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[...] Drivers don't have a dedicated human manager who responds to their inquiries. Instead, they have community support representatives (CSRs), located at the email equivalent of a call center, often located abroad, such as in the Philippines, and managed by third-party companies, like Zendesk. Effectively, Uber offshores and automates its main communications with drivers. Drivers receive automated replies to most of their messages, which often appear to be based on keywords in the the text of their emails. [...]
christ. wonder if they're partnering with a startup that does automated customer service using "AI"
[...] I ask if the company tries to build trust with its drivers, and hte answer - that Uber cares about building trust with all of its end users - floors me. The fact that even in an informal interview this person is deploying the language used in the lawsuits gives me pause [...] the senior employee persists in asking me how Uber can improve its relationship with drivers. I can't hep but think this is roughly akin to asking how to improve your relationship with your girlfriend after she discovers that she is, in fact, your mistress.
hahaha love this
[...] the company contorts itself in order to avoid giving the impression that its workers are considered employees [...] "It says bicycle couriers who work for Deliveroo are never to be referred to as workers, employees, or staff, and that the Deliveroo jackets they have to wear on the job are not uniforms but 'branded clothing'. These workers don't have 'contracts', says the document, but 'supplier agreements'. They don't 'schedule shifts', but 'indicate their availability'. And they can never get sacked - instead, they're 'terminated'."
about a leaked dock in june 2017
short story idea: non-tech company that tries the same thing and gets sued or workers unionise
[...] as Uber enters a new space, it takes a direct-to-consumer approach, bypassing potential barriers, like regulations or political opposition, by winning over consumers with its effective app. It cautions opponents that might try to constrain some of its practices by conveying the message, "Be grateful for the disruptive innovation we bring, because what we offer is superior to the regulations that would hold us back" (what I refer to as "gratitude logic"). Because of its size and influence, it simply shrugs off regulation that it doesn't like. Then, Uber shifts and reshifts its identity, trying to find exploitable cracks and inconsistencies between various systems of rules and laws. Finally, Uber plays stakeholders against each other, using temporary alliances to gain a foothold wherever it goes. In many cases, drivers, passengers, cities, and others benefit from Uber's operations, but there are always others who are left behind.
damn this is good! very similar reasoning to my piece on Uber from sep 2017
[...] when Uber first arrives in a city, rates are higher and drivers are often happier. Then, it floods the market with new drivers, sometimes by widening eligibility criteria (such as by extending the range of cars drivers can use), and often lowers the rates at which driven earn their income. By creating a job for everyone, Uber can undermine the interests of dedicated full-timers. In effect, one civil rights cause—equality of access—is pitted against another cause: job security. The sheen of civil-society partnerships gives Uber cover for practices that negatively affect drivers in other arenas.
[...] The multiplying numbers who hold a stake in Uber's future can create paradoxical clashes between civil rights and labor rights efforts when they might otherwise be aligned, because organization in favor of or in resistance to Uber is not uniform.
The specter of managing labor's economic relations along racial lines evokes other social struggles in American history. For example, historian Nancy MacLean reminds us that at the turn of the nineteenth century, a battle brewed in Tennessee between free miners and employers who (in collusion with the state) were keeping wages low by renting cheap convict labor. "The widely reviled system, so redolent of slavery, created a perverse incentive to lock new up for petty offenses so the state could rent them out to coal companies as dirt-cheap labor to rake the jobs of free miners, who had organized the United Mine Workers of America to demand living wages and decent treatment." [...]
needs to be analysed further but, damn, food for thought
[...] this new nerd culture is the best possible news for our collective future, given the awesome challenges ahead. Soon there will be nine billion people crowding this warming planet, and each one will come equipped with a supercomputer in their pocket. So I’m optimistic, bullish even. Who better to inherit the Earth, at a time of crisis, than a generation obsessed with science and engineering?
eeerrrmmm
Larry Brilliant: Steve used to write me when he started Apple. I would get these letters, and then one day he just called me. He said, “Do you remember when we would say ‘power to the people’? That’s what I’m doing, I’m giving power to the people. I’m building a computer that every person can put on their desktop, and I’m going to get rid of the high price of the mainframes.”
new forms of power arise tho (the underdog)
Sean Parker: And then it becomes the post–social media era. It’s all the people who would have become investment bankers who want to go start internet companies, and it’s a purely commercial, purely transactional world. It’s just become this transactional thing, and it’s attracted the wrong type of people. It’s become a very toxic environment. A lot of people have shown up believing, maybe correctly, that they can cash in. But that’s Silicon Valley the ATM machine, not Silicon Valley the font of creativity and realization of your dreams.
but surely that's always where it was going to end up under capitalism? if it's able to mint billionaires, it will
Chris Caen: This is a little clichéd and eye-rolling—and it’s not true for all the entrepreneurs—but I think for a large portion of the entrepreneurs here they generally kind of make the world better. Look at all these entrepreneurs who are living five to an apartment, who are not making a lot of money, and may never make a lot of money. They can get a six- or seven-figure job at a bank or a large company but they choose to do this. At the end of the day it’s not money, it’s this emotional connection: “I am somehow connected with this world in a different way, and I can act upon that.” I think that is unique to Silicon Valley. Even back to the original days of Atari, there was this idea that you can have an emotional-professional career, and that’s okay. You can say, “I want to do this because I want to do this,” and that’s accepted.
the alternatives also suck tho
Ralph Baer: They made a couple hundred Pong games during 1972 toward the end of the year. And it was thirteen thousand Pong games the next year. The competition made more than that, everybody was making knockoffs.
Al Alcorn: Bally copied it, but it was with permission because we had a relationship with them. Nutting just stole Pong and made a game called Computer Space Ball, because everything they had was Computer this—Computer Quiz, Computer Space, Computer Space Ball… Clever! Why didn’t they ask us? Everybody else stole it except Ramtek. When I say “stole it,” I mean just copied the circuitry that I designed. Ramtek actually looked at it and made their own electronic version. They made a copy, but they didn’t take the schematic.
i never wanna hear about china copying things ever again
also, "why didnt they ask us?" seriously? why do you think