As we can see with the Uberization of everything, and with Guy Swift’s presence in Hari Kunzru's Transmission, the modernizing world affords those with wealth and privilege the opportunity to circumvent traditional, universal norms and structures. While Uber—like Guy Swift’s forward-thinking company, Tomorrow*—initially showed promise as an innovative disruption to clunky, heavy, 20th century methods of conducting business, the accumulation of power, privilege, and capital eventually corrupted any original visions of innovation, rendering them as yet another capitalistic power structure in need of its own disruption. In the cases of both Uber, with its persistent scandals and lawsuits, and Tomorrow*, with Guy Swift’s fall from grace, illegitimately obtained power can still be defeated, or at least derailed, by disruption from those in a less privileged caste.

    In the article “Man and Uber Man,” Barry Korengold, president of the San Francisco Cab Drivers Association, protests Uber and its rise to power, saying, “I think of them as robber barons...They started off by operating illegally, without following any of the regulations and unfairly competing. And that’s how they became big—they had enough money to ignore all the rules.” Korengold, in contributing to the discourse about Uber and its ethos, offers a perspective about Uber as a corporation, at a more macro level. Comparing them to the plutocratic robber barons of an industrializing 19th century America, he claims their swift increase in worth (they closed $1.25 million in their first round of financing) afforded them the ability to eschew lawful practices in favor of providing a cheap, unethical service to a demanding market. According to Korengold’s observation, these so-called innovative corporations still operate like robber barons of early industry, using their money to exploit workers and trample ethics.

In New York, where yellow taxis form an iconic part of the city's identity, taxi medallions cost close to a million dollars; mostly-immigrant drivers or operators are willing to shell out extravagantly for these medallions as long-term permanent investments because they provide job security and stability. Uber disrupts this comfortable notion, because with less demand for taxis, a medallion becomes less sought after. Medallion owners are in distress as they watch their expensive investment plummet.

Uber’s tactics are demonstrated in Transmission through the Databodies and Tomorrow* companies.  For example, Uber is able to deactivate employees' accounts whenever they want and without notice.  Uber uses employees until they can no longer benefit from them, then drops them.  The two capitalistic companies in the novel do the exact same thing.  For example, Arjun Mehta who is of the lower working class and a part of the Databodies company, is hired to work in a body shop on the East Coast at one point.  The CFO of the facility tells Arjun that he was hired because “your boss said you came cheap" and once he is finished with his task he is immediately terminated, as Uber employees would be.  There is no warning or permanence; Arjun is exploited and powerless.  Like Uber, Databodies uses money to bypass moral principles which is something Uber would call “permissionless innovation” (Uber's Consumer Democracy).  Uber claims employees are independent contractors--individualism playing a major role in capitalism-- and that the company is not responsible for them in any way.  Uber, as well as Databodies, consumes the employee and treats them as objects, yet holds them accountable for themselves. Like the higher ups in Uber, Guy Swift is able to fire anyone he wants to with no warning at all.  For instance, when Caedmon, the network administrator is unable to fix the Leela virus right away, Guy fires him on the spot.  He cannot afford to lose the capitalistic and consumer competition and so, in order to keep his upper class status, he rids himself and the company of ethics, exploiting Caedmon and whoever else is in his way.  

The transportation industry has long represented a division in status between those who have, and those who have not. In chapter two of Thoreau’s Walden, in a discussion of the lives lost building the railroad, Thoreau extends the personification of the wooden “sleepers” that line the tracks to refer to people:

“We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon.”

Like railroad laborers in the 19th Century, and the outsourced, immigrant tech labor (e.g. Arjun and his sister) in Kunzru’s Transmission, 60% of U.S. Uber drivers are minorities who have not gone to college, and at least half of Uber Drivers must pay for their own health care (Solomon, Forbes.com). The majority of Uber drivers in the U.S. are in the lower income bracket, which shows that as the market stands, Uber doesn’t offer a difference to Thoreau’s class boundaries. There are those who ride, and those who are ridden upon. In response to 19th Century labor inequality, the 1877 Railroad Strike and policy changes like 1926’s Railway Labor Act aimed to protect the ridden-upon laborer; in regards to Uber, we may see similar institutional upheavals. On November 2nd, yet another San Francisco taxi company sued Uber for “predatory pricing,” (Tech Crunch), yet another lawsuit in the stream of lawsuits against the company.
 

In its rise to ubiquity, Uber developed a reputation as the most efficient, “lightest,” most innovative answer to public transportation; an uncomplicated, no-fuss means of getting from point A to point B. However, reading Karly Sciortino’s article, “Breathless: Is UberPool the new Tinder?”, we encounter a new dimension of taking an Uber. With UberPool, which “allows you to share rides with other passengers who are going in the same direction and split the cost,” the added social element has resulted in Sciortino’s hypothesis that UberPool may be “the new Tinder,” an alternative means of finding romance (with minimal effort and stakes). Because of this added element of the opportunity to meet a partner, Uber no longer is the uncomplicated incubator for transportation it once was known to be, and instead carries the weight of potential romantic interaction. Despite Uber’s algorithm, marketing, and reputation as a high-class, futuristic service, UberPool has attracted a demographic of those who are willing to pay less in exchange for the (initially) unappealing element of sociability. Those same people have, in turn, turned the transportation service into a dating service. Again, those with the least amount of capital, and the lower status as UberPool-ers, have become the disruptors; we see this paralleled in Transmission, with Arjun’s disruption being motivated by the impulse to connect--specifically, with Leela Zahir.

Uber and its ethos has permeated through consumer culture at every level, to the point of introducing the term uberization--the instantaneous, hyper-efficient model of service that has become synonymous with the startup’s name. Uber mirrors Guy’s company, Tomorrow*, in that it has become a modern institution that has been successful enough to accumulate an inordinate amount of wealth and privilege. Moreover, taxi drivers who have invested their life savings (read: hundreds of thousands) on a taxi cab medallion now find themselves in a rut and cannot escape from what is essentially a dying occupation of unionized cab driving. As a result, companies like Uber and Tomorrow* become institutions of unchecked power that preside over anyone below their status, such as Arjun and Uber’s drivers, who are part of the heavier, less elite class. To counter the impunities of the corporate elite, disruption from the lower class becomes necessary to check these disruptive powers that be. Unionization--to protect us, the freelancers--is at hand.

Authors: Ariana Balagtas | Haley Bautista | Jessica Arce | Ben Koh | Luke Dreyer