
Disruption for Thee, But Not for Me - cribbles
http://locusmag.com/2019/01/cory-doctorow-disruption-for-thee-but-not-for-me/
======
geofft
The closest thing we have to a meta-service is Meta-Elsevier, more popularly
known as Sci-Hub, which works so well simply because it doesn't care about
legality. It's hosted outside the US on a slowly changing list of TLDs, and so
it doesn't have to worry about _any_ form of copyright law, not just the DMCA.

I think if you wanted to build more services like this, you'd have to go this
approach: instead of building an above-board app that uses the Uber API and
has developer info on file with Apple and Google, anonymously develop a tool
for jailbroken phones that injects itself into the Uber app and monitors
requests. Instead of building a website that scrapes Amazon centrally, build a
browser extension with permissions on amazon.com. And so forth.

The arms-length approach of meta apps helps here, because then individual
ride-sharing coops and bookstores get plausible deniability. They're not
telling you to use the app, it's a shadowy foreign group who decided to link
to them.

~~~
IWeldMelons
Sci-Hub is Kazakhstani creation actually.

~~~
Fins
It's Putin's creation to much greater degree than Kazakhstani, Elbakyan is not
Kazakh at all, she just happened to be born there.

~~~
IWeldMelons
You've never lived there I guess, in the former USSR. Elbakyan is of Armenia
ethnicty, who was born in Kazakhstan (hence she is Kazakhtani, not Kazakh).
And her native language is Russian, so is the native language of many Kazakh
people who lives in the bigger cities of Kazakhstan.

------
cs702
The main challenge to _successful_ (i.e., market-dominating) cooperatively-
owned platforms like the ones Cory wants is that usually there are no
incentives that motivate _individuals_ to dedicate their lives and souls in
the creation, launching, running, and perpetual improvement of such platforms
for the benefit of others.

The exceptions, including successful projects like GNU and Linux, tend to be
led by rather unique individuals, like Richard Stallman and Linus Torvals, who
are almost religiously zealous about their mission, and they maintain their
commitment year after year, and decade after decade, without any personal
profit motive.

Barring these exceptions, Capitalism seems to be the "least-worst solution" to
this problem that human civilization has evolved over millennia, so far.

~~~
zozbot123
Creating a federated platform is technically quite feasible. E-mail, the Web,
Usenet (before it was overrun by spam anyway), IRC... plus these days, stuff
like PeerTube and Mastodon. Sure, not every one of these is "successful", but
the trend is there.

~~~
blfr
The trend is definitely not there. The trend is away from IRC towards Slack,
away from open web to walled gardens (or trashpiles) of Facebook, away from
Usenet towards unfederated forums like this one.

~~~
simias
I agree but:

>[...] away from Usenet towards unfederated forums like this one.

We're actually one step beyond that already, the era of forums is behind us,
now people open a Facebook page or Subreddit when they want to create a
community around a given topic instead of powering up a new PHPBB instance
like they might have 15 years ago. Forums like HN are getting increasingly
niche.

I don't like this trend but I think it makes complete sense. Centralized
solutions offer generally better user experience (you don't have to monitor 10
different websites or watch your emails for notifications, you don't have to
create dozen of accounts etc...), they're easier to develop, easier to
maintain and, perhaps critically, easier to monetize.

These days I only see the cryptocurrency communities betting on a
decentralized future (instead of merely wishing for it without much hope like
I do).

------
lordnacho
He's making a very important point here about the free market. In what sense
is it free? What is a reasonable thing to hold someone to, contractually?

There's a real lack of thinking about what the free market should actually
mean. It's almost always couched in industrial era terms when it does come up,
esp in relation to Uber and the gig economy. "Labour" has a very different
meaning now to what it meant back in the 1800s.

Good episode of South Park talks about this, "The Human CentiPad". Basically
the boys fall foul of an Apple agreement and something bad happens. Really
bad.

~~~
jessaustin
I'm glad you warned us that the something that happens is really bad. I
wouldn't have guessed from the episode title... b^)

------
em3rgent0rdr
This article is a good time to plug LibreTaxi:

"Free and open source alternative to Uber/Lyft connecting passengers and
drivers. LibreTaxi makes ridesharing affordable by getting rid of the third
party between passengers and drivers. Negotiate the price before the ride is
confirmed, pay cash upon arrival. 1-minute hiring for all drivers."
[https://libretaxi.org/](https://libretaxi.org/)

~~~
Kiro
Who has cash nowadays though?

~~~
sincerely
Someone who doesn't carry cash is someone who doesn't do anything
interesting...

~~~
Kiro
What is that supposed to mean? In my country cash is virtually non-existent.

~~~
capitalsigma
In the US I hardly ever use cash.

------
jelling
Doctorow, per usual, writes with the certainty of an out of shape sportswriter
playing Monday morning quarterback. He just doesn't know what he's talking
about.

For example, he says "Uber...allows them to illegally discriminate against
people with disabilities" Does he really not know the long history of cab
drivers not stopping for black passengers? This has been frontpage news on
multiple occasions, most famously with Danny Glover. Multiple friends have
told me how much Uber/Lyft have improved this situation.

Meanwhile, Doctorow's meta platform idea literally steals revenue from people
who have added tremendous value not only at time of transaction but after via
the reputational system and other customer service functions. Nevermind that
it would be trivial for Uber to squash this via cancellation fees and driver
derankings.

If you want to form a co-op app, go for it. But find a better thought leader
than Doctorow.

~~~
cribbles
The racist cab pickup issue occurred to me too, but it’s not in conflict with
his overall argument. Doctorow allows that the ride hailing app experience
(not to be mistaken with to the “ride sharing” business model) is, in most
respects, a foundational improvement upon the old taxi pickup experience. This
is not mutually exclusive with the claim that Uber, et al.’s business
practices (i.e. circumvention of any and all possible tax and labor laws)
introduce a unique set of problems for riders and drivers alike.

~~~
jelling
You may be right about the tax issues. My criticism was of his attempt to hang
all of society's ills on Uber/Lyft/etc... It's inaccurate at best.

~~~
sangnoir
He never said taxis were great- did you miss this:

> Uber (and its Peter-Thiel-backed rival Lyft) are not good companies. They’re
> not forces for good. But the system they killed? Also not good.

------
mcv
I don't see why meta-Uber has to hitch on the backs of Uber and Lyft. Just
have an app (I'd suggest "Ride") that knows all these local co-ops and
contacts an appropriate one. Ride Austin when you're in Austin, Ride Shanghai
when you're there. Make it trivial for anyone to start such a co-op in a new
city, and the drivers will come. There's no need to first book on Uber.

~~~
icebraining
The reason why Cory wants to hitch on Uber is because he knows people trust
Uber more than a random app they've never heard; he says so himself, when he
recounts his Shanghai experience. So you'd find the driver on Uber (borrowing
its trust network) before switching to the other app. But that also shows why
his argument against Uber is flawed: they can charge more money because they
actually provide a better service by being available worldwide, unlike these
local apps. If the Meta-Uber were to kill the host, it would destroy itself.

~~~
mcv
But people who don't trust the other app are not going to use the other app
anyway. If you want to hire a co-op driver, start with the co-op app first.
Hoping Uber will accidentally send you a driver who also happens to be in the
co-op seems like a pointless exercise.

~~~
icebraining
As a rider, I need to trust the app to do two things: give me a decent driver
and provide me with a reasonable estimate of the cost of the trip. By first
making the reservation with Uber, I can get both of those from them, making me
much more willing to use the local app to do the actual transaction.

------
nova22033
>Uber also eliminates safety checks for drivers (and allows them to illegally
discriminate against people with disabilities, people of color

He has it exactly backwards. Taxicabs would routinely racially profile
passengers.

[https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/04/nyregion/danny-glover-
say...](https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/04/nyregion/danny-glover-says-cabbies-
discriminated-against-him.html)

------
frumiousirc
A meta ride share app needs development effort (money), infrastructure (money)
maintenance (money) and integration with local co-ops (money) and all that
money needs an administrative hierarchy (more money).

All this overhead needs to be put in place without any direct income from
riders. Either it come's in the form of a service that co-ops subscribe to and
pay for or it comes in the form of a collective formed of individuals already
in the co-op. Whatever the formation, it's activity that needs funding from
the drivers.

This "meta" layer is then ready for abuse. Once the drivers are connected to
this top-level coordinating layer the individual co-op layers become mere
middle-men and are ripe for cutting out. Then we just get back to Uber.

It would be interesting to learn ideas how such a meta system could be created
while limiting the overhead costs levied on the co-ops and retaining a
decentralized cooperative system that allows drivers (and the higher layer
workers) to retain their power.

~~~
zanny
There is absolutely no reason for ride sharing to not be a protocol. Drivers
join a federated network of other drivers they "agree" with and you pick the
driver pools you want (and they could be local drivers, or they could be
drivers that meet some criteria or vetting process). You could have any number
of ride share apps that use the protocol and interface with server
infrastructure of each network.

If you distribute the authority in the system you decentralize the power
structures that produce hostile actors like the brass of Uber and Lyft.
Nothing says each city can't have its own app and own driver cooper so long as
my app from my city can speak your cities language when I'm there.

------
rkachowski
I think this downplays the anticipated response from Uber and the like. DMCA
and CFAA are just tools used, not the entirety of the barrier to further co-op
based disruption. There's nothing to stop Uber / Lyft from banning their
drivers from the service completely if they are caught using the hypothetical
Meta-Uber app.

I understand that this example is just an illustration of the spirit of the
article and doesn't represent Cory's argument, but I feel that the "felony
contempt-of-business-model" is only one pillar in the structure, rather than
the whole thing.

~~~
not2b
If they tried that, it would undermine their argument that their drivers are
independent contractors. You can ban an employee from working for a
competitor, but you can't ban a contractor. Many drivers drive for both Uber
and Lyft; in an area with a good co-op, they'd probably start out driving for
all three, and if the co-op pays them more they'd take as many rides from the
co-op as they could get.

------
ykevinator
I love this. It indirectly calls out that uber has relatively easy to clone
tech. A co-op network is a great idea and a white label or open source uber
application is probably a great idea.

~~~
officemonkey
I was appalled that the the existing taxi system (essentially a protected
monopoly) wouldn't immediately create an Uber/Lyft app when ride-sharing first
appeared. Then I realized that building such a thing would only benefit
drivers and customers, and those are the two constituents that the existing
taxi system doesn't care about.

~~~
sigmaris
In the UK there's an app available, [https://gett.com/](https://gett.com/),
which is very similar to Uber but hails regular, licensed taxis.

~~~
tomp
But I don't want to ride regular, licenced taxis. They're still a cartel. They
charge a premium for having to learn all the streets of London by heart, but
that's not a premium I'm willing to pay (or that I consider valuable) in the
modern day'n'age of Google Maps and the likes.

------
jstanley
> Today, DRM is used to force people with artificial pancreases to buy
> proprietary insulin

Wow, that seems especially evil.

~~~
dTal
It's worth exploring exactly what's meant by "proprietary insulin". Insulin
can't be proprietary - it's a natural, widely available molecule of publicly
known composition. What's actually proprietary in scenarios like these is some
encryption key that will persuade the device to work - the fact that the key
is embedded in a memory chip glued to the container is a red herring. In the
case of a life-essential substance that is consumed at a predictable rate,
there is no logical distinction between this and a Mafia protection racket -
pay them periodically forever, or die.

It shouldn't be surprising that companies will do this if they can. There was
an episode of Doctor Who not too long ago where employees on a space station
had to buy oxygen from the company store.

~~~
favorited
I remember someone making a claim about insulin, but it wasn't the insulin
itself – it was proprietary consumables for insulin pumps.

------
evrydayhustling
> An investor in the audience stood up to tell me how full of shit I was: I
> had no idea just how complicated Uber’s app and infrastructure were, and
> there was no way a bunch of grubby drivers would ever be able to match its
> expert coding and administration.

Silicon Valley's technical skills and ethos are good at _discovering_
disruptive business models. It is incredibly hard to pivot operations at scale
until you get the market properly sorted out. Investors would love to believe
that this also imploes a moat for replicating and administrating the system...
but there is no reason one flows from the other.

Of course, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his
salary depends upon his not understanding it!" \- Upton Sinclair

------
golemotron
It's so frustrating to read Cory on economics. It's like:

market reasoning, market reasoning, market reasoning, pitch an idea and then
forget about market reasoning.

------
dwighttk
He shows an example of a successful co-op app that worked (as long as the
government was keeping Uber and Lyft out of the city that annually experiences
surges of traffic of tech savvy users) but never gives an example of one of
his meta apps in action...

How much rent would one of those apps be allowed to seek? Or would they just
be run out of benevolence?

~~~
ph0rque
Also, what happens if a competing co-op opens up shop in the same city?

------
jawns
Yes, it's true that by essentially hacking Uber and Lyft's systems, you could
create an app that siphons away business from them.

But what would happen if such a technique were to become legal and ubiquitous?

Suddenly, no one wants to invest in a company that requires significant
capital, because they know that as soon as the company becomes successful
enough to become a target, there will be other companies that will swoop in
and attempt to exploit its technology so they themselves don't need to invest
significant capital.

The damage to the market would be severe.

That said, as a fan of distributism
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism)
I am also a huge fan of cooperatives, and I think worker-owned co-ops can be
successful in the ride-sharing space without needing to resort to such
tactics.

~~~
WhiteMonkey
> Suddenly, no one wants to invest in a company that requires significant
> capital

But this is the point: the reason Uber is successful isn't particularly
because of their technical excellence or innovation, it's because they've used
massive amounts of capital to very knowingly buy the market.

This is an example of one of the nefarious sides of capitalism -- a flaw --
not a celebration of how great it is at solving problems (which is genuinely
is in a lot of circumstances).

If Uber didn't have as much capital, smaller distributed co-ops may well have
prospered.

~~~
jawns
I am no cheerleader for capitalism, but for any business whose core offering
is a marketplace (as with Uber/Lyft, who connect buyers of rides with sellers
of rides), then building out that marketplace requires solving the chicken-
and-egg problem, and typically that is done through advertising, marketing,
pricing, customer loyalty, etc.

Much of that requires capital, and the asset you end up with after investing
that capital is a large user/subscriber base, which can lead to other
competitive advantages. It is true that having a large user/subscriber base
does not imply technical excellence or innovation, but it is a business asset
nonetheless.

But if that asset can be easily siphoned off, then there is less of an
incentive to build it out to begin with.

------
joshuaellinger
He missed a couple of points on the Austin side of things.

1\. Uber/Lyft went to the state to get the regulations overturned in a bit of
venue shopping. They don't have to do fingerprinting. Happens a lot around
here.

2\. He failed to mention Austin Taxi Co-op. Some old hippies got together and
helped form a normal Taxi company but made it owned by the drivers. It has an
adequate but clunky app that is slowly getting better. They grabbed about 2/3s
of the regular taxi drivers.

We won't really know how the ride-share market plays out until the subsidy
goes away. It reminds me of when Standard Oil would go into town, undercut the
local gas station until it fold, and then recoup the cost by raising prices.
It is one of the things that the Antitrust laws were specifically designed to
stop.

------
PaulHoule
I find it ironic that the one problem w/ the cooperative model in Austin is
that it doesn't serve the fancy shindig (SXSW) that shows up once a year and
then blows out of town.

Meeting the needs of Austinites is a more sustainable business because you
don't need to handle the burst capacity.

Somehow the market of people who are flying around all the time seems to get a
disproportionate amount of attention from marketers who make catalogs full of
stuff like:

[https://www.coolthings.com/motorized-monocycle-looks-
fun/](https://www.coolthings.com/motorized-monocycle-looks-fun/)

Fortunately the "yellow cab" model works just fine at the airport where people
show up at predictable times. I did not grow up with the habit of taking cabs,
and I've never taken one in NYC, but I learned at some point that if I didn't
have a better plan to get away from the airport such as

[http://web.mta.info/mta/airtrain.htm](http://web.mta.info/mta/airtrain.htm)

I could walk up to the taxi stand and be on my way and yeah it is kindof
expensive... But often about the same or less then I'd spend on parking alone
for a rental car in a congested city.

On the way back I learned I could go to the front desk of the hotel and have a
cab ready for me when I want to go at 4am or whenever I need to catch an early
flight.

~~~
ghaff
For the most part, for airport to hotel and back, Uber/Lyft are mostly
interesting relative to cabs because they tend to be cheaper (sometimes
substantially). For one trip I do a number of times a year where I need to
take a cab from and to the airport at my destination, the only reason I tend
to use Lyft is that it's about $15 cheaper than a cab ride.

In general though I don't use Uber/Lyft or cabs all that much when I travel
(which is frequently). But, anecdotally, a lot of people seem to have gotten
into the habit of pulling their phone out of their pocket whenever they need
to go more than a couple of blocks.

------
reubenswartz
Thoughtful article. Wonder why you couldn’t have a meta ride app that would
tell you which ride share app(s) to install based on your current location or
on a search (say if you’re about to visit Austin for SXSW). A simple API for
people to submit apps (and perhaps reviews) and no need to hack the
incumbents’ apps (although there would be some karmic justice in that, I don’t
think it’s right, and would probably lead to incumbents doing worse things to
the apps trying to displace them).

~~~
icebraining
If you want that, you can just go to the App or Play Store and search for
"rides <city>".

What Uber provides, and what Cory's proposal piggybacks on, is trust: just
like when you ask for a Big Mac, you know more or less what you're getting
when you're matched an Uber driver with 4.8 starts, yet the same is not true
for some other ridesharing app you've never heard of.

But that also backfires on his argument about Uber's rates and goal of
replacing it; they can charge an higher rate because they provide a service
that others don't - a reasonably consistent experience worldwide - and one
can't get rid of it without harming the meta-app itself.

------
orblivion
Cory, if you're reading this, don't call it Meta-Uber. Call it:

Co-opt

~~~
HillaryBriss
Co-opt is a clever name, but, if I'm not mistaken, Doctorow believes naming it
'meta-uber' would be critical to discovery of the app by end users.

I mean, I _think_ Doctorow's idea is that users search on Google Play for
'uber' and not only does 'uber' appear in the results, but so does 'meta-uber'

------
luord
I'm trying to find how Ride Austin was built. I assume that the money for the
developers and the servers must've come from somewhere. If it was the drivers
themselves, isn't that basically the 25% they pay uber up-front? Mind you,
that's still better than Uber, since they own the app, but it's not exactly
the surge in income that the article later tried to paint it as.

That doubt aside, I mostly agree with this.

------
lkdjjdjjjdskjd
If they had such a great coop going, I don't understand why they went back to
Lyft/Uber?

~~~
VSerge
Found this piece in which Lyft boasts that they had more driver upon coming
back to Austin, and where RideAustin states that their numbers have dropped
from 50k weekly rides to 20k rides, which is their minimum number to remain
relevant.

Drivers probably signed up again with Lyft/Uber simply because these apps had
again a significant volume of business to offer.

Also, I saw on reddit that RideAustin had closed its onboarding office, which
seems like the best way to send drivers to their competitors.

[http://austin.culturemap.com/news/innovation/07-27-17-ride-s...](http://austin.culturemap.com/news/innovation/07-27-17-ride-
sharing-companies-austin-rideaustin-fasten-uber-lyft-return/)

------
geggam
In Germany you have to use mytaxi

[https://us.mytaxi.com/index.html](https://us.mytaxi.com/index.html)

------
HillaryBriss
probably a dumb question: how does the "unique code" part of his idea work?

how could the apps on both the driver's and passenger's phones both reliably
generate the same globally unique code?

~~~
icebraining
It could be simply a combination of the specific information of the ride:
username of rider + username of driver + origin + destination.

~~~
HillaryBriss
thank you for the response. i'm wondering how my meta-uber app would obtain my
origin and destination. is Doctorow proposing that the user manually enter
origin and destination into both the actual uber app and the proposed meta-
uber app?

~~~
icebraining
I believe the idea is that the meta-uber app would programmatically control
the actual uber app, hence the CFAA and DRM concerns.

~~~
HillaryBriss
Ah. Ok. Got it. Thanks.

So, meta-uber would need to embed within itself a hacked copy of the actual
uber app, or just very carefully mimic calls to Uber's backend somehow.

Or meta-uber would need to somehow have the permission to run and inject data
into an authentically installed instance of the Uber app (not quite sure if or
how, say, the Android platform's security model would allow this.)

Hmmm.

~~~
icebraining
It could also use an embedded browser and load
[https://m.uber.com/](https://m.uber.com/)

