Communicating with a distant friend twenty years ago meant that I would have to send a hastily composed letter or, gasp, ask my parents if I could call long-distance. E-mail and the internet weren’t pervasive and there were no apps that would alert me to how influential I was on the internet based on the cat pictures I post. Smartphones combined with constant internet presence have changed the way that we interact with our surroundings and our expectations.
New web-based start-ups have helped revolutionize our daily experiences by capitalizing on this internet availability, solving many tiny problems that we didn’t even know we had before. I can be alerted when a parking spot opens up downtown, know what song is playing on the radio, and stay in constant contact with the entire world at any moment. For these services we typically regard new tech start ups and their entrepreneurial founders in a much more positive manner than entrenched multinational corporations. This regard even extends past a general liking towards these companies, but also forgiveness for when they stumble. No matter the privacy problems I still use Gmail and at this moment photos are flying back and forth on snapchat even though their entire database of users was compromised
One company that I would like to focus on is Uber. They’re a start-up that has focused on having their own stable of contracted taxi drivers and pairing that with a smartphone app so a cab can be hailed at any time, from anywhere. They fit a stereotypical niche in silicon valley, where they are revolutionizing a pre-existing industry by adding technology and thus easing our collective pain of hailing a cab.
They are an easy service to focus on, because the ramifications of their actions and the specter of their possible success are more noticeable. Uber practices what they term ‘Surge Pricing’, where the cost of a cab goes up with lack of availability (in other circles it is more honestly referred to as ‘Price Gouging’). This financial incentive is supposed to encourage other drivers to pick up shifts and ease the lack of supply, but really, when these situations hit (like the horrible snow storms recently in the central and east or New Year’s Eve night even), the situation won’t change for hours.
Naively we could say if there is demand then services that employ cab drivers should be able to charge what the market can bear. The problem is that it transforms getting a hold a cab from a service that we can (sort of) depend on as residents to one that you shouldn’t even really consider unless you are in desperate need or have no real concern for the cost. While there are competitors that mimic Uber’s approach (Lyft and others), Uber is desperately trying to push them out of the space and curry customer favor by dropping prices dramatically for a very short term (these discounts are only expected to last for 6 week). At the same time, there are general concerns of the relative safety we can expect from Uber drivers after one hit and killed a small child crossing the street (don’t worry, Uber’s insurance won’t cover it since the driver wasn’t actively giving a ride to client at the time).
Earlier on in their existence most people wrote about how they were brave upstarts fighting an entrenched bureaucratic organization in order to provide a better service. While they have fought in numerous cities across the country in order to have their service there (taxi cab associations and their regulating bodies are of course against their existence), they have also tried to not have nearly the same amount of restrictions applied to them. This lack of adherence to the standard process is finally starting to blow up in our faces and I think that we should learn from it.
We are at a point where web companies no longer just sell us products and deliver them or provide a clearinghouse for our thoughts that always stay digital. We are pushing out into this new/odd area of web companies that serve as clearinghouses for real physical services from others (like renting someone else’s room on AirBnB) and I think it has pushed past just having the classifieds online.
So maybe we should ignore the typical feelings we have about how “Google and Facebook are so cool” and “this other start up is like totally amazing” and when the question of regulating these services come up say, “Yeah, let’s keep the rules the same. Because, you know, corporations are psychotic and don’t really give a fig if I get sliced up inside a serial killer’s home that I rented to recuperate in after being hit by an unlicensed cab driver I hailed from my smartphone”.
(image from Flickr)