Uber Is Still a Bezzle
I guess the new trend with talking about Big Tech is to ensure that you allow absolutely no nuance; everything &lt;company&gt; did is bad, everything it changed is for the worse, and it&#x27;s all just a big con. There&#x27;s not a hint anywhere in here that the world pre-Uber was anything but a shining city on the hill. Post-Uber, it&#x27;s all clearly a hellscape of broken transportation and impoverished drivers.<p>If this article were just targeted at investors, fine. I wouldn&#x27;t touch Uber stock myself. But despite all the mentions this article makes of investors, it really feels like it&#x27;s making an argument that&#x27;s much wider: that Uber has made the world a measurably worse place.<p>All the scandals around Uber are presented as if they&#x27;re something new; as if Uber created and nurtured an unprecedented environment of crime and abuse. Which is, of course, ridiculous. Taxis scammed their riders with bad routes and hacked meters. We know that taxi drivers have robbed, killed and raped their passengers, same as various Uber drivers, but government by and large didn&#x27;t even keep stats on these crimes. I&#x27;ve been to many cities where locals have warned me to never, ever use taxis.<p>The gig economy is bad? OK. Fine. I hope that workers find a way to engage in collective action; I hope that people besides the workers help them. I would be happy to support any widespread movement for better work conditions and pay. But gig work is not inherently bad, and it&#x27;s ridiculous to pretend that nobody should ever have a business model that uses it, or that Uber&#x27;s popularization of gig work was a sin against humanity.<p>Uber broke laws? My god, I&#x27;m so happy they did. The taxi industry was bad; the legislation protecting and restricting the taxi industry was awful, and corrupt, and needed to be forcibly broken.<p>I remember having a crippling injury several years before Uber existed. I couldn&#x27;t drive, I couldn&#x27;t take public transportation, I was utterly reliant on taxis in a major metropolitan city. My injury was bad, but using taxis was absolutely unbearable. And even long after Uber was around, taxi companies were doing very little to improve. It feels like the author here would tell me that I&#x27;m wrong, that Uber made things worse. For my part, I feel like he&#x27;s just chasing clout; it&#x27;s fashionable to paint Big Tech as evil, and there&#x27;s no profit in admitting anything it changed might be good.