I believe many of these of 2010s startup unicorns/companies (in the contractor/gigging space) will go down in history the same way as modern day robber barons.

The ideas were good - use your leftover time/space/goods, and earn some money. We'll cover the tech, just pay us x% of the cut.

But then it became obvious that these types of ventures were in direct conflict with various labor laws across the globe. So they begin to skirt the laws, pitting their laborers against governments, all while exacerbating the sectors. And turns out it's hard to subsidies certain businesses with VC money forever.

Where did things go wrong? Maybe when people starting treating gigging economy as a full-time thing. Maybe they thought they could offer cheap and awesome service forever. Maybe they thought they could remain in the grey area of the law forever, or at least until they gained enough power to change the laws.

I used to use airbnb, now it sucks. I'm back to hotels.

I used to use uber, now it sucks. I'm back to using taxis.

I used to use delivery services, now they suck. I just pick up my own food at a fraction of the cost.

I - the consumer - obviously enabled all these things. Ok, enough rambling...

Add Netlix to the pile. Each of these services leveraged a brief window of technological advantage before the trundling entrenched industries and governments caught up. Now that they have, they must compete on a dramatically different front. The initial technical challenges are now dwarfed by the challenge of fighting multinational Suarons.

This strange arc of the last decade has shown me that a sizable chunk of information technology has matured to the point of being a commodity. For those that have worked in the field reaching back further than a decade, this begets an ennui, as our labors redirect less towards the question of what is possible and increasingly more towards the petty struggles of bureaucracy and maximization of profit and labor exploitation.

We had (have?) a moment that was more fleeting than we realized.

I read somewhere about the history of the modern corporation, I think it was in Sapiens. The motivating factor for introducing the corporation was to create an entity which cannot be held accountable the same way a person can. It is therefore unsurprising that corporations behave in an amoral fashion, that is in a sense, the point.

Indeed. The mainstream cultural response to the amorality of corporations was regulation. It wasn't a perfect solution (thanks to regulatory capture), but it was, at least, a reasonable way to balance different interests in society. The point of tech startups seems to have generally been to take an existing regulated industry (taxis, hotels, etc.), sprinkle magic computer dust over it, and claim that now the industry regulations don't apply because now it's a "tech" company. And then, of course, there are also the end runs around general-purpose regulations like the minimum wage and overtime. It's not at all surprising that the results have generally been disastrous.

I'm not suggesting what Uber did is OK, but taxis also operate as a mafia, at least where I leave (and I'd bet most major cities in the world).

Uber is a more efficient mafia that won over the old mafia.

Uber seems to have weaponized senior public officials and MPs in many European countries.

This a scandal of huge proportions.

> MacGann insists that Uber drivers were seen by some at the company as pawns who could be used to put pressure on governments. “And if that meant Uber drivers going on strike, Uber drivers doing a demo in the streets, Uber drivers blocking Barcelona, blocking Berlin, blocking Paris, then that was the way to go,” he said. “In a sense, it was considered beneficial to weaponise Uber drivers in this way.”

How is that wrong? Uber gives people jobs. People have a right to compete with taxi drivers. The city should not be taking those jobs away.

All of the examples you gave are wrong (as in, bad behaviour, rather than incorrect!) but it's worth noting that they are tactics similar to those employed by many other groups seeking to create pressure in other situations - including by taxi drivers fighting against the ride-sharing companies.

Demonstrations, blocking streets, keeping stories in the press - all time -honoured tactics. I guess the outrage here is a private for-profit organsation adopting such behaviour more usually associated with political parties and pressure groups?

Rule #1 in monkey business: don't get caught!

Seriously though, this kind of BS is not normal corporate behavior. When they do it to individuals it's a huge scandal. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed#Industry_r... or Or more recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal

This is effectively Uber at war with multiple sovereign and local governments. It's fucking insane.

> weaponising drivers against city governments to do Uber's bidding to lobby

This dismisses drivers' expressed preferences and actions in favor of a chosen narrative. Drivers protested the measures purporting to help them. They polled against them in California. They voted against them.

Claiming they were all brainwashed by corporate requires extraordinary evidence. (It is akin to dismissing a unionization vote by claiming the union brainwashed the workers.)

It's not just workers. Remember when Uber was sending push notifications with propaganda about the various driver classification efforts?

taxi drivers weaponized themselves like this in france at some point, they probably learned from this tactic because i think it got uber banned in paris or something

I don't have a link to any source, it was some years ago and it might have changed since