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May 14, 2015 1:32 PM   Subscribe

Disruption’s Tragic Flaw The case of Uber shows why European companies should not follow the example of their American competitors too closely. It pays to take the needs of customers and contractors into account.
posted by infini (44 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
"Disruption" is fine when it comes to technology, and it's even fine when it comes to business processes as long as it's applied carefully (and allowed to fail when it isn't working).

Experimentation is generally a good thing, and I think that markets should cautiously encourage open-mindedness.

Uber's business model barely counts as disruptive, and their labor practices do not stand up to any scrutiny. If we want to argue about the merits and drawbacks of disruption, we need to pick a better example. Uber's biggest "innovation" is the way that it's cut prices by aggressively squeezing its workers out of a living wage.

Uber is Wal-Mart; not Apple.

Uber isn't an argument against disruption. It is an argument for universal labor protections, and for laws that prevent companies from capturing a market by dumping or circumventing those labor laws.
posted by schmod at 1:58 PM on May 14, 2015 [52 favorites]


This is a thoughtful article, but does anyone NOT realize that Uber's only disruption is flaunting labor laws to exploit people who don't technically work for them? I suppose their success so far indicates that plenty of people don't know or don't care.
posted by snofoam at 2:05 PM on May 14, 2015 [15 favorites]


Also, I think it is just a bad title, the author is basically arguing that they are not truly disruptive, or, I guess not a true "evolutionary mutation" in the framework used in the article, because their disruption is so narrow and lopsided.
posted by snofoam at 2:09 PM on May 14, 2015


I forgot about the contractor / employee issue. Do other taxi company drivers count as employees and not independent contractors?
posted by Phredward at 2:11 PM on May 14, 2015


Not just parasitic on labour deregulation. Uber is a 'startup tech' business so like all of them it's utterly parasitic on historic government investment in that infrastructure, which includes everything from the internet to telecoms to the Ph.D academic dudes that Apple bought who sorted out touchscreens a few years back.
posted by colie at 2:13 PM on May 14, 2015 [11 favorites]


I give some allowance for poor translation - but this is impressively incoherent. Perhaps there is a point in there more sophisticated than "we should regulate disruptive industries but I have no idea how so let me signal for a whileby repeating all the negative stories about uber from US papers I found on google news" but I could not find it.

I mean: what we see in Uber and similar cases is a tragic flaw: disruption without discipline. Disruption without the institutionalization required for systemic coherence, which is essential for trust. Half mutation, half repetition…half advocacy, half contempt…half future, half past. I can't imagine that says anything except, "uber booo!" in german either.
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 2:13 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


Engineering, blessed it be, had at long last solved the ancient problem of combustable buildings, enabling structures to outlive the torching of their meager human inhabitants.

"We can build anything this way!" they sang from their glass palaces, the garish timbres mingling with the tempered walls, "We can build anything."
posted by an animate objects at 2:13 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


These days, when I hear "disruption," I understand it to mean "rentier checkpoint crammed into any available transaction."
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:15 PM on May 14, 2015 [59 favorites]


They've got a nice app, and are riding on the coattails of a universally-loathed industry.

Do other taxi company drivers count as employees and not independent contractors?

I think this varies from city to city, but there are definitely a lot of industries that already do this, particularly in transportation/logistics. However, Uber seems to skim an unusually large amount from the top.
posted by schmod at 2:15 PM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]


like all of them it's utterly parasitic on historic government investment in that infrastructure, which includes everything from the internet to telecoms to the Ph.D academic dudes that Apple bought who sorted out touchscreens a few years back

This is some new definition of the word parasite that I haven't been previously familiar with.
posted by Wood at 2:16 PM on May 14, 2015 [6 favorites]


"Parasitism is a non-mutual symbiotic relationship between species, where one species, the parasite, benefits at the expense of the other, the host."
posted by colie at 2:18 PM on May 14, 2015 [13 favorites]


Uber isn't an argument against disruption. It is an argument for universal labor protections, and for laws that prevent companies from capturing a market by dumping or circumventing those labor laws.

I think I get your point; but it seems like the argument is basically that Uber isn't really disruption because disruption isn't really a bad thing, which would strike me as semantically perverse.
posted by clockzero at 2:20 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


Disruption without the institutionalization required for systemic coherence

I'm imagining that the German language probably has a single word for this concept.
posted by schmod at 2:21 PM on May 14, 2015 [20 favorites]


Thanks colie, but that's the one I do know.
posted by Wood at 2:26 PM on May 14, 2015


America of course has received no benefit at all from Silicon Valley - Silicon Valley and technological entrepreneurship are bad things.

Because governments invest in universities, everyone who goes to universities and then makes money (and pays taxes, but not as many as I would like) and employs other people (but not at the wages I would like) - is a parasite.

Or maybe just maybe the way a society works is a bit more complicated than that?
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 2:30 PM on May 14, 2015 [6 favorites]


I think I get your point; but isn't it somewhat perverse, semantically, to claim that Uber isn't disruption because disruption isn't actually bad?

No. I think that disruption is a broad and generic term that the authors of the article haven't taken the time to define or examine.

If Uber wasn't associated with technology (apps! smartphones!), we wouldn't be using the word "disruption" to discuss their labor practices and corporate ethics. They'd just be another shitty corporation that squeezes its workers, and illegally manipulates the market.

Disruption is neither good nor bad. A company is typically labeled as "disruptive" when it introduces a broad paradigm-shift that rapidly impacts an existing industry (winning the favor of consumers in the process). The exact moral implications of such a shift need to be examined on a case-by-case basis.
posted by schmod at 2:31 PM on May 14, 2015 [5 favorites]


If Uber wasn't associated with technology (apps! smartphones!), we wouldn't be using the word "disruption" to discuss their labor practices and corporate ethics. They'd just be another shitty corporation that squeezes its workers, and illegally manipulates the market.

I think they self-applied the term, didn't they?

Disruption is neither good nor bad. A company is typically labeled as "disruptive" when it introduces a broad paradigm-shift that rapidly impacts an existing industry (winning the favor of consumers in the process). The exact moral implications of such a shift need to be examined on a case-by-case basis.

I don't see how Uber isn't disruptive. And I'm sort of perplexed by the assertion that disruption is neither good nor bad -- evidently, it can be very bad, so why conceptually divorce it from its actual effects?
posted by clockzero at 2:41 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]


LOL 'America'

I wonder who that is?
posted by colie at 2:41 PM on May 14, 2015


So I think Uber is terrible on a couple of levels, although the app and service are actually great and the driver's I've met so far don't see terrible oppressed. The taxi industry is hardly a friend of the working man though - taxi driving is terribly exploitative especially in places with medallion regulations like NYC where medallion owners rake in big fees while drivers have to work for hours before they've earned a cent for themselves. Maybe in Europe taxi driving is a sustainable job but in the US it's terrible all around.
posted by GuyZero at 2:43 PM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]


Uber is disruptive on a couple levels:

(1) An incredibly easy to use interface that requires 0 human interaction to quickly get a car to your location, regardless of how weird that location is, regardless of "what part of town" you're in*, and be more or less guaranteed a pleasant experience in getting to your location, compared to your usual taxi experience. Oh, and when you get there, you don't have to worry about cash on hand, about a "broken" credit card machine, keeping track of a paper receipt for expense reimbursement, or figuring out a tip.
(2) In addition to all of the above, you can also have this experience on UberX, as well as UberTaxi and UberBlack. UberX disruptively (read: questionably) lowers the barrier to entry for new drivers.

I mean, does anyone remember The Time Before Uber? Does anyone remember how much taxis can SUCK? Calling a dispatcher, being told a cab might get to you in a half hour (but no idea what plate or ID number or whatever to watch for), waiting hopelessly on a streetcorner for 45 mins with none ever stopping and no idea what to do next? Or (hello!) having an office 30 minutes south of the city and needing to get to the airport, so facing the dispatcher informing you no cabs want your business because you're just too out of their way? Arguing over using a credit card to pay? Receiving a receipt with barely visible ink? Cabs that reek of smoke and whatever else, surly drivers who ignore you or evangelize to you or rant at you or spend the entire time muttering on their phones to someone? From a consumer standpoint, you'd better believe that Uber in all its forms has changed my expectations of how I hire a car to get me from point A to point B. That's disruptive and is totally independent of labor laws and taxi regulations.

The whole UberX thing is, IMO, a totally different kettle of fish. It tries to be new in a different way, and yeah, it skirts existing laws and regulations and that's worth discussing and fixing. I'm completely on board with questioning the current model and finding a more fair way to treat those drivers, but at the same time, I and many others are giving black car services and some taxis way more business than we ever would have done before -- I literally was not aware you could just ring up a black car, I thought it was some fancy rich person "it's just always on call for me" kind of thing -- so Uber has been a net good for many, many drivers out there already working within the existing regulations, and that shouldn't be forgotten.

If the only outcome of the Uber experiment is that cab companies finally get consistently useful and easy-to-use mobile apps to call cabs, and they ACTUALLY provide service to everyone who wants it regardless of where in the city they are, then I think that's a win -- and a disruption. If they slightly improve their customer service experience, that's a win too. And if the employer/independent contractor relationship between Uber and its drivers, AND the taxi companies and its drivers (which are hardly a paragon of virtue), receives a lot more scrutiny and it is changed for the better? I'm happy enough to consider that Uber disruption as well, whether or not they intended for it to happen.

I know it's cool to hate Uber right now, and I know as a privileged person who can afford to take UberBlack cars I don't have all the same skin in the game that others do, but it really has changed the way people look at transportation and insisting otherwise is simply ridiculous.

* Ever tried to flag down a cab in Harlem? Try it some time.
posted by olinerd at 2:59 PM on May 14, 2015 [23 favorites]


This article was written by an American, presumably in English. It's not a translation, in response to comments above about its muddled/obscure writing.

On parasitism, I think what other posters have meant by ‘Silicon Valley’ is very specifically the newest generation of startups focused on disrupting non-digital goods and services by doing an end-run around existing businesses that have not computerised properly yet. These ventures are consumers, not creators, of technological advances. Anyway, even technological innovation from historical (70s–90s) Silicon Valley is a product of massive public investment in military research and manufacturing and in public higher education.

I think the venture capitalists’ obsession with scalability, once it gets applied to goods and services that are non-digital and thus not infinitely reproducible at zero marginal costs, inevitably results in ethically and often legally indefensible business models (we take the profit, other people take the risks). The discourse of ‘disruption’ is useful. By equating destruction with progress, it helps cuts short any thinking about the damage done to so-called ‘legacy’ businesses, or about the societal immune reaction faced by these startups (legal attacks, demonstrations, bad press, etc).

When the truth is that there is a lot of overdue computerisation which is desired by consumers and reduces costs, but it does not follow by economic necessity that one app developer should be able to extract rents on entire sectors of world economic activity, which is the dream that is bankrolling ‘sharing economy’ apps.

It's nice that Zuboff made the effort to try to tell European leaders that they are wrong to worry about not having their own little Silicon Valleys, but it seems futile. After so many decades of ill-thought-out importation of US economic policy (uncritical, piecewise, chaotic, context-blind, and anyway ineffective), I can only believe that the reasons are deep-seated and beyond the reach of rational argument.
posted by ormon nekas at 3:06 PM on May 14, 2015 [8 favorites]


* Ever tried to flag down a cab in Harlem? Try it some time.

Heh. I requested an Uber in a nice part of Manhattan a few weeks back and when the driver got there and I told him I was going to JFK he was all "uh, no, I have an appointment in an hour uptown" which is the same "going off shift" shit I get from NY cabbies all the time who are willing to break the rules and don't want airport fares.

So I got on the E train and spent $10 getting to JFK instead.

Anyway, Uber cars are nicer and in SF where cabs ar elike hen's teeth it's a godsend, but it's mostly more of the same.
posted by GuyZero at 3:08 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


Correction to my previous comment: Silicon Valley up to the 1990s, rather than 70s–90s (a bad starting point).
posted by ormon nekas at 3:09 PM on May 14, 2015


A company is typically labeled as "disruptive" when it introduces a broad paradigm-shift that rapidly impacts an existing industry (winning the favor of consumers in the process).

No, a company is typically labeled as disruptive when it introduces a cheaper, more convenient, lower-quality product into a market with slow-moving incumbents who don't see the low-quality product as a threat. Or rather: it's labeled as disruptive when the market decides it prefers cheapness and convenience to quality, and the newcomer beats the incumbents.

Uber is Wal-Mart; not Apple.

Well, yeah. Wal-Mart is almost the definition of disruptive innovation. Apple, in its modern incarnation, is the opposite. (As I understand it, Apple in 1980 does have some claim on the term, as part of the wave of personal computers that could serve as inferior but affordable substitutes for business computers.)
posted by escabeche at 3:19 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


If this is written as native English that raises it to Umair "There is only the journey past the edge of impossibility" Haque levels of rediculousness.
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 3:27 PM on May 14, 2015


Uber ist uber das? Oh, ja, Das Gesetz.

Naturlich.
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:33 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


One of the interesting things about articles like this is that they cite examples of bad driver behaviour as though this never happens with "real" taxi drivers. Or that the taxi companies never have a stupid response to bad taxi drivers. It's a really weak argument and it muddies the water since as anyone who has ever regularly taken taxis knows in a place where there is limited competition-- this is nonsense.

For me, much more cogent arguments against Uber are the way they treat their drivers, and how much they skim.

(When I lived in NL, I and many others used to *pray* for Uber to come disrupt the goddamn drivers in Amsterdam. Taxis there are hideously expensive, regularly turn down rides if they think the fare is too small-- including leaving disabled people standing in the street, steal money from tourists by inventing crazy and non-existent "luggage" charges. As to behaviour, fights with both passengers and other taxi drivers at taxi queues were so common that the government had to send separate officials to monitor their bad behaviour at the biggest lines. Pffft.)
posted by frumiousb at 3:38 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]


Not just parasitic on labour deregulation. Uber is a 'startup tech' business so like all of them it's utterly parasitic on historic government investment in that infrastructure, which includes everything from the internet to telecoms to the Ph.D academic dudes that Apple bought who sorted out touchscreens a few years back.

I dunno about Uber but a lot of tech business give a lot back to academic tech, as well as to the commons of open source. Government and infrastructure, sure, not so much.
posted by atoxyl at 3:41 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


Uber is Wal-Mart; not Apple.

Uber isn't WalMart or Apple; it's eBay.
posted by Chuckles at 4:02 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


Uber is like a guy charging 20% for access to a checkout line to kids bagging groceries for tips.
posted by snofoam at 4:12 PM on May 14, 2015 [10 favorites]


Anyway, even technological innovation from historical (70s–90s) Silicon Valley is a product of massive public investment in military research and manufacturing and in public higher education.

I already said this, but to be a little more specific - the importance of the U.S. government in creating the Internet from an infrastructure and protocol standpoint is treated as a bit of a dirty little secret by the Internet industry. The importance of academic research on the other hand is extraordinarily well-recognized by many tech giants - most famously Google which of course came straight out of academic research - though there are also some famous entrepreneur types who seem to think that model ought to be disrupted as well. The main issue there is that tech giants are mostly interested in being private benefactors of the parts of educational institutions which are most useful to tech giants and not very much at all in the "public investmen" aspect or in supporting the other things those institutions traditionally do.
posted by atoxyl at 4:19 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


Incidentally Larry Page's dad was a CS PhD. from the earliest days that you could get one.
posted by atoxyl at 4:28 PM on May 14, 2015


If the market is mutating to accommodate wages that have been flat for 36 YEARS, then THE SYSTEM is what's fucked up.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 4:50 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


I'm happy Lyft and Uber are destroying the taxi medallion scam that allowed investors to exploit cabbies and price gouge consumers. If that fight results in better labor standards for cabbies too then so much the better.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:21 PM on May 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


Doesn't taxi medallion money go to the public sector?
posted by persona au gratin at 6:17 PM on May 14, 2015


Uber makes it so that you can get around my city without a car at any time of day. There really isn't any substitute for the service they provide. Bus service is spotty and shuts down at midnight, taxis are worse than useless and jitneys are only slightly more reliable than taxis but 10x more dangerous. I totally understand the criticisms of Uber's business practices but they've filled a complete service vacuum and until someone better comes along, I'm happy that they're here.
posted by octothorpe at 6:54 PM on May 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


An AirBnB and an Uber thread on the same day! I don't know where to spend my hate tokens.
posted by Justinian at 7:04 PM on May 14, 2015 [3 favorites]


This whole thing reminds me of the Checker taxi wars.
posted by clavdivs at 10:42 PM on May 14, 2015


mean, does anyone remember The Time Before Uber? Does anyone remember how much taxis can SUCK?
I can, it was awesome.
Ring one of 3 taxi companies who serve my town and they'd turn up in ~10 minutes and take you where you wanted to go.

Is this the part where I use my own personal experiences to serve as a basis for describing taxi services across the entire fucking planet?
posted by fullerine at 12:39 AM on May 15, 2015 [13 favorites]


countries and cities with respect to driver screening and licensing: including Germany, the Philippines, South Korea, Spain, Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Thailand, the Netherlands, Portland, Oregon, San Francisco, London, and Los Angeles.

In case you were wondering, London is indeed in Britain. I have never used uber: I don't use taxis that much, and when I do I'll usually go to a taxi rank or call a company I am familar with. I cannot imagine needing taxis often enough to need a special app to sort it out. Admittedly I drive now, but even before then I mostly avoided paying for taxis when other method of transport are better. Maybe the US and the UK aren't the same?

I gotta say that article was indeed all over the place and didn't really seem to have a clear through point (Europe can do better than the US? We're talking about a company here, so it feels weird to talk about the countries adopting it or not)
posted by Cannon Fodder at 5:49 AM on May 15, 2015


Can the Sharing Economy Provide Good Jobs?
Some see benefits for many kinds of workers, others see a raw deal for most

posted by infini at 9:02 AM on May 15, 2015




Taxi medallions are straight-up rent seeking.

At least Uber wrote an app and runs some servers.
posted by GuyZero at 2:24 PM on May 15, 2015


Uber is absolutely a technical innovation. It's Google Maps, monetized: What before required highly skilled labor now requires average driving skill. What before required significant infrastructure for managing payments, now just requires customers with phones. And what before required significant friction, managing fleets of cars and drivers and dispatch, now just doesn't.

Something like 75% of customer revenue goes to the actual labor. Is it people's own cars experiencing wear and tear? Sure. But guess what else is now vastly more reliable?
posted by effugas at 2:55 AM on May 16, 2015


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