I think you are misreading him, but it's mostly his fault. He's not talking about if consumers got value out of things during a bubble, but what is left over after it "pops". His argument is basically that uber did not represent a viable business plan initially/currently (true) and will never find a viable plan (arguable), therefore at some point it will collapse when people get tired of subsidizing the rides in various ways. His claim then is when this happens, what is left afterwards is strictly worse than what existed before uber.
Now I'm not going to opine on the argument or the timeline, but nowhere in there does he claim that people getting subsidized rides didn't benefit from them at the time, just that it nets out negative over time.
Edit: You would need a literal Gods-eye perspective of the Universe to know how something like this actually nets out.
I don't know man, how hard is it to just admit that you were wrong.
Doctorow's saying the opposite about Uber.
* Uber offers cheap ride through a cnvenient app and lets drivers keep a lot (?) of the rewards
* Drives taxies out of business
* Uber raises prices and lowers drivers' rewards
* Now more expensive and less reliable than ever
He built a whole economic theory around it, even coined a name for it: Enshitification.
> Like Uber, the massive investor subsidies for AI have produced a sugar high of temporarily satisfied users.
On one hand, it destroyed the livelihoods of many people. On the other, it made ordering a taxi so easy that a lot of people stopped driving home from parties drunk.
Uber has also made getting around in a lot of cities much safer. I've gotten into taxi's with drunk drivers before (seriously wtf), not a problem with Uber, or at least not for very long. (When I reported the drunk taxi driver, turns out the medallion owner wasn't working that night and had lent his cab to someone else, there was not trace of my ride or of the driver...)
In American cities I often found I had to wait 20 minutes to get an Uber or Lyft, if one even came. Is that because the economics of it fundamentally don't work and no one wants to drive for them any more?
The American taxi companies screwed up, tl;dr by maintaining a low supply of taxi medallions cities and cab companies maintained wealth for people who had already acquired one. This meant taxi companies could never fulfill demand during peak hours.
Also city councils had to bow to pressure to not have streets clogged 24/7 with taxis.
> In American cities I often found I had to wait 20 minutes to get an Uber or Lyft, if one even came. Is that because the economics of it fundamentally don't work and no one wants to drive for them any more?
Depends on the time of day, the city, and where you are at. I've not had a problem getting an Uber in Seattle, but the prices in Seattle are extravagant.
This has been the complete polar opposite of my experience in NYC. The professional taxi drivers are pretty consistent, like 1/4 uber/lyft drivers barely know how to drive at all. I distinctly remember one driver so terrifyingly incompetent I made him pull over and let me out of the car five miles from where I was going...
Drunk people are stupid. A giant "get me home now" button is more likely to get utilized versus stumbling around trying to wave down a taxi.
Also the cash thing, knowing that a card is 100% going to be accepted is huge, compared with Taxis and "oops the card reader is broken today".
I prefer to pay cash, personally. Denying finance parasites their 2% fee is always worth an extra ten seconds of my time.
In Seattle, you can't really flag down a cab.
What you could do in the past (pre-uber) was call their phone number, have the dispatcher on the other end pick up and be annoyed that you are bothering him, and request a cab that may or may not show up.
Also you had to know where you are at, which for a lot of people I know, is a serious challenge. A surprisingly large % of people have serious problems finding what intersection they are at. (To be fair, sometimes you are on a street that, for whatever reason, doesn't have any street signs, or the street sign is not lit up at all and you have to use your phone's flashlight to try and read it... and again, all this while drunk).
The experience sucked.
Not only did that fraud end up screwing over the retail investors who made the Saudis and the other early investors a pile of money after the company’s IPO – but it also destroyed the legitimate taxi business and convinced cities all over the world to starve their transit systems of investment because Uber seemed so much cheaper. Uber continues to hemorrhage money, resorting to cheap accounting tricks to make it seem like they’re finally turning it around, even as they double the price of rides and halve driver pay (and still lose money on every ride). The market can remain irrational longer than any of us can stay solvent, but when Uber runs out of suckers, it will go the way of other pump-and-dumps like WeWork.
--
Enumerating the manifest harms doesn't mean you didn't enjoy cheap rides for a time, it's not all or nothing.
"Cheap rides" do have a measurable cost to others and society.
In addition to the ills cited here one could add many others, not least of which was the elevation of a grotesque ethos of "breaking things" (i.e. evading any legal obligation or social responsibility until regulators and critics, viewed with contempt, "catch up"), and notably distilled down douche-bag toxic tech-bro culture. Both of which still tarnish and retard our industry.
For instance, in Denver, we still have several (I think even more than when I moved here in 2011) Taxi companies. Those Taxi companies actually use apps now. Those companies don't ever have the "oh the credit card reader is broken" excuse anymore. Riding a Non-uber Taxicab in Denver is an objectively improved experience now!
> douche-bag toxic tech-bro culture.
Ah, I see where you're coming from now.
into a life-long hater.
The culture there was among the worst and most egregious, but it opened the door to unapologetic toxicity that the Valley has never recovered from.
There's no excusing it, no overlooking it, and those who would defend it or ignore it are worse than complicit.
No.
Cherry picking counter examples does not disprove the main point, which is describing a business model.
>Uber burned $31 billion in investor cash, mostly from the Saudi royal family, to create the illusion of a viable business. Not only did that fraud end up screwing over the retail investors...
but looking now Uber's market cap is $128bn so it doesn't look like the investors did that badly or that there's nothing there.
I guess the thousands of rides I've taken so far were just... nothing? I'll tell you what. I remember the world before Uber. It fundamentally improved my life.
If I were one of the shrill victim types, I would call this take ableist against blind people who have objectively gotten value out of Uber. Instead, I'll just call it silly.