Blurred Lines: the emergence of Uber and disruption
a paradigm-setting case that provided key enabling conditions for the stupidity of e-scooters
After finishing the first of three planned pieces on the stupid, stubborn, surreal presence of the e-scooter, I realised there was a lot that had to be said about disruption for any of this to make sense.
What follows is a section I wrote from an aborted book; on re-reading, I think it gives a fit for purpose descriptive analysis of the blurred lines disruption enabled, while the example of Uber, which was paradigm setting, is about so much more than just getting a ride or being taken for one. Again and as always: transport is never (only) about transport.
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In the year following the Global Financial Crisis – the 365 days from September 2008 – big labels and clunky acronyms competed for narrative attention, masking panicked uncertainties. It was a time when the zeitgeist itself – in the Anglocapitalist world – became unclear and uncertain, stuttering for a prolonged moment.
Considering the following then-current framings, as questions:
Was the time from 2008 an opening era of hope and change, led by a smart, articulate Black US president – even after the Obama Presidency bailed out Wall Street?
Would the BRICs* (Brazil, Russia, India, China) define the political economy of the coming decade, with their large landmass and populations and rapid GDP growth? Would the BRICs manage to avoid the fate of the PIGs (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain), with their bad debts, small and ageing populations, and falling GDP?
Would the combination of Moore’s Law, 4G, the pervasion of mobile email on BlackBerry, and the ‘democratising potential inherent in the Internet’, help billions of ordinary people resist tyranny and ‘free the world’ from legacy media monopolies, corruption, bureaucracy, and autocracy?
Could the overcoming of global hunger and the massive reduction in poverty, especially that overseen in China by its Party state, square the ecological circle between ‘peak oil’, ‘global warming’, urbanisation, and global population growth?
As the dark alley alternatives of these many interacting processes, would global shadows not creep in and overwhelm these ‘new’ dynamics of 21C life, leading to a near future of spiralling crisis, pervasive geopolitical weakness, societal breakdown, and the pervasion of nothing but the frustration of cancelled hopes and cultural variants of the the ‘nasty clique battles’ of a post-political global racket society, already outlined at its dystopian horizon by Adorno in 1964?
Constellating the dynamic tension between Adorno’s ’64 hopeless futurity and the bright possibilities of ’08 ‘hope and change’ Obama, how can we glance back and think about how disruption cast its spell over so many people during the 2010s? For without the power of disruption as one among a number of enabling conditions, e-scooters, and their stupidity, might not have become the futile, dignity-free jama I argued they pervasively are.
Looking back ‘fifteen years ago’ to re-tension disruption’s points of emergence, it’s clearer now to see how the Global Financial Crisis upset the hubristic certainties of Anglocapitalist hegemony by default that had attended what we can now – arguably – see as the historical period of ‘the end of history’, the two decades between 1989-2009, which I wrote about here.
The unchallenged global centre suddenly stuttered, but had to hold. And yet, the syndicated confidence of bright-teethed, loud-mouthed American spokespeople left over from those high 90s – the likes of Thomas Friedman and Fareed Zakaria – were still caught in their new millennium GWoT narrative of ‘full spectrum dominance’. These boosters of American-Dominance-Goodness did ‘not yet, not quite’ feel the need to give a substantive account of the manifold places and regions where 90% of the world actually lived – and how they did – as if it really mattered outside and beyond the metanarrative of neoliberal globalisation and case studies about the ‘development’ of the ‘developing countries’. But by 2010, the GFC had definitively corroded the bright smiling faces that had presented the unblinking self-presumption of American primacy after ’89, without having a strong sense of viable competitor alternatives, counter-ideological models, and polycratic narratives.
It was around this time, 2010, that disruption congealed.
2010- : disruption’s ascendency, Uber as paragon, operating ‘above and beyond law’, shady tactics, sharp practice, titanic vision, and the cover of the disruption narrative.
By 2010-11 – after 2009 – the complexity and indeterminacy of the two post-GFC years was reassembled into a way of thinking about the new decade that Anglocapitalism was making – by breaking and entering. Disruption recombined venture capital, digital technology, and Randian entrepreneurialism, boosted by Stanford and Harvard MBA Kool Aid.
Looking back, we should give primacy to the oceans of venture capital available in the 2010s, and notice how this was pump primed by trillions in USD and EUR at negligible interest rates due to quantitative easing, rendered urgent by the need of anyone living on compound interest (retirees, pension funds, the global wealthy) for 7-10% returns, and made compelling by the ‘sudden’ and undeniable success of magical-quality G search, social media, one-click service delivery – and smartphones, above all.
Moreover, disruption made total cultural sense, in relation to a ready-to-hand, ready-to-Rand cultural model of heroic success whose founder CEOs embodied the remorseless will-to-domination of Lance Armstrong and the relentless positive thinking of Norman Vincent Peale. From the myopic, self-referential, self-mystified observer position of the 2010s Anglosphere (to 2017), the Anglocapitalist 2010s was the (short) decade of disruption: its mantra was Travis Kalanick’s “always be hustlin’”, implying as it does the grey spaces of the shady anthem of 2013 America, Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’.
As Alex Hochuli noticed in 2021,
“The company, like many others of its kind, is a “bezzle”—John Kenneth Galbraith’s name for legalized larceny. Again, the illicit and licit are two sides of the same coin; it is in these gray spaces where the hustler flourishes”.
With these sketched points in mind, what was disruption, actually; how did it work in these grey spaces, who did it work for – and, if we follow the money, was disruption something more ambiguous and unctuous – something that sticks to us and smells (less fresh than a Mentos in a 2015 Uber passenger seat)?
As it entered the 2010s, disruption was a shortening of ‘disruptive innovation’, laid out in the late 90s writings of Clayton Christensen, and spread in the 2000s by American MBA programs and interviews with its graduate entrepreneurs in the North Atlantic business press. In line with other accounts, like Lepore’s from 2014, Christensen’s work attempted to explain how technology and social change interacted in the global corporate world of the End of History. Above all, disruption was a story about how ‘outsiders’ innovate by upsetting ‘incumbents’. Disruption’s story was one where upstart-upsetter disruptors enter a with a cheaper offering, creating a fresh, appealingly efficient alternative, generating a new customer base, category, or market that, in any famously successful case, changes the way business is done – and, in a ‘world champion instance’, destroys that field’s global incumbents in the process.
As a cryptic crossword clue, ‘disruptive innovation’ = ‘creative destruction’.
We should keep noticing how this means we’ve come to accept destruction as innovation.
Disruption in the early 2010s was also a moral discourse about amoral agents, a story about how ruthless heroes who would stop at nothing to create societal beneficence, pitilessly cracking (nasty, old!) eggs to make (fresh, nutritious!) omelettes. Its heroes were societal alchemists willing to do bad things to produce good outcomes, in ways that made them heroic individuals, titanic exemplars worthy of emulation (and cf 2018 Musk, as he appeared to be in the last post, several years pre Baphomet).
Competition between disruptors and (old, bad, problematic! [but still pre-#metoo]) incumbents was the metanarrative propagated by 2010s Silicon Valley, and Uber, Tesla, Google Maps and Air BnB its most unambiguous and consequential avatars. In hindsight, 2010s disruption was a paranoid-schizoid narrative, marked by a black and white moral polarity pitting the ‘new, good, solutions’ of heroic disruptors against ‘old, bad, problematic’ incumbents: disruption, all good; incumbents, all bad.
The absence of ambivalence should have alerted critical publics to substantive issues attending its uncritical embrace. Until 2017, they did not, and there were few paying skeptical yet close attention; why not, why so? This question reverberates into the present when considering dockless bike hire schemes, as well as e-scooters, so keep it in mind, and keep wondering: where are the critical publics and the journalists?
Disruption’s conquering narrative and moral loading created cover, and the broad willingness and large publics to suspend their disbelief and come along for the ride with it created a time-sensitive yet prolonged moment in which it lasted – for several years from 2010, before evaporating around 2017. As with the Victorian and Californian Gold Rushes, or the popular opinion of the majority in favour of war in 1914-15 in all combatant countries once war broke out, what we have to reckon with when thinking is just how popular disurption was, how it overflowed Silicon Valley, inundated the world’s cities, and spilled into the highest levels of electoral politics, across a number of cultures, some very distant from the USA. Aside from the many case studies of its exploits and transformative effects, disruption should be seen as a collective effervescence akin to those that have attended the many hypes, bubbles, manias, and rushes in human history. Disruption’s moral narrative created a festival of credulity that provided a global expo’s worth of cover that stopped its cooks from being in any way legible as crooks.
A full account of disruption would also have to dedicate a section to understanding where and how this gave a broad and buoyant societal license to entities, operations and practices that, just a few years later, would have been met with more ordinary levels of incredulity, ambivalence, and indifference.
Uber is surely a paragon of disruption.
Focusing on Uber in the years of its aggressive expansion, 2011-17, and like Google Maps in the same years (cf Zuboff’s chapter on Maps in Surveillance Capitalism), it’s worth noticing how this paragon’s success depended on using a set of tactics ‘ahead and beyond’ the law: always not yet legal, or never were nor would be. Uber was blurred lines.
This is because its executives knew its launches were illegal, deliberately engaged in hyper aggressive tactics, and worked in a highly concerted way, over many years and right across the world, to ‘lean on governments to change the law in its favour’. Yet Uber continues to operate without censure in very many of the world’s cities to the time of writing, and the ‘Uber Files’ were greeted with a collective shrug. What’s integral for understanding the relation between disruption in all this is twofold.
Firstly, throughout its years of expansion, Uber’s ‘ahead and beyond’ tactic was deployed to draw regulators into a reactive scramble where they’re tied up in their own legal-bureaucratic red tape. By design, this bought Uber time for socio-cultural acceptance, creating armies among workers and allies among platform users and giving space for aggressive lobbying of thatched in politicians, while creating socio-technical facts on the ground that tended to be seen as irreversible1.
Secondly, getting and staying ‘ahead and beyond’ the law, powered by the rocket fuel of venture capital, allowed Uber to play artfully with the broad cover created by the narrative of disruption. In the Anglosphere, this sat atop an already existing cultural license for entrepreneurial solutioneering – which successful execution entrenched the case for, while destroying the already shaky credibility of incumbents. Going ahead and ‘solving big’ by punching first and punching hard into cities, and then asking for small, specific forgiveness, became a whole way of operating, and Uber’s modus operandi co-created heroes, exemplars, imitators, and license into the package, just as the Roman Empire ‘laid itself’ and its own self-evident justification by paving its roads as it used them to move and supply its conquering legion. Good logistics always advertises its own effectiveness as it works.
Getting and staying ahead and beyond, in time, also created a ‘too late already’, wherein, if subject populations later decided ‘we’ didn’t like or want it, it would be too late to change, there would be no way to go back – and who would want to go back to the ‘bad old days’ of taxis? In these ways, first getting and staying ahead of the law was about creating a fait accompli and its durable, popular and expansive perpetuation, much like the ‘what have the Romans ever done for us’ scene in The Life of Brian.
In the case of Uber, ‘all of the above’ was, moreover, read back to receptive publics by news media in terms of the moral story of disruption, as a matter of beneficence, superior and more agentic ways of ‘seeing, doing and fixing’. After recruiting and backing drivers, then riders, and while lobbying regulators, Uber’s style of fast, decisive, all-conquering solutioneering was explained – by receptive (or harried) journalists rewording the disruptors’ press releases2 – as happening because the disruptor was ‘generously offering’ to ‘finally’ swoop in and solve the problems of city transport that incumbents could or would not fix.
Recursively (and see Vogl on recursion), this continual storytelling between drivers, riders and news media transformed ‘the disruptors’ into a group compellingly represented as giving new norms back to a values-starved society, one that had trouble reaching its destinations on time. Uber were providing urban societies with an overdue alternative that – in refreshing contrast to old monopolies and bureaucratic authority – was about solving everything, using collaboration, sharing, and apps. Disruptors and their users would work together on app-based platforms in ways that always democratised as they expanded profitably, harmonising the disruptor’s interests with those of everyone, and capitalism. At street level, this provisioning of beneficence by the disruptors heralded the long overdue fixing of simmering urban nuisances the public sector could not address, because of resources and jurisdictional limits – final mile transport, which I will return to when I get back to e-scooters, tended to be offered up in this vein.
For Uber in the expansion years, the tactical antagonist was the taxi cartels and their unions and factional backers on city councils. As a street-level counter offer to taxis, 2010s Uber was so much more appealing: no more waiting by the side of the road in the rain with your hand out hoping, no more getting ripped off by unshowered drivers in run down cars, no more problems haggling and clinching a clearly agreed and reasonable price for a ride, no more not knowing where you’re being taken, or if you’re being taken for a ride; no more rudeness and inappropriate behaviour without the recourse of the ratings system. Instead of taxis: cheaper rides (they were cheaper in those early years, thanks to VC subsidy) whose clearly known fare was agreed to with a tap of the finger, a cute visualisation of the approaching vehicle, no messing around with change at the end of the ride, and the security of knowing that if there was any in-car disagreement or driver misconduct, Uber, who monitored everything, would take care of it all, and kick the bad guys off the platform.
Somehow, we ‘knew’ this – even as we knew that Uber were the blurred lines guys. Somebody please square this circle for me; if you do so, you will have understood the post GFC 2010s in the Anglocapitalist countries.
Uber’s tactics and power plays city-by-city were down and dirty, yet its global strategic vision was titanically bigger. Uber’s broadcast strategic vision by the mid 2010s was nothing less than a revisioning of the totality of urban transport along autonomous, automated, app-hailed lines (less broadcast: with one corporation as its monopolist provider). Fossil-fuelled gridlock and climate change were proffered here as two wicked problems of global-urban 21C life that Uber’s total-planetary urban transport vision would deliver solutions for: “transport as reliable as running water - for everyone”. Für alles und über alles: Uber was enthusiastically willing to break the law to establish this transformative vision of global monopoly; doing so was integral to how it went about this as well as how its leaders understood it all; and actively supporting the corporation, in the name of this vision, was something many of us approved of and clicked for.
Uber’s strategic vision not only justified its unlawful tactics, it was self-understood by its leaders and spokespeople in relation to the moral loading of disruption’s narrative as good, proper and just. Google Maps were ‘only’ trying to show you precisely where your friend or stalk-ee lived and exactly how long it would take to get there; Air BnB were ‘just’ offering creative alternatives to overpriced hotels, and ways for the creative middle class to keep a toehold in rapidly gentrifying neighbourhoods by monetising one of the few assets they owned that could keep pace with the ROI that anyone with access to global capital could reliably expect in that decade of quantitative easing.
But uber was bigger in its talk: mid 2010s Uber proclaimed ‘moah’ for their mission, elevating disruption to a global-level, imitation-worthy moral-entrepreneurial leadership that could and should permeate scholarly research, higher education, political organisation, and ethical conduct. Uber’s total moral promise of global disruption was in how it would soar above the tar pits of politics, magically solving the world’s urban problems governments refused to address, because of bureaucratic constipation, regulatory capture, moral hazard, momentum, path dependence, and institutional corruption.
It was popular. ‘We the people’ really wanted to let them have at this, for the most part, and that was one of the real keys to Uber’s success. In the 2010s, Uber was the quintessence of disruption, and lots of people wanted it, loved it, defended it; at one point, even some French people took to the streets to demand regulators get out of the way of its expansion*.
Looking back, was Uber a racket? I urge that it was not, and this is where it is truly theoretically interesting, because it was also aggressive and shady in its wilful creation of the chaos, confusion, and blurred lines that suited its expansion. But how was it not, how is it not; for what reasons?
On launch in most cities of operation many of Uber’s operations were illegal. Uber’s executives did engage in a widely reported, well-substantiated pattern of aggressive behaviour that was coercive, sought to surveil and intimidate journalists and investigators, and actively obstructed investigations by regulators and police. This set of tactics – well detailed in the Uber Files and Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped – is quite a neat match for Torrio and Capone’s paradigm-setting expansion into Chicago’s suburbs and Cicero in the early 20s; and it also bears some comparison to Starbucks’ expansion across the world in the late 90s, a point synthesised into satire in a memorable scene of The Sopranos. If we give a distillation of Wilson’s description of rackets as ‘groups conspiring using coercive strategies in the pursuit of particularistic interests, in a field of ruthless unscrupulous competition’, Uber was, again, a model racket. And yet, Uber seems to not quite fit this picture.
In line with the characterisation given in this post, between 2010 and 2017, Uber operated under the cover of the disruption narrative. Uber made many enemies and faced stiff resistance from its detractors during its period of breakneck expansion, yet it had enthusiastic soldiers in many of its drivers, allies in its riders, and spokespeople in its lobbyists, as well as widespread public support. Lots of people loved Uber, not just for its service, but especially for how it was smashing taxis and regulators. Social license truly matters; Uber did have a widespread social license. We were all a bit blurred lines in the 2010s; that was the zeitgeist – for a few years, until #metoo.
Secondly, although Travis Kalanick’s position became untenable by 2017-18, the scandals that surrounded him, even in that year of #metoo, didn’t effect market share: Uber increased its rides in the year of its annus horribilus. In the US at least, Kalanick’s ‘blurred lines’ ethoi –
“Violence guarantees success”
“Better to ask for forgiveness than permission”
“Always be hustlin’”
were not repudiated so much as sublated by the election of an American president of that orange shyster who gloried in grabbing women by the pussy. Trump was the Uber president; he is a living embodiment of blurred lines.
We could circumscribe this point to the United States and its actual culture and values (as always disclosed in gangsta rap3); sufficed to say, there is no difference between the practices and values of Uber under Kalanick and 80-sum million voting Americans think of as the proper way of being and doing of its de facto king and sovereign, which is also the proper-ideal way to be an entrepreneur, and the proper-ideal way of being a celebrity. If Uber was a bezzle run by a hustler – and it may have been – then the bezzle and the hustler may also be two pure signatures of actually existing contemporary America.
Thirdly, considering that Uber’s operations are now legal in most jurisdictions across the world at the time of writing, it’s hard to see Uber as a racket anywhere now, even if it was using violence, intimidation and knowingly unlawful measures to clear, hold and build its operating territory, no different to the way Capone did. If the incumbent sucks (and taxis in the 2010s were less than excellent), if the disrupter upsets the scene with a better, cheaper, alternative that’s more appealing to the sovereign consumer (and Uber, as mentioned, were initially cheaper and better, while VC was paying the difference), even if Uber was a corporation engaged in sharp practice and shady dealings – to get us and itself to its destination – many might say ‘that’s just capitalism’, ‘that’s the game’4.
Finally, there’s an important distinction hidden in the cover of disruption that I place substantial weight on. In this post, I’ve fundamentally been suggesting that the narrative of disruption provided an almost magical socio-cultural cover for any number of shady tactics and any amount of sharp practice: this also provided the ‘cover’ for the amoral vacuum of post GFC Anglocapitalism, whose zeitgeist included a president like Trump and CEO founders like Kalanick, Elizabeth Holmes, Adam Neumann, and Sam Bankman-Fried. It’s all of a piece.
This cover emanated but was not at all limited to the United States; it really affected things here in little old Australia, and elsewhere. It was also highly time sensitive. Disruption’s spell wore off –and much of what Uber and the other paragons of disruption got away with wouldn’t fly so easily now as a setup (but then, incumbency, momentum and path dependency takes care of most of that for them).
But in thinking about Uber as a racket, or not, above and beyond this, there is the relatively simple yet key fact that, once we strip away the hype, Uber was not a front for anything, was not an avatar for anything except its own expansion, which was and is about accessing urban transport services using a platform dependent on the pervasion of smartphones and credit cards. Uber was, for the most part – and like the smartphone and the e-scooter – a convergence ‘device’, whose resonance really showed us how we were and who we have become. Uber was a readymade, an artful assemblage comprised of ready-to-hand societal resources supplied by contemporary cities where millions of people carrying phones are frustrated in trying and paying to get where they need to go, and where many hundreds of thousands of people can drive and need work, because they are underemployed in that selfsame environment (the post GFC social fact that created the labour pool in the US in the first place). When ascertaining the racket-ness of any given group’s entity or activity therefore, we should not only think again and again about protection, we also have to consider how the service ostensibly on offer functions as a front for the real game which is behind it. This means that front/back relations, and a degree of wilful and artful hypocrisy, including the connivance of relevant publics and officials, are usually required for something to be a racket.
For all these reasons, alongside the richness of its ambiguity and indeterminacy, the case of Uber is also valuable for how it helps us understand the ways in which groups and enterprises that fit widely used definitions are still not (quite) rackets. Wherever an entity’s conduct is a fit for the culture, norms and style by which corporations ordinarily operate, Uber shows us one among many examples where a corporation will be are lauded and applauded for working ahead and beyond the law: it is then the law’s job to catch up with practice and norms, and so it was here.
‘Ahead and beyond’ also denotes how Google Maps dealt with the many regulators who tried to oppose them by checking the illegality that attended their expansion – which was, like Uber’s, so rapid and aggressive, and so backed by received common sense and technological momentum, that it was easily made to seem unstoppable in any case.
Let’s recall that this was all happening in the same decade that Google and Facebook reamed news media; the same decade that ‘journalists’ really bit hard into Twitter, too. We were all on our phones, were we not? This is what we have to tell the grandchildren: yeah, we were all on our phones.
with East Coast being critical or rueful about the involvement in ultra violence, and East Coast glorifying in it, in either party mode, or cold mode.
Much like the move to ‘scruples’ era dominance of Prop Joe and Avon Barxdale in seasons 1–3 of The Wire, to the unscrupulous terrifying ruthlessness of Marlo, Snoop and Chris in seasons 4–5.