The End of Uber with Cory Doctorow
The War on Cars
The War on Cars, LLC
4.9 • 937 Ratings
🗓️ 26 January 2022
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Remember when Uber, the mobile phone taxi-hailing app, was going to revolutionize transportation, transform cities, and lead us to our glorious robot-car future? That wasn't so long ago. So, what happened? Where did it all go? Cory Doctorow has some ideas. A prolific non-fiction author, sci-fi novelist, and technology activist Doctorow has been a keen observer and critic of Uber for years now. "Uber," Doctorow writes, "is a bezzle. Every bezzle ends. And Uber's time is up." Plus: Reality has a well known anti-car bias.
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SHOW NOTES:
End of the Line for Uber by Cory Doctorow
Pluralistic.net: Daily Links and more from Cory Doctorow
You can find two of Cory's most recent books, "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism" and "Attack Surface" at our page on Bookshop.org.
If you want to go deep, transportation analyst Hubert Horan's many articles dissecting Uber can be found here.
Follow Cory Doctorow on Twitter.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | geometry hates cars. You know if you multiply I mean I don't have to tell the war on cars this but if you multiply |
| 0:07.2 | you know all of the journeys by the space that the car occupies in the road by the amount of road that you need by the distance that that pushes people apart because you have to build more roads. |
| 0:18.0 | You are in a Red Queen's race that you cannot win. |
| 0:21.0 | Hey, it's Aaron. cannot win. |
| 0:26.0 | Hey, it's Aaron Napa Stack here. Welcome to the War on Cars. |
| 0:30.0 | Remember Uber, the taxi hailing app with global ambition? |
| 0:35.0 | Uber was going to be the next Google or Apple or Ford Motor Company. |
| 0:39.6 | It was going to reshape our cities, give us self-driving cars, and touch everyone's life every day, |
| 0:45.0 | everywhere around the world. |
| 0:48.2 | Uber made its public offering in May of 2019. |
| 0:51.8 | The result was the biggest first day dollar loss in the history of the |
| 0:56.2 | U.S. stock market. While millions of smaller investors lost their shirts, |
| 1:00.9 | Uber's Wall Street underwriters, and earliest venture capital backers made piles of money. |
| 1:07.5 | As for all the hype about Uber being the future of transportation, that vaporized too. Our guest today is Corey Doctorow. He is a prolific |
| 1:17.4 | novelist journalist and technology activist and he has been a sharp observer and critic of Uber from the beginning. |
| 1:25.0 | Dr. Rose's work focuses on themes of individual and communal self-determination |
| 1:31.0 | in a world where technology monopolies rule and so much of our |
| 1:36.1 | cultural political economic and social life plays out on digital platforms over which we |
| 1:42.1 | have very little control. I had a great |
| 1:45.0 | conversation with Corey about Uber and what he sees as its fundamental flaws, |
| 1:49.3 | its inevitable demise, and its likely legacy. |
| 1:54.0 | But before we get to that, a quick word from our sponsor. |
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