Perspective matters! Here’s where I am standing:
I’m among a growing cacophony of voices telling you that Uber is bullshit, but I think that I’ve a rather unusual reason for my beliefs. Suppose, for a moment that you consider automobile use as a societal evil forced on us by really awful planning and really great marketing. Suppose that you were one of the early bunch of the Napster + Linux generation, forced to consider the concept of copyright at a young age, and finding the claims of the “injured” parties to ring quite hollow. Suppose again, that you’ve been rather obsessed with the concept of connecting everyone on earth without cost for the better part of two decades. Well, in that case, you’d get me…. But I do not think that I am unique — in fact, I think I’m quite normal among those who have lived connected lives.
The P2P argument:
Uber claims that it is a peer to peer service, except… Let’s examine topology:
A peer to peer network (video of bittorrent P2P network)
Simple photo of a P2P network
Why's this matter?
Peer to peer networks are known for being extremely resilient, and this plays out in the real world. Independent actors of similar rank serving one another’s needs works well in both computer systems and in human social systems. Uber isn’t even close to P2P, however. Here’s a Diagram of Uber:
Except… It’s not. Uber runs the entire network and in the end Uber is largely extractive. Uber is doing nothing more than:
- Marketing very well
- using Venture Capital to ensure industry dominance and undercut existing models (which are also bullshit, mind you)
- I'm talking about you, taxi medallions, and you, medallion financial.
- Using its actual role as a marketplace to claim that it is offering peer to peer services.
- Exploiting multiple concurrent technological trends in order to capture an obvious future market: Consumers liberated from their cars by autonomous vehicle technology.
Remember folks, you won’t be driving much longer — you’ll consider it too dangerous for humans to drive, and thus in 3 years Uber is merely a money pump and a large autonomous fleet that has nothing whatsoever to do with "sharing"-- except maybe the autonomus vehicles themselves.
A global response to a global plague
There *is* without any doubt a way to solve “the uber problem.” If this is a business model you can get behind, and you’d like to invest in, I’m game to set it up with you. If you’re already developing it, then I’m game to host your servers for free and collaborate with you on marketing and implementation. Here’s how to build Uber for a better world:
- Thousands of independently run servers using a compatible protocol to orchestrate the movement of people and services, independently setting their own platform rates.
- Open server platform used to provide anonymized data for cities.
- Hundreds of consumer app choices.
- Passengers never even give the app their name, and can pay in either cryptocurrency or cash.
- A fixed 2% platform fee: 1% for server hosts and 1% for programmers.
- Drivers can set their own rates for each trip depending on their opinion.
- Drivers can also have pre-fixed rates that they’ve programmed into the platform.
- Customers can meaningfully connect with drivers, and request them in the future.
- Native carpool support.
- Air Travel support.
- Water travel support.
- Space Travel Support.
- To save time, the app defaults to calculating by the area’s cost per kilometer and the premium or reduction in fee for the driver’s vehicle type (of course we allow motorcycles as a transit choice — the transaction is genuinely P2P now!)
- Passengers can accept or decline the driver’s offer.
- Routines can be pre-programmed and (the correct) vehicles automatically allocated.
- When driving is automated, diverse preferences create diverse options, and transportation does not become a monopoly.
I could keep going, too. The open, inclusive way is better for everyone. Venture capitalists, stop funding leeches. In the end, your fund foots the bill for things like Uber's operations in China, which any Chinese person in any Chinese city can tell you are entirely doomed.
A Shameless Plug
This is NOT my idea. This belongs to the millions who have dreamt this up and been forced to accept substandard services and ethical lapses for myriad reasons.Yes, I want the transportation system I described here to exist, and obviously I’ve spent a good deal of time thinking about it — probably every single day since a wonderful afternoon in Ghana in 2004 when I realized that there was only one direction that could create and it was P2P & resilient systems. With 6 months, an engaged community of early adopters, and a million dollars, we could build the first iteration of this code together, publicly. We’d be starting a company that only does good: can you find a victim in the cash flow of this enterprise? I tried. I can’t find a victim…..
If you’re the investor, I’d like to point out a two companies in particular that have done extremely well with 100% open development:
I hope that you now want to learn more about:
PS for steemit:
I originally wrote this article more than a year ago now. Uber remains bullshit. My current work is on a global network of very small but relatively powerful computers that will be able to power applications like the one described in this article. My work centers around the intersecting trends of the internet of things, user-centric design, physicalization/tokenization of virtual objects, blockchains, internet decentralization, open source and hardware manufacturing. I run a company called the Kloudery with my partner in networked chaos, Brenn Hill.