transportation-network company

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pages: 265 words: 69,310

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

“After Our Uber Exposé, Their PR Team Tried to Dupe Us.” L.A. Weekly, October 29, 2014. http://www.laweekly.com/news/after-our-uber-expos-their-pr-team-tried-to-dupe-us-5177453. Ferguson, Jordan. “Recent Transportation Network Company Ordinances.” Best Best and Krieger LLP, October 30, 2014. http://www.bbknowledge.com/california-public-utilities-commission-cpuc/recent-transportation-network-company-ordinances-in-austin-houston-and-washington-d-c-display-variety-of-regulatory-approaches/. Fernholtz, Tim. “Is Uber Costing New Yorkers $1.2 Billion Worth of Lost Time?” Quartz, July 10, 2015. http://qz.com/449600/uber-is-slowing-down-new-york-city-but-slowing-down-uber-wont-fix-the-problem/.

8 Schor, “Debating the Sharing Economy.” 9 Gannes, “Zimride Turns Regular Cars Into Taxis With New Ride-Sharing App, Lyft.” 10 Gustin, “Lyft-Off: Car-Sharing Start-Up Raises $60 Million Led by Andreessen Horowitz.” 11 Ibid. 12 Gannes, “Zimride Turns Regular Cars Into Taxis With New Ride-­Sharing App, Lyft.” 13 Gannes, “Lyft Sells Zimride Carpool Service to Rental-Car Giant Enterprise.” 14 Gannes, “Competition Brings Lyft, Sidecar and Uber Closer to Cloning Each Other.” 15 Lawler, “A Look Inside Lyft’s Financial Forecast For 2015 And Beyond.” 16 D’Onfro, “Uber CEO Founded The Company Because He Wanted To Be A ‘Baller In San Francisco.’” 17 Meelen and Frenken, “Stop Saying Uber Is Part Of The Sharing ­Economy.” 18 Scola, “The Black Car Company That People Love to Hate.” 19 Kalanick, “Uber Policy White Paper 1.0.” 20 Hall and Krueger, “An Analysis of the Labor Market for Uber’s Driver-Partners in the United States.” 21 Geron, “California Becomes First State To Regulate Ridesharing Services Lyft, Sidecar, UberX.” 22 Ferguson, “Recent Transportation Network Company Ordinances.” 23 California Public Utilities Commission, “Transportation Network Companies.” 24 Hirsch, “Taxi Trouble.” 25 Watters, “The MOOC Revolution That Wasn’t.” 26 Trafford, “Is John Tory Facing an Uber Battle at City Hall?” 27 Paris, “Electric ‘Boris Cars’ Are Coming to London – How Do They Work in Paris?” 28 Biddle, “Here Are the Internal Documents That Prove Uber Is a Money Loser.” 29 Kalanick and Swisher, “Uber CEO: We’re in a Political Battle with an ‘Assh*le.’” 30 Kalanick, “A Leader for the Uber Campaign.” 31 Dempsey, “Taxi Industry Regulation, Deregulation, and Reregulation.” 32 Rosen, “The Knowledge, London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS.” 33 Leisy, “TAXICAB DEREGULATION AND REREGULATION IN SEATTLE: LESSONS LEARNED.” 34 Sadlak, “Taxicab Deregulation.” 35 Dubinsky, Gollom, and Rieti, “Cab Driving Riskier than Police Work.” 36 Dale, “Council Votes to Overhaul Toronto Taxi Industry.” 37 Gans, “Is Uber Really in a Fight to the Death?”

When Seattle City Council decided that Lyft and Uber were breaking taxi regulations, it was Peers that mobilized supporters to sign petitions. And these efforts were not in vain: they succeeded in getting councils to back down, and in one of the organization’s most important victories they got the state of California to recognize a new category of transit organization called “Transportation Network Companies,” which created a framework within which Lyft, Uber, Sidecar, and others could operate legally, and which has been imitated in several other states since. In the summer of 2014, Peers listed 75 partner organizations on its web site, and the list gives a snapshot of the Sharing Economy landscape as it hit the mainstream.


pages: 257 words: 64,285

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition by David Levinson, Kevin Krizek

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, collaborative consumption, commoditize, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, dematerialisation, driverless car, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Google Hangouts, high-speed rail, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the printing press, jitney, John Markoff, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Lyft, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Network effects, Occam's razor, oil shock, place-making, pneumatic tube, post-work, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, tacit knowledge, techno-determinism, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The future is already here, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, Zipcar

. —— While people, animals, weather, larger cargo needs, and so on are still potential confounding factors, autonomous vehicles interacting with only autonomous vehicles should be much easier to design and manage than autonomous vehicles in mixed traffic. The next chapter considers how Transport Network Companies such as Lyft and Uber compete with taxis. But with their added labor, such services are too expensive for most people for frequent mobility.173 In contrast, autonomous vehicles total costs will be significantly lower, making it feasible that larger numbers of people replace their personal car (which is parked 23 out of 24 hours) with one that comes on-demand.

The car-shedding question remains: how many households will surrender a second (or first) car for the occasional trip?185 Is the market thick enough that the likelihood of finding a car nearby is high enough that it is reliable enough to use? With Car2Go there is no guarantee there will be a car within walking distance. Efforts to rebalance the fleet can be costly. This is where other services (taxi, transport network companies, transit) come in as backups. This is also where autonomous vehicles can be important. Nevertheless, people prefer not to think about every transaction. If they are charged per use, they use less. But they are less happy and more determined to get a car of their own to avoid transaction costs.

Anecdotally, it appears people who drive for Lyft are more likely to be (though not universally) American citizens or long-term residents, and since they own their own car, less likely to be poor, recently landed immigrants who comprise the taxi drivers in many cities. Lyft is in many ways simply an app with a back-end (rather, 'cloud-based') dispatch service. They claim to be a "transport network company whose mobile-phone application facilitates peer-to-peer ridesharing by enabling passengers who need a ride to request one from drivers who have a car." They insist the drivers are independent (as are the riders). The difference between this and a taxi dispatcher is thin. A taxi is "a car licensed to transport passengers in return for payment of a fare, usually fitted with a taximeter."190 So for taxicabs, the arrangement between the rider and the passenger is mediated by the government (which licenses the vehicles).


pages: 491 words: 77,650

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

Details vary across juris- dictions, but one common goal emerges: to deny workers’ employment status and ensure that platforms are defined as mere intermediaries. In June 2016, free-market think tank R Street’s map of state-level legisla- tion listed only five US states that had not enacted some form of transport network company (TNC) regulation.60 At first glance, these measures set out a balanced approach, permitting on-demand platforms to operate and subjecting them to basic standards, from driver verification to insurance requirements. Upon closer investigation, however, it becomes clear that new legislation frequently favours platforms’ interests.

Screening Mechanical Turk workers’ (Carnegie Mellon University 2010) http://lorrie.cranor.org/ pubs/note1552-downs.pdf, archived at https://perma.cc/RGA6-MRQ8; ‘The myth of low cost, high quality on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk’, TurkerNation (30 January 2014), http://turkernation.com/showthread.php?21352-The-Myth- of-Low-Cost-High-Quality-on-Amazon-s-Mechanical-Turk, archived at https:// perma.cc/6S5H-6RKA 5. Yanbo Ge, Christopher R. Knittel, Don MacKenzie, and Stephen Zoepf, Racial and Gender Discrimination in Transportation Network Companies (2016) NBER Working Paper No. 22776; Joshua Barrie, ‘This CEO says he has a 3.4 rating on Uber because he’s gay’, Business Insider UK (16 February 2015), http://uk. businessinsider.com/gay-businessman-low-uber-rating-london-2015–2, archived at https://perma.cc/ANN3-DD5F. Other passengers feel that the relative ano- nymity provided by ride-sharing platforms is an improvement on taxis: see Jenna Wortham, ‘Ubering while black’, Medium (23 October 2014), https://medium.

L. 176 Chen, Keith 122 Davies, Paul 174 Cherry 38 Davies, Rob 151 Cherry, Miriam 97, 99, 132, 173, 174, 184 Day, Iris 177 chess robots 1, 6 Deakin, Simon 36, 112, 130, 131, 152, 172, China 12, 38, 153 174, 177, 178, 184, 185 Chowdhry, Amit 181 deductions from pay 15, 19, 60, 63, 67 Christenson, Clayton M. 39 Deep Blue 1 ‘churn’/worker turnover 68 Deliveroo 2, 11, 12, 13, 115 Clark, Shelby 46 collective action by drivers 113 classificatory schemes 13, 28–9, 147 contractual prohibitions 66–7 misclassification 95, 96–100 employment litigation 99 Clement, Barrie 162 internal guidelines 43–4 Clover, Charles 153 safety and liability 122–3 Coase, Ronald 19, 94, 101, 172 wage rates 65 Coase’s theory 19, 20 delivery apps 2 Codagnone, Cristiano 150 demand fluctuations 78 Cohen, Molly 36, 37, 152, 157 Denmark 36 ‘collaborative consumption’ 42 deregulation 37, 40 (see also regulation) collective action 113–15 Dholakia, Utpal 150 collective bargaining rights 48, 65, 82 Didi 2, 12, 38 commission deductions 15, 19, 60, 63, 67 differential wage rates 109–11 commodification of work 76, 77, 110 digital disruption 49, 50 competition 88 ‘digital feudalism’ 83 consumer demand 17–18 digital innovation see innovation consumer protection 10, 112, 121, 128–9 digital market manipulation 123 safety and liability 122–3, 128–9 digital payment systems 5 * * * Index 193 digital work intermediation 5, 11, 13–16 borderline cases 100 disability discrimination 62, 121 identifying the employer 100 discriminatory practices 62, 94, 113, easy cases 102–3 121, 180 functional concept of the disputes 66 employer 101–2, 104 disruptive innovation 39–40, 49, 50, 95 genuine entrepreneurs 103 dockyards 78, 79–80 harder cases 103–4 ‘doublespeak’ 31–50, 71, 95, 97–8, 133 multiple employers 103 Doug H 160, 163 platforms as employers 102–3 down-time 60, 65, 76, 77 ‘independent worker’ 48 Downs, Julie 180 misclassification 95, 96–100 Drake, Barbara 168 ‘personal scope question’ 93 drink driving 133, 184–5 employment taxes 125–7 Dzieza, Josh 163 Engels, Friedrich 81, 168 ‘entrepreneur-coordinator’ 101 economic crises 145 entrepreneurship 6, 8, 21, 32, 42, 43, economic drivers 7, 18–24 45–6, 50, 52 (see also micro- Edwards, Jim 146 entrepreneurs) efficiency 7 autonomy 53–5 Elejalde-Ruiz, Alexia 175 algorithmic control and 55–8 ‘elite worker’ status 61, 67 sanctions and 61–3 ‘emperor’s new clothes’ 71 wages and 58–61 empirical studies 28–9 freedom 8, 14, 27, 29, 47, 49, 51, 52, employer responsibility 104 53, 55, 65–8, 69, 85, 96, 108, 110, employment contracts 94 112, 113 bilateral relationships 100 on-demand trap and 68–70 employment law 4, 9, 10, 38, 84 risk and 86 (see also regulation) genuine entrepreneurs 102, 103 continuing importance 139–40 misclassification 96–7, 98, 101 control/protection trade-off 93–4, 95 ‘personal scope question’ 93 European Union 107, 111, 112, 178 self-determination 63–5 flexibility and environmental impacts 21, 26 innovation and 90 Estlund, Cynthia 137, 185 measuring working time 105–7 Estonia 127 mutuality of obligation 174 Estrada, David 41 new proposals 46–9 euphemisms 44–5 rebalancing the scales 107–8 European Union law 107, 111, 112, 178 collective action 113–15 exploitation 26–7 portable ratings 111–13 Ezrachi, Ariel 150 surge pricing 108–11 ‘risk function’ 131, 132 Facebook 35, 57 workers’ rights 105 FairCrowdWork 114, 179 rights vs flexibility 115–17 Farrell, Sean 164 employment litigation FedEx 97 FedEx 97, 173 feedback 5, 15–16 France 99 Feeney, Matthew 35, 151 Uber 45, 48, 54–5, 98, 99, 106, 115 Field, Frank 26 UK 45, 48, 98–9, 106, 115 financial losses 22–3 US 54–5, 97, 98, 99 ‘financially strapped’ 29 employment status 21, 45, 47 Finkin, Matthew 74, 84, 166, 169 * * * 194 Index Fiverr 12, 13, 24, 78 historical precedents and CEO 17 problems 72, 73–85 Fleischer, Victor 20, 147 rebranding work 4–6, 32 flexibility 8, 10, 12, 107, 108 labour as a technology 5–6 vs rights 115–17 market entrants 88 food-delivery apps 12 matching 13, 14, 18–20 Foodora 2, 12 monopoly power 23–4, 28 Foucault, Michel 55, 159 network effects 23–4 founding myths 34–5 overview 2–3 Fox, Justin 182 perils 6, 26–8, 31 fragmented labour markets 83, 84, 86, platform paradox 5 90, 113 platforms as a service 7–8 France 78 consumer protection 10 employment litigation 99 potential 6, 7, 12, 24–6, 31 Labour Code 114, 176, 179 regulation 9–10 (see also regulation) regulatory battles 36 real cost of on-demand services 119, tax liability 126 121–2 (see also structural ‘free agents’ 28–9 imbalances) Freedland, Mark 174, 175 regulation see regulation Freedman, Judith 111, 178 regulatory arbitrage 20–2 freedom 8, 14, 27, 29, 47, 49, 51, 52, 53, size of the phenomenon 16–17, 145–6 55, 65–8, 69, 85, 96, 108, 110, work on demand 11–29 112, 113 gigwork 13 on-demand trap and 68–70 Giliker, Paula 183 risk and 86 global economic crises 145 Frey, Carl 136, 185 Goodley, Simon 173 Fried, Ina 183 GPS 5, 57 Greenhouse, Steven 66, 164 Gardner-Selby, W. 185 Griswold, Alison 164, 181 gender parity 144 (see also Grossman, Nick 46 discriminatory practices) Gumtree 20 Germany Gurley, Bill 161 regulatory battles 36 Guyoncourt, Sally 178 workers’ rights 114 gift vouchers 105 Hacker, Jacob 86, 170 gig economy Hall, Jonathan 60, 162, 165 business models 12–13, 44, 100 Hammond, Philip 126, 182 cash burn 22–3 Hancock, Matthew 46, 166 clash of narratives 8 Handy 18 classification 13, 28–9 Hardy, Tess 176 critics 2, 3, 8 Harman, Greg 163 digital work intermediation 5, 11, Harris, Seth 48, 49, 105, 157, 175 13–16 Hatton, Erin 82, 169 economic drivers 7, 18–24 Heap, Lisa 177 empirical studies 28–9 Helpling 2 employment law and see employment Hemel, Daniel 147, 170 law Hesketh, Scott 181 enthusiasts 3, 4, 8 hiring practices: historical gigwork vs crowdwork 13 perspective 78, 79 growth 17–18 historical perspective 72, 73–85 ‘humans as a service’ 3–6 Hitch 38 * * * Index 195 Hitlin, Paul 162 Internet Holtgrewe, Ursula 169 collective action 113 HomeJoy 132 Third Wave 73 Hook, Leslie 153 Irani, Lilly 6, 114, 142, 162, 179 Horan, Hubert 22, 148 Isaac, Mike 170, 171 Horowith, Sara 144 Issa, Darrell 41 hostile takeovers 111–12 Howe, Jeff 7, 11, 142 jargon 42–5 Huet, Ellen 153 Jensen, Vernon 167, 168, 170 Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) 60, 93 Jobs, Steve 35 ‘humans as a service’ 3–6 joint and several liability 104 historical precedents and problems 72, Justia Trademarks 143 73–85 rebranding work 4–6, 32, 40–50 Kalanick, Travis 43, 86 Hunter, Rachel 106, 176 Kalman, Frank 16, 144 Huws, Ursula 27, 141, 150 Kaminska, Izabella 22–3, 44, 90, 148, 156, 169, 171, 172 ‘idle’ time 60, 65, 76, 77 Kaplow, Louis 184 illegal practices 57 Kasparov, Garry 1 immigrant workers 77 Katz, Lawrence 16 incentive structures 67–8 Katz, Vanessa 116, 179 independent contractors 21 Kaufman, Micha 17, 145, 149 Independent Workers Union of Great Kempelen, Wolfgang von 1 Britain (IWGB) 113, 179 Kennedy, John F. 135, 185 industrialization 75 Kenya 36 industry narratives 32–3, 49–50 Kessler, Sarah 151 information asymmetries 32, 54, 87, 131 Keynes, John Maynard 135, 185 innovation 3, 6, 8, 9, 10, 31, 32, 42, 45–6, King, Tom, Lord King of Bridgwater 71 110 cheap labour and 89 Kirk, David 133, 184 disruptive innovation 39–40, 49, 95 Kitchell, Susan 166 historical precedents and problems 72, Klemperer, Paul 165 73–85 Krueger, Alan 16, 48, 49, 60, 105, 106, incentives 86–90 157, 162, 165, 175 myths 72, 83 Krugman, Paul 170 obstacles to 88–90 Kucera, David 186 paradox 72, 87 problematic aspects 85–90 labour law see employment law productivity and 87 Lagarde, Christine 86, 170 shifting risk 85–6 Leimeister, Jan Marco 13 workers’ interests and 89–90 Leonard, Andrew 33, 151 innovation law perspective 36 Lewis, Mervyn 168 ‘Innovation Paradox’ 9 Liepman, Lindsay 184 insecure work 9, 10, 12, 27, 42, 107 Lloyd-Jones, Roger 168 historical perspective 80, 81 loan facilities 68 insurance 123 lobbying groups 32, 47, 48 intermediaries 83 (see also digital work Lobel, Orly 11, 37–8 intermediation) low-paid work 9, 26–7, 40–2, historical perspective 79–80 59, 61 International Labour Organization low-skilled work 76, 77, 82 (ILO) 4, 83, 97, 169, 173 automation and 138 * * * 196 Index Lukes, Steven 159 Murgia, Madhumita 182 Lyft 2, 12, 13, 38, 41, 42, 76 mutuality of obligation 174 algorithmic control mechanisms 56 network effects 23–4 regulatory battles 35 Newcomer, Eric 148, 165 Uber’s competitive strategies 88 Newton, Casey 164 Nowag, Julian 183 McAfee, Andrew 137, 138, 185 Machiavelli, Niccolo 93, 172 O’Connor, Sarah 43, 155 machine learning 136, 137 ODesk 60 McCurry, Justin 186 O’Donovan, Caroline 144, 164, 181 Malone, Tom 73 Oei, Shu-Yi 124, 125, 132, 147, 182, 184 Mamertino, Mariano 161, 163 Ola 2, 12 market entrants 88 on-demand trap 68–70 market manipulation 123 on-demand work 11– 29 Markowitz, Harry 184 real cost of on-demand services 119, Marsh, Grace 182 121–2 (see also structural Marshall, Aarian 186 imbalances) Martens, Bertin 150 Orwell, George 31, 151 Marvit, Moshe 142 Osborne, Hilary 164 Marx, Patricia 119–20, 180 Osborne, Michael 136, 185 matching 13, 14, 18–20 outsourcing Maugham, Jolyon 182 agencies 40 Mayhew, Henry 77, 78, 79, 167 ‘web services’ 2 Mechanical Turk 1, 2, 6 outwork industry 74–5, 76–7, 79, 80, 89 mental harm 57–8 Owen, Jonathan 178 Meyer, Jared 149 ‘micro-entrepreneurs’ 8, 21, 46, 49, Padget, Marty 186 52–3, 63 Pannick, David, Lord Pannick 110 ‘micro-wages’ 27 Pasquale, Frank 8, 40, 154 middlemen 80 Peck, Jessica Lynn 26 minimum wage levels 3, 9, 21, 26, 27, 59, peer-to-peer collaboration 42, 43 94, 104, 105 Peers.org 32–3 minimum working hour guarantees 108 performance standard probations 61 misidentification 95, 96–100 personal data 112, 178 mobile payment mechanisms 5 ‘personal scope question’ 93 monopoly power 23–4, 28 Pissarides, Christopher 19, 147 Morris, David Z. 171 platform paradox 5 Morris, Gillian 174 platform responsibility 122–3, 128 MTurk 2, 3, 4, 11, 12, 24–5, 76, 139, platforms as a service 7–8 161–2, 163 consumer protection 10 algorithmic control mechanisms 56 regulation 9–10 (see also regulation) business model 100, 101, 103, 104 Plouffe, David 154 commission deductions 63 Poe, Edgar Allen 1 digital work intermediation 14, 15 Polanyi’s paradox 138–9 matching 19 political activism 114 payment in gift vouchers 105 portable ratings 111–13 quality control 120 Porter, Eduardo 171 TurkOpticon 114 ‘postindustrial corporations’ 20 wage rates 59, 60, 61 Postmates 57, 63, 121 * * * Index 197 Poyntz, Juliet Stuart 168 structural imbalances 130, 131 Prassl, Jeremias 174, 175, 176, 177, robots 136–7 178, 183 Mechanical Turk 1, 6 precarious work 9, 10, 12, 27, 42, 107 Rodgers, Joan 177 historical perspective 80, 81 Rodriguez, Joe Fitzgerald 181 price quotes 121–2 Rönnmar, Mia 175 surge pricing 58, 108–11, 122 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 133, 185 Primack, Dan 148 Rosenblat, Alex 54, 56, 65, 123, 131, 159, productivity 87 160, 163, 164, 182, 184 public discourse 69 Rosenblat, Joel 165 public health implications 27 Rubery, Jill 84, 169 punishment 57 (see also sanctions) Ryall, Jenny 181 quality control 5, 80, 120 safe harbours 47, 49 safety and liability 122–3, 128–9 rating mechanisms 5, 15–16, 53–4 sanctions 61–3 (see also punishment) algorithms 54, 55, 87–8 Sandbu, Martin 87, 170 discrimination 62, 113 Scheiber, Noam 164 portable ratings 111–13 Schmiechen, James 167, 168, 169 sanctions and 61–3 Schumpeter, Joseph 133 rebranding work 4–6, 32, 40–50 self-dealing 123 regulation 9–10 (see also employment law) self-determination 36–7, 47, 63–5 industry narratives 32–3, 49–50 (see also autonomy) new proposals 31, 46–9, 50 self-driving cars 89, 137 opponents 31, 33–4 sexual assaults 121, 180–1 Disruptive Davids 34–7 sexual discrimination 62, 144, 180 disruptive innovation theory ‘sham self-employment’ 97 39–40, 49 sharing economy 7, 20, 51 New Goliaths 37–40 critics 32–3 regulatory battles 35–7, 47–9 disruptive innovation 39, 49 safe harbours 47, 49 enthusiasts 61 self-regulation 36–7, 47 Sharing Economy UK 33, 37 shaping 32–3, 45–9 sharing platforms 116 regulatory arbitrage 20 –2, 147 Shavell, Steven 184 regulatory experimentation 36 Shleifer, Andrei 111, 178 Reich, Robert 108, 176 Shontell, Alyson 161 Relay Rides 46 Silberman, Six 61, 114, 162, 163, 179 ‘reluctants’ 29 Silver, James 156, 158 reputation algorithms 54 Singer, Natasha 43, 155, 156 ride-sharing/ridesharing 2, 21, 38, 41 Slee, Tom 32, 53, 142, 151, 155, 158, 159 (see also taxi apps) Smith, Adam 73 algorithmic control mechanisms 55–6 Smith, Jennifer 170 business model 102–3 Smith, Yves 148 discriminatory practices 62, 121 social media 114 maltreatment of passengers 121 social partners 10, 94 ride-sharing laws 47 social security contributions 21, 125–7 Ries, Brian 181 social security provision 3, 48, 131 Ring, Diane 124, 125, 132, 147, 182, 184 sociological critique 27–8 Risak, Martin 102, 175 specialization 75 risk shift 85–6 Spera 51, 158 * * * 198 Index Sports Direct 40–1 taxi regulation 21, 36, 37, 38, 114 Standage, Tom 141 vetting procedures 121 standardized tasks 76 tech:NYC 33 Stark, Luke 54, 56, 65, 159, 160, 163, 164 technological exceptionalism 6, 128 start-up loans 68 technological innovation see innovation Stefano, Valerio De 84, 169 technology 5–6, 27 Stigler, George 32, 151 unemployment and 135, 137, 140 Stone, Katherine 67, 165 terminology 42–5 structural imbalances time pressure 57 business model 130–2 Titova, Jurate 183 digital market manipulation 123 TNC, see transportation network levelling the playing field 127–32 company platform responsibility 122–3, 128 Tolentino, Jia 166 real cost of on-demand services 119, Tomassetti, Julia 20, 147, 156, 171 121–2 Tomlinson, Daniel 163 safety and liability 128–9 trade unions 65, 113, 114, 178, 179 sustainability 132–3 transaction cost 19 tax obligations 123–4, 129, 131, 132 transport network company (TNC) employment taxes and social regulation 47–8 security contributions 125–7 Truck arrangements 105 VAT 124–5, 129 Tsotsis, Alex 151 Stucke, Maurice 150 TurkOpticon 114, 162, 163, 179 Sullivan, Mike 180 Summers, Lawrence 111, 131, 178, 184 Uber 2, 11, 12, 43 Sundararajan, Arun 36, 37, 41, 73, 74, 75, algorithmic control mechanisms 56, 151, 152, 157, 166, 167 57, 58 Supiot, Alain 130–1, 177, 184 arbitration 165 surge pricing 58, 108–11, 122 autonomous vehicles and 89 survey responses 120 ‘churn’/worker turnover 68 Swalwell, Eric 41, 154 commission deductions 63 competitive strategies 88 takeovers 111–12 consumer demand 18 ‘task economies’ 76, 77, 79 control mechanisms 54 Task Rabbit 2, 12, 13, 46, 143–4, 163 creation of new job business model 100, 101, 160 opportunities 77–8 company law 56 digital work intermediation 14, 15 contractual prohibitions 66 disruptive innovation 39 digital work intermediation 14, 15–16 driver income projections 51 financial losses 22 Driver-Partner Stories 25, 149 founding myth 34–5 driver-rating system 158, 160 regulatory arbitrage 20 employment litigation terms of service 44, 53, 122, 158, 181 France 99 wage rates 64 UK 45, 48, 98, 106, 115 working conditions 57 US 54–5, 99 Taylor, Frederick 52–3, 72, 158 financial losses 22, 23 tax laws 84 ‘Greyball’ 88, 170 tax obligations 123–4, 129, 131, 132 ‘Hell’ 88, 170 employment taxes and social security loss-making tactics and market share 64 contributions 125–7 monopoly power 23 VAT 124–5, 129 positive externality claims 132–3 taxi apps 12, 20 regulatory arbitrage 20 * * * Index 199 regulatory battles 35, 36 Vaidhyanathan, Siva 40, 154 resistance to unionization 65, 178 value creation 18–19, 20 risk shift 86 van de Casteele, Mounia 182 safety and liability 122–3, 180–1 VAT 124–5, 129 sale of Chinese operation 38 Verhage, Julie 147 surge pricing 58, 122 vicarious liability 128 tax liability 125, 126, 127 unexpected benefits 26 wage rates 58–61, 64, 65 wage rates 58, 59, 60–1, 64, 65, 127 Wakabayashi, Daisuke 171 working conditions 113, 178 Warne, Dan 115 UberLUX 14 Warner, Mark 16 UberX 14, 51, 60 Warren, Elizabeth 127, 183 UK Webb, Beatrice and Sidney 80, 168 collective action 113 Weil, David 83, 169 employment litigation 45, 48, 98–9, 106 welfare state 130, 131 tax liability 124–5, 126 Wilkinson, Frank 84, 130, 131, 169, unemployment 135, 137, 140, 145 172, 184, 185 Union Square Ventures 46 Wong, Julia Carrie 170 unionization 10, 65, 113, 114, 178, 179 work on demand 11–29 ‘unpooling’ 147 worker classification 28–9, 147 Unterschutz, Joanna 178 misclassification 95, 96–100 Upwork 12, 76, 144 workers’ rights 105 algorithmic control mechanisms 56 vs flexibility 115–17 business model 100, 160 working conditions 57, 68–9 commission deductions 63, 67 historical perspective 77, 81 US Uber 113, 178 discriminatory practices 121 working time 105–7 employment litigation 54–5, 97, 98, 99 Wosskow, Debbie 157 regulatory battles 36, 47 Wujczyk, Marcin 178 tax liabilities 126–7 taxi regulation 36, 114 Yates, Joanne 73 transport network company (TNC) YouTube 58 regulation 47–8 user ratings 5, 15–16, 53–4, 55 Zaleski, Olivia 165 portable ratings 111–13 zero-hours contracts 40, 41, 107 sanctions and 61–3 Zuckerberg, Mark 35 * * * Document Outline Cover Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy Copyright Dedication Contents Introduction Welcome to the Gig Economy Humans as a Service Rebranding Work The Platform Paradox Labour as a Technology Making the Gig Economy Work Platforms as a Service Exploring the Gig Economy Charting Solutions A Broader Perspective 1.


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Uber takes a 25 percent cut from each ride, yet drivers are not considered employees and the company is not responsible for their safety. Uber is also not responsible for the safety of its consumers (riders) nor the increased congestion and pollution it causes in urban centers. In San Francisco, for example, transportation experts concluded that transportation network companies such as Uber and Lyft were responsible for more than half of the increase in roadway congestion between 2010 and 2016.46 In trying to grasp the scale of smartphone jobs, we must also include all the warehouse and logistics workers continually set in motion by our “wherever, whenever” purchasing power.

They use appwashing and gamification to disguise shit jobs as entrepreneurial opportunities, and they apply peer pressure and nondisclosure agreements to chill dissent among full-time employees. But as the disconnect between fantasy and reality becomes too obvious to ignore workers are fighting back. In 1998, long before people were using apps to connect with “transportation network companies,” New York City taxi drivers formed a union, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. The taxi market was widely considered impossible to unionize, but under the bold leadership of Bhairavi Desai, and through clever tactics and dogged organizing, drivers won important gains: regulations on taxi companies, a health and disability fund for drivers, and raises that put drivers on the path to a living wage.

Worker coalitions are shining a light on the invisibility and precarious working conditions experienced by tech workers and people working in the app economy; ILSR is showing the importance of access and how rural and poor communities are under the thumb of giant telecom companies; groups advocating for algorithmic accountability emphasize how code can be coercive; and the ACLU and ProPublica are fighting against unjust surveillance and are clear advocates for a broader restoration of privacy. Seeing the great work these groups are doing also highlights the uphill battle we face. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance is organizing tirelessly to mitigate the hardships of its workers through small but meaningful gains. Yet the notion of compelling transportation network companies to treat app drivers as employees with rights, thus undercutting the model of digital piecework, is fiercely contested. The defeat in court of Deliveroo drivers in the UK who pursued employee rights and the April 2019 National Labor Relations Board advisory memo designating Uber drivers as independent contractors with no right to unionize show how entrenched the new app-work models have become in just a short time, and how difficult it will be to change expectations about work in the gig economy.


pages: 295 words: 81,861

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

Hilton, “The Jitneys,” Journal of Law and Economics 15:2, 1972, p. 296. 3 Ibid. 4 Travis Kalanick, “Uber’s Plan to Get More People into Fewer Cars,” TED, February 2016, Ted.com. 5 “Fireside Chat with Travis Kalanick and Marc Benioff,” Sales-force, September 2015, Salesforce.com. 6 Sam Harnett, “Words Matter: How Tech Media Helped Write Gig Companies into Existence,” in Beyond the Algorithm: Qualitative Insights for Gig Work Regulation, ed. Deepa Das Acevedo, Cambridge University Press, 2021. 7 Dana Rubinstein, “Uber, Lyft, and the End of Taxi History,” Politico, October 30, 2014, Politico.com. 8 Gregory D. Erhardt, “Do Transportation Network Companies Decrease or Increase Congestion?,” Science Advances 5:5, 2019, p. 11. 9 “TNCs Today: A Profile of San Francisco Transportation Network Company Activity,” San Francisco County Transportation Authority, 2017, Sfcta.org. 10 Bruce Schaller, “Empty Seats, Full Streets: Fixing Manhattan’s Traffic Problem,” Schaller Consulting, 2017, Schallerconsult.com. 11 Bruce Schaller, “The New Automobility: Lyft, Uber and the Future of American Cities,” Schaller Consulting, 2018, Schallerconsult.com. 12 Michael Graehler Jr., Richard Alexander Mucci, and Gregory D.

When Uber perceived the threat of regulation on the local level, where taxis were typically regulated, it would bring its massive lobbying operation to state lawmakers and get them to preempt local laws with more lax, state-wide regulations that codified ride-hailing services as separate from taxis. Naturally, this happened first in California. The state’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC) created the classification of “Transportation Network Company” in 2013 to cover ride-hailing companies, which had the effect of taking regulatory authority away from San Francisco and other cities in the state. At the time, the San Francisco Cab Drivers Association argued that the PUC’s actions effectively deregulated the industry. In a statement, a spokesperson for the organization said, “any additional class of transportation provider, which offers the same on-call/on-demand passenger transportation service without the same regulatory standards, renders existing regulations meaningless.”26 They deemed it unfair competition because ride-hailing companies and their drivers would not have to follow the same rules as taxi drivers.


pages: 343 words: 91,080

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, business logic, call centre, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive load, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death from overwork, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Chrome, Greyball, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social software, SoftBank, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, Tim Cook: Apple, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, urban planning, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Knittel, Don MacKenzie, and Stephen Zoepf, “How Apps Like Uber Perpetuate the Cab Industry’s Racial Discrimination,” Alternet, January 6, 2017, www.alternet.org/economy/how-apps-uber-perpetuate-cab-industrys-racial-discrimination. 2. Yanbo Ge, Christopher R. Knittel, Don MacKenzie, and Stephen Zoepf, “Racial and Gender Discrimination in Transportation Network Companies,” National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2016, www.nber.org/papers/w22776. 3. Andrew Beinstein and Ted Sumers, “How Uber Engineering Increases Safe Driving with Telematics,” UBER Engineering, June 29, 2016, https://eng.uber.com/telematics/. 4. In other publicly reported incidents of sexual harassment by passengers, drivers similarly cite weak communications from Uber in responding to their incidents.

Kimberly Reeves, “Uber’s Big Win: Texas Ridesharing Rules Bill Passes through Senate,” Austin Business Journal, May 17, 2017, www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2017/05/17/ubers-big-win-texas-ridesharing-rules-bill-passes.html. 31. HR 100, 85 Cong. (2017) (enacted), https://legiscan.com/TX/text/HB100/2017. 32. Joy Borkholder, Mariah Montgomery, Miya Saika Chen, and Rebecca Smith, “Uber State Interference: How Transportation Network Companies Buy, Bully, and Bamboozle Their Way to Deregulation,” National Employment Law Project and the Partnership for Working Families, January 2018, www.forworkingfamilies.org/sites/pwf/files/publications/Uber%20State%20Interference%20Jan%202018.pdf. 33. Rosenblat, “Uber’s Drive-By Politics.” 34.

Darrell Etherington, “Lyft Raises $1 Billion at $11 Billion Valuation Led by Alphabet’s CapitalG,” Tech Crunch, October 19, 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/19/lyft-raises-1-billion-at-11-billion-valuation-led-by-alphabets-capitalg/. 3. Rani Molla, “Uber’s Market Share Has Taken a Big Hit,” Recode, August 31, 2017, www.recode.net/2017/8/31/16227670/uber-lyft-market-share-deleteuber-decline-users. 4. San Francisco County Transportation Authority, “TNCs Today: A Profile of San Francisco Transportation Network Company Activity,” June 2017, www.sfcta.org/sites/default/files/content/Planning/TNCs/TNCs_Today_112917.pdf. 5. Jessica, “New Survey: Drivers Choose Uber for Its Flexibility and Convenience,” Uber Newsroom, December 7, 2015, https://newsroom.uber.com/driver-partner-survey/. 6. Lyft, “Explore,” February 14, 2018, www.lyft.com/. 7.


pages: 472 words: 117,093

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

., 305 Spotify, 146–48 stacks, 295–96, 298 Stallman, Richard, 243 standard partnership creativity and, 119, 120 defined, 37 demand for routine skills and, 321 HiPPO and, 45, 59 inversion of, 56–60 modified by data-driven decision making, 46–60 structure of, 31 Starbucks, 185 statistical pattern recognition, 69, 72–74, 81–82, 84 statistical prediction, 41 status quo bias, 21 steampunk, 273 Sterling, Bruce, 295, 298 S3 (Amazon Web Service), 143 Stites-Clayton, Evan, 263 STR, 221 “stranger-danger” bias, 210 streaming services, 146–48 Street, Sam, 184 Street Bump, 162–63 Stripe, 171–74, 205 structured interviews, 57 students, gifted, 40 Sturdivant, Jeremy, 286 subscription services, 147–48 suitcase words, 113 Suleyman, Mustafa, 78 “superforecasters,” 60–61 supervised learning, 76 supply and demand; See also demand; demand curves; supply curves O2O platforms for matching, 193 platforms and, 153–57 and revenue management, 47 supply curves, 154–56 Supreme Court, US, 40–41 surge pricing, 55 Svirsky, Dan, 209n Sweeney, Latanya, 51–52 Swift, Taylor, 148 switching costs, 216–17, 219 Sydney, Australia, hostage incident (2014), 55 symbolic artificial intelligence, 69–72 introduction of, 69–70 reasons for failure of, 70–72 synthetic biology, 271–72 systems integration, 142 System 1/System 2 reasoning, 35–46 and confirmation bias, 57 defined, 35–36 and second-machine-age companies, 325 undetected biases and, 42–45 weaknesses of, 38–41 Szabo, Nick, 292, 294–95 Tabarrok, Alex, 208–9 Tapscott, Alex, 298 Tapscott, Don, 298 Tarantino, Quentin, 136n TaskRabbit, 261, 265 taxi companies, Uber’s effect on, 201 TCE (transaction cost economics), 312–16 TechCrunch, 296 technology (generally) effect on employment and wages, 332–33 effect on workplace, 334 as tool, 330–31 Teespring, 263–64 Teh, Yee-Whye, 76 telephones, 129–30, 134–35 tenure predictions, 39 Tesla (self-driving automobile), 81–82, 97 Tetlock, Philip, 59 text messages, 140–41 Thank You for Being Late (Friedman), 135 theories, scientific, 116–17 theory of the firm, See TCE (transaction cost economics) Thierer, Adam, 272 “thin” companies, 9 Thingiverse, 274 Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman), 36, 43 Thomas, Rob, 262 Thomke, Stefan, 62–63 3D printing, 105–7, 112–13, 273, 308 Thrun, Sebastian, 324–25 TNCs (transportation network companies), 208 TØ.com, 290 Tomasello, Michael, 322 Topcoder, 254, 260–61 Torvalds, Linus, 240–45 tourists, lodging needs of, 222–23 Tower Records, 131, 134 trade, international, 291 trading, investment, 266–70, 290 Transfix, 188, 197, 205 transparency, 325 transportation network companies (TNCs), 208; See also specific companies, e.g.: Uber Transportation Security Administration (TSA), 89 Tresset, Patrick, 117 trucking industry, 188 T-shirts, 264 tumors, 3D modeling of, 106 Turing, Alan, 66, 67n Tuscon Citizen, 132 TV advertising, 48–51 Tversky, Amos, 35 Twitter, 234 two-sided networks credit cards, 214–16 Postmates, 184–85 pricing in, 213–16, 220 pricing power of, 210–11 switching costs, 216–17 Uber, 200, 201, 218–19 two-sided platforms, 174, 179–80 Two Sigma, 267 Uber driver background checks, 208 future of, 319–20 information asymmetry management, 207–8 lack of assets owned by, 6–7 as means of leveraging assets, 196–97 network effects, 193, 218 as O2O platform, 186 origins, 200–202 and Paris terrorist attack, 55 pricing decisions, 212–15, 218–19 rapid growth of, 9 regulation of, 201–2 reputational systems, 209 routing problems, 194 separate apps for drivers and riders, 214 and Sydney hostage incident, 54–55 value proposition as compared to Airbnb, 222 UberPool, 9, 201, 212 UberPop, 202 UberX, 200–201, 208, 212, 213n Udacity, 324–25 unbundling, 145–48, 313–14 unit drive, 20, 23 Universal Music Group, 134 University of Louisville, 11 University of Nicosia, 289 unlimited service ClassPass Unlimited, 178–79, 184 Postmates Plus Unlimited, 185 Rent the Runway, 187–88 unsupervised learning, 76, 80–81 Upwork, 189, 261 Urmson, Chris, 82 used car market, information asymmetry and, 207 Usenet, 229, 271 user experience/interface as platforms’ best weapon, 211 and successful platforms, 169–74 users, as code developers, 242 “Uses of Knowledge in Society, The” (Hayek), 235–37 utilization rate, O2O platforms, 196–97 Van Alstyne, Marshall, 148 Van As, Richard, 272–74 Vancouver, Canada, Uber prohibition in, 202 venture capital, DAO vs., 302 verifiability, 248 verifiable/reversible contributions, 242–43 Verizon, 96, 232n Veronica Mars (movie), 262 Veronica Mars (TV show), 261–62 Viant, 171 video games, AI research and, 75 videos, crowd-generated, 231–32 Viper, 163 virtualization, 89–93; See also robotics vision, Cambrian Explosion and, 95 “Voice of America” (Wright), 229–30 von Hippel, Eric, 265 wage declines, 332 Wagner, Dan, 48–50 Waldfogel, Joel, 144 Wales, Jimmy, 234, 246–48 Walgreens, 185 Walmart, 7, 47 Wanamaker, John, 8–9 warehousing, 102–3, 188 Warner Brothers, 262 Warner Music Group, 134 Washington Post, 132 Washio, 191n waste reduction, 197 Watson (IBM supercomputer) health claim processing, 83 Jeopardy!

But by March of 2016, Uber was handling 50 million rides per month in the United States. The great majority of Uber’s ride suppliers were not professional chauffeurs; they were simply people who wanted to make money with their labor and their cars. So how did this huge market overcome severe information asymmetries? In 2013, California passed regulations mandating that transportation network companies (TNCs) such as Uber and Lyft conduct criminal background checks on their drivers. These checks certainly provided some reassurance, but they were not the whole story. After all, UberX and its competitor Lyft both grew rapidly before background checks were in place, and by August 2016, BlaBlaCar still did not require them for its drivers.


pages: 296 words: 83,254

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, carbon footprint, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

“Zaarly Shutters Its Reverse Craigslist Marketplace, Goes All In on Virtual Storefronts, as Co-founder Exits.” Tech Crunch, March 9, 2013. Entis, Laura. 2014. “ ‘We’re the Uber of X!’ ” Entrepreneur, August 12, 2014. Erhardt, Gregory D., Sneha Roy, Drew Cooper, Bhargava Sana, Mei Chen, and Joe Castiglione. 2019. “Do Transportation Network Companies Decrease or Increase Congestion?” Science Advances 5 (5): eaau2670. Eubanks, Virginia. 2018. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York: St. Martin’s. Fang, Lee. 2019. “Google Hired Gig Economy Workers to Improve Artificial Intelligence in Controversial Drone-Targeting Project.”

“The ‘Sharing’ Economy—Issues Facing Platforms, Participants & Regulators.” Washington, DC: Federal Trade Commission. www.ftc.gov/reports/sharing-economy-issues-facing-platforms-participants-regulators-federal-trade-commission. Ge, Yanbo, Christopher R. Knittel, Don MacKenzie, and Stephen Zoepf. 2016. “Racial and Gender Discrimination in Transportation Network Companies.” NBER Working Paper 22776. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. www.nber.org/papers/w22776?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_medium=email&utm_source=ntw. Georgakas, Dan, and Marvin Surkin. 2012. Detroit, I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Gilmore, Savannah. 2018.


pages: 340 words: 92,904

Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars by Samuel I. Schwartz

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, car-free, City Beautiful movement, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Enrique Peñalosa, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the wheel, lake wobegon effect, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, longitudinal study, Lyft, Masdar, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, oil shock, parking minimums, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, skinny streets, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, TED Talk, the built environment, the map is not the territory, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, Wall-E, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Competitors like Sidecar (launched January of 2012) and Lyft (founded summer of 2012 as an extension of an earlier city-to-city ridesharing service known as Zimride) noticed the potential upside for a business that could extract revenue from travelers without actually investing in anything as expensive as buses, trains, or even cars; all that they needed were software algorithms and marketing. Though the California Public Utilities Commission, under pressure from existing taxi services, shut them all down, it allowed them to reopen the following year as what the state of California now calls “Transportation Network Companies.” Uber, by far the biggest kid on the ridesharing block, expanded to Paris, Toronto, and London in 2012, and hasn’t looked back. By 2015 you could download the Uber app to your smartphone and request an Uber pickup in more than two hundred cities in forty-five countries.e This kind of growth attracts all sorts of attention.

Ferguson, 215 and positive feedback, 213 and racial discrimination, 214–219 redistributive or vertical, 214 return-to-source or horizontal, 214 and TEA-21, SAFETEA, and MAP-21 bills, 213–214, 214n See also Transportation Transportation infrastructure, 228–230 and ASCE Report Card on roads, 206–208 building and maintaining, 229–230 car-centric, future of, 69–70 deficient and obsolete, 228–229 investment in, 228–229 See also Bridges; Roads; Transportation Transportation Network Companies, 199 Transportation network(s) and attractors, 163–164, 166 in Boston, 166, 167, 188 and cars, 180 in Charleston, 166–170 and destination, 164, 165 and geometry, 163 in Houston, 171–173, 220 multimodal/multinodal, 61, 157, 163–165, 169, 180–181 in New York City, 48–63, 212 in Paris, 166–167, 167 (map) and power grid, comparison between, 208 and reliability and frequency, 170–171 and route maps, 170 and routes, 165 in Salt Lake City, 191–195 in San Francisco, 188 and transport modes, 164–165 and trip generation, 163–165 in Vancouver, 160–163, 165, 218 in Zurich, 174–180, 208–209 See also Grids; Transportation; Transportation systems Transportation policy and politics, 224–227 See also Transportation Transportation system(s), 156–158, 213 and connectivity, 159–160 in crisis, 61–63 and efficiency and flexibility, 156–157 and environmental concerns, 62 and gasoline, dependence on, 62 and grid patterns, 158 (see also Grids) and mobile transport devices, 209–210 and peak demand, 206 and smart cities, 208–210 See also Grids; Transportation; Transportation networks TRAX (Utah), 192–193, 194–195 Trevelyan, George Macauley, 94–95 Triborough Bridge, 30 Trip generation, 133, 163–165, 180 Trolley car, 6, 9 Trolleybus, 163, 163n, 169, 174, 175, 176, 179 Trust, 99 Tunnel engineering, 17 Uber (ride-matching/sharing service), 75, 196–205, 198n, 235 complaints against, 199–201 and liability insurance, 202–203 and surge pricing, 200, 201 and VIM, 203–204 See also Ride-matching/sharing services UberX, 199 Underhill, Paco, 143 United Cities Motor Transport, 9n United Kingdom, 116 United States leading cause of death in, 134 walking and cycling in, 150–151 University College London, 239 University of Hawaii, 231 University of Michigan, Transportation Research Institute, 73, 79 University of West Virginia, 232 Urban heat islands, 118–119 Urban Land Institute, 84 Urban living, 83–85, 84n, 85n and Millennials, 111–112 and public transit, and liberals versus conservatives, 225–226 versus suburban living, 70, 86–88, 110–112 and walking (see Walkability) See also Cities Urban Space for Pedestrians (Zupan and Pushkarev), 147 US Army, Cross-Country Motor Transport Train, 15 US Department of Defense, 183 Advanced Research Projects Agency, 233 US Department of Transportation, 209 USA Today, 199 Utah, 192–195 Utah Transit Authority (UTA), 193–195, 193n Value of a Statistical Life (VSL), 40–42 Vancouver, British Columbia, 167, 180, 218 transportation network in, 160–163, 165, 218 Vanderbilt, William K., 14, 14n Vehicle miles traveled.


pages: 375 words: 88,306

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Third, SROs must be perceived as legitimate and independent. And finally, an SRO must take advantage of participants’ reputational concerns and social capital.26 The state of California has pioneered a self-regulatory approach for one sector of the sharing economy, through the creation of Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) in 2013. As described in detail by Catherine Sandoval, the commissioner of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), at the 2015 Federal Trade Commission workshop about the sharing economy, this represents an interesting partnership between government and sharing economy platforms.

background screening, 50–51 contractor classification and, 160, 161 new social safety net and, 191 platform, 43–44 platform independence, 194 pricing, supply, and merchandizing, 194 TechCrunch, 11 Telang, Rahul, 112 Teran, Dan, 160 “There’s an Uber for Everything” (Fowler), 11 Thierer, Adam, 146 Thin sharing economies, 34 Threadless, 76 ThreeBirdNest, 107, 125, 177 3-D printing, 57–58 Thumbtack, 3, 6, 77, 164 Tiger Global Management, 25 TimeRepublik, 35 TimesFree, 43 Timms, Henry, 23, 136 Tincq, Benjamin, 23–25, 199 Tool libraries, 15 Total factor productivity (TFP), 116–117 Trade School, 43, 82 Traity, 64–65, 98 Transparency, mandated, 157 Transportation Network Companies (TNCs), 153 Trust, 4, 6, 12, 28, 35, 39, 47–50 brand-based, 144–146 history of (in world trade), 142–143 digitization of, 60–65 reputation and, 97–98 Tujia, 6, 121 Tumblr, 85 Turkle, Sherry, 45 Turo, 3, 80, 107, 177, 190 Tusk, Bradley, 136 Tuzhilin, Alexander, 112 Twitter, 29, 85 Uber, 2, 3, 6, 10, 19, 48, 154, 161, 186, 197, 203 class-action lawsuit and, 160 consumer behavior changed by “data Darwinism” and, 200–201 data science and, 157, 200–201 driver classifications, 159, 160, 176, 182, 183 driver protests, 200 entrepreneurial nature of, 192, 194 financing of, 25 gift economy aspects, 35 impact on traditional taxis, 122–123 local network effects, 119–120 as microbusiness, 77, 113 new social safety net and, 191 platform, 84 platform independence, 194 pricing, supply, and merchandizing, 194, 195 regulatory challenges, 135 social capital and, 62, 64 trust and, 145 UberPool, 66 “Uber Alles” (Surowecki), 19 Ulbricht, Ross, 86 Union Square Ventures (USV), 17, 23, 25, 85–86, 90, 157, 189 United States Conference of Mayors, 131, 147 Universal Avenue, 77 UnSYSTEM, 85–86 Upwork, 77, 162, 163.


pages: 441 words: 96,534

Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution by Janette Sadik-Khan

autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, business cycle, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crowdsourcing, digital map, Donald Shoup, edge city, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, fixed-gear, gentrification, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, megaproject, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, self-driving car, sharing economy, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

This wave of change has landed on our streets, and these changes will advance how we get around cities and use our streets. A smartphone can eliminate the anxiety of getting around, whether you’re in Boston, Bangalore, or Buenos Aires. But these new apps also pose big questions. While new transportation services like Uber and Lyft (called transportation network companies or TNCs in transport-speak), or shared-vehicle services like Car2Go, Zipcar, and Bridj, are using technology to dramatically lower the operating and entry costs for taxi and car services, they raise questions about social equity, safety, and the true costs of these popular services. Without a regulatory framework, cities could see outcomes that run counter to goals of mobility, sustainability, accessibility, and social equity.

See also specific projects chief mission, xiv–xvi DOT Academy, 39 head count, xiv–xv implementation of projects, xvi job offer by Bloomberg, xi–xii, xiii, xiv, 37 Planning and Sustainability Division, 38 PlaNYC. See PlaNYC Transportation Department, United States (USDOT), 212, 229–30, 238 Transportation network companies (TNCs), 284–85 Transport for London, 129, 132, 258 Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, 15 Tri-State Transportation Campaign, xiv, 177, 236 Trottenberg, Polly, 229–30 Trucks and trucking, 277–78 Turner, Matthew, 62 Twelve-foot lanes, 49–51 23rd Street, Madison Square plaza, 85, 86, 86–89, 88 Two-way model street, 56–59, 57 rearranging, 58–59, 58–59 U Uber, 284–85 Union Square, 85, 93 United Nations (UN), 15, 228 United States Department of Transportation (USDOT), 212, 229–30, 238 University of Toronto, 62 Urban density.


pages: 190 words: 62,941

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination by Adam Lashinsky

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Benchmark Capital, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google X / Alphabet X, hustle culture, independent contractor, information retrieval, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, new economy, pattern recognition, price mechanism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, young professional

“We were a bunch of happy warriors.” State legislatures are quirky places, often meeting only part time, and 2015 happened to be a big year for Uber because most states were in session. Kay monitored the various jurisdictions where Uber was under attack. A Seattle ordinance, for example, capped “transportation network companies,” or TNCs, at one hundred vehicles at a time. Kay worked on legislation in Colorado, which swung from regulation so restrictive it would shut down Uber in Denver to passing one of the first laws that lightly regulated and legalized ridesharing throughout the state. She eventually moved on to Las Vegas, the first city Uber pulled out of and where it eventually won the right to do business—in 2015.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Driven by an aggressive CEO, a stronger technical focus on logistics and marketplace incentives, a take-no-prisoners corporate culture, and huge amounts of capital, it has spent billions to outpace its rivals. Lyft is still a strong contender in the United States, gaining, but in distant second place. The amount of capital raised turned out to be surprisingly important. While the transportation network companies, or TNCs, as they are sometimes called, don’t have to spend money buying cars, they have spent billions on marketing, subsidized fares, and driver incentives in a race to build the biggest network of customers and drivers. Uber’s willingness to sidestep regulators was also part of its success.

For this multi-factor optimization to work, though, Uber and Lyft have to make a deep commitment to evolving their algorithms to take into account all of the stakeholders in their marketplace. It is not clear that they are doing so. Understanding the differences between means and ends is a good way to help untangle the regulatory disagreements between the TNCs (transportation network companies) and taxi and limousine regulators. Both parties want enough safe, qualified drivers available to meet the needs of any passenger who wants a ride, but not so many drivers that drivers don’t make enough money to keep up their cars and give good service. The regulators believe that the best way to achieve these objectives is to limit the number of drivers, and to certify those drivers in advance by issuing special business licenses.


pages: 234 words: 67,589

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Finally, the legal classification of ride-hail drivers as independent contractors is a pillar of the business model, since it keeps labor costs low. Each of these elements is inseparable from the internet. The fact that Uber is an internet company has helped it persuade politicians and regulators that it should be exempt from a century of taxi regulations—indeed, that it represents a novel corporate form, a “Transportation Network Company.” Similarly, Uber’s large trove of data, manufactured through the internet, has helped convince investors to finance the firm so generously. And the managerial algorithms that this data nourishes have helped maintain the fiction that drivers are independent contractors, as bossing people around through an app camouflages the reality of Uber’s rule.


pages: 294 words: 82,438

Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World by Donald Sull, Kathleen M. Eisenhardt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Apollo 13, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, complexity theory, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, diversification, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, machine translation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, Network effects, obamacare, Paul Graham, performance metric, price anchoring, RAND corporation, risk/return, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Startup school, statistical model, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Wall-E, web application, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Airbnb is among the most successful of the shared-economy companies. Unlike many traditional businesses, shared-economy companies have no single base of customers. Rather, these companies provide two-sided markets that connect sellers (or people with something to share) with buyers (who are willing to pay for the product or service)—like the transportation-network company Lyft, which connects passengers who need a ride to drivers who have a car, and TaskRabbit, an errand-outsourcing company that connects people who need something done with “taskers” who will do the job. For Airbnb, it’s connecting local residents with room to spare and travelers who need a place to stay.


pages: 366 words: 94,209

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Dollars),” statista.com, 2015. 22. Media Squat, WFMU, June 8, 2009. 23. Megan Rose Dickey, “We Talked to Uber Drivers—Here’s How Much They Really Make,” businessinsider.com, July 18, 2014. 24. Aaron Sankin, “Why New York Taxis Are Powerless Against Uber’s Price War,” dailydot.com, July 8, 2014. 25. Don Jergler, “Transportation Network Companies, Uber Liability Gap Worry Insurers,” insurancejournal.com, February 10, 2014. 26. Tim Bradshaw, “Uber’s Tactics Pay Off as It Goes Head to Head with US Rival,” ft.com, September 11, 2014. 27. Fred Wilson, “Platform Monopolies,” avc.com, July 13, 2014. 28. David Streitfeld, “Amazon, a Friendly Giant as Long as It’s Fed,” nytimes.com, July 12, 2014. 29.


pages: 324 words: 89,875

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

By focusing on partnering with global platform companies, Adyen has grown quickly. From 2013 to 2014, its revenue nearly doubled, from $95 million to $185 million, and in 2014, the company secured $250 million from investors, which valued it at $1.5 billion.1 Uber first started working with Adyen in 2012, when the transportation-network company first launched in the Netherlands. Adyen has since helped Uber expand to dozens of markets on six continents. It adapts its payments solution to regional differences in regulations and payments infrastructure, so that its client companies can accept payments in nearly 200 countries. “In the fast-moving, high-growth curve that unicorns go through, speed to market and removing complexity are paramount,” Adyen CEO Pieter van der Does says.


pages: 373 words: 112,822

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Boris Johnson, Burning Man, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collaborative consumption, data science, Didi Chuxing, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, East Village, fake it until you make it, fixed income, gentrification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, inflight wifi, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Necker cube, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, race to the bottom, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

The decision by the five PUC commissioners on the ridesharing companies was ultimately unanimous. Under Michael Peevey’s influential direction, and with letters of support from Mayor Ed Lee in San Francisco and Mayor Eric Garcetti in Los Angeles, Peevey and the four other commissioners voted to formally legalize ridesharing, classified the firms as “transportation network companies,” and said they would revisit the ruling in a year. The new rules required the companies to, among other things, report the average number of hours and miles each driver spent on the road every year—a requirement Uber would subsequently ignore, racking up millions in fines.27 It also reiterated that the companies were required to hold a million dollars in supplemental insurance to cover drivers, but only while passengers were in their car—a provision that was soon shown to be tragically inadequate.28 Nevertheless, the ruling legitimized the TNCs and gave them ammunition for coming legal fights in other states and countries.


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

But it has been forced to take a crash course in the political and legal grammar of innovation, because it has faced mounting opposition from competitors, trade unions, and authorities. Its opponents are calling for it to be either forced out of business or regulated to make it behave and operate just like every other taxi firm it competes with. As you might have guessed, the company in question is Uber – the San Francisco-based transport network company offering services via an app. UberPop, its peer-to-peer car-sharing service using unlicensed drivers, closed in France following the men’s arrest and all the protests against the service. Trade unions had taken strike action in protest against Uber, and some of them became violent. They burnt tires and aggressively harassed Uber drivers and their passengers.


pages: 527 words: 147,690

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

When a group of Uber drivers assembled outside the company’s headquarters to protest their firing, the company’s general manager said that the drivers weren’t employees and that, when they were fired, it simply amounted to deactivating the drivers’ accounts. The given reason? Low ratings from passengers. This insouciance is built into Uber, which calls itself a software company, or alternatively, a transportation network company, rather than a taxi company. (Sidecar identifies as a peer-to-peer ride-sharing service.) Uber is also known for flouting local laws by setting up business in a new city without speaking to officials responsible for managing the transport sector. There’s a great deal of unacknowledged work involved in the sharing economy.