more important as ridesharing becomes a commodity. Here in the Bay Area, the Uber and Lyft markets are really fluid.

…

That experience let us see a future world where car ownership would not be necessary. Today more than 60 million riders use Uber and Lyft. These ridesharing services have ushered in a whole new set of consumer priorities: Why buy a car at all, when all you need to do to get from point A to point B is pull out your phone? Why can’t I just subscribe to transportation the same way I subscribe to electricity and internet access? But wait, you might say. Uber isn’t a subscription service—there are no monthly fees. I disagree. It sure looks and feels like a digital subscription service to me. Uber has your ID and all your payment particulars, and it employs usage-based pricing so that you pay for only what you use.

…

All due respect to other potential ecommerce vendors, but Amazon has my business, in no small part due to Amazon Prime—they hooked me with the free shipping, and now I’ve got music, movies, and all sorts of other services. I’m not going anywhere. Uber and Lyft are both vying for that same lock-in effect by offering discounted services around consistent consumption patterns—in other words, they’re going after my commute. As Lyft president John Zimmer, anticipating fully autonomous vehicles, told The New York Times: “The cost of owning a car is $9,000 a year. Let’s say we offer a $500 monthly plan in which you can tap a button and get access to transportation whenever you want it, and you get to choose your room-on-wheels experience.

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

Suhauna Hussain, Johana Bhuiyan, and Ryan Menezes, “How Uber and Lyft Persuaded California to Vote Their Way,” Los Angeles Times, November 13, 2020, www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2020-11-13/how-uber-lyft-doordash-won-proposition-22. 37. Eve Batey, “Eater Readers Overwhelmingly Oppose Prop 22,” Eater SF, November 2, 2020, https://sf.eater.com/2020/11/2/21546110/doordash-uber-prop-22-election-2020-polling; Alex N. Press, “With Prop 22’s Passage in California, Tech Companies Are Just Writing Their Own Laws Now,” Jacobin, November 5, 2020, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/11/proposition-22-california-uber-lyft-gig-employee. 38.

…

A Lot Is at Stake,” Los Angeles Times, October 16, 2020, www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-10-16/skelton-proposition-22-uber-lyft-independent-contractors. 39. Sam Harnett, “Prop. 22 Explained: Why Gig Companies Are Spending Huge Money on an Unprecedented Measure,” KQED, October 26, 2020, www.kqed.org/news/11843123/prop-22-explained-why-gig-companies-are-spending-huge-money-on-an-unprecedented-measure. 40. Alexander Sammon, “Prop 22 Is Here, and It’s Already Worse Than Expected,” American Prospect, January 15, 2021, https://prospect.org/api/content/2967b920-56ac-11eb-904a-1244d5f7c7c6/. 41. Don Seiffert, “Uber-Backed Group Says Prop 22 Ruling Won’t Affect Mass.

…

Ballot Drive,” Boston Business Journal, August 22, 2021, www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2021/08/22/uber-backed-group-massachusetts-prop-22-ruling.html; Nate Raymond, “Companies-Backed Massachusetts Gig Worker Ballot Measure Clears Key Hurdle,” Reuters, September 1, 2021, www.reuters.com/world/us/companies-backed-massachusetts-gig-worker-ballot-measure-clears-key-hurdle-2021-09-01/; Alex N. Press, “Gig Companies Are Bringing the Disastrous Prop 22 to a State Near You,” Jacobin, August 16, 2021, https://jacobinmag.com/2021/08/gig-tech-companies-rideshare-ride-hail-uber-lyft-prop-22-contractor-employee-worker-protections-massachusetts-bill. 42.

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator