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Comment by platz | Hacker News Reader

"Silicon Valley innovation now is directly aimed at oppressing the underclass, and everybody knows it and can see it. They hate Uber. People hate Uber. It means the death of the era of good feelings that came with this constant Moore's Law style innovation.

And that was an unforced error, by Silicon Valley. It was in their DNA. They didn't have to give Travis Kalanick, a guy they despised and never trusted, for good reason—They didn't have to give him all that venture capital.

But they saw him as an expendable probe, so they cynically gave him money, to see how much law-breaking he could get away with in the name of their disruption activities.

That was hubris—and nemesis is well on the way."

- NEXT17 | Bruce Sterling | Live from 2027

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Silicon Valley doesn't oppress the underclass, what a load of melodramatic nonsense. Most Silicon Valley companies have nothing to do with the underclass, and when they do it's usually in the form of making things like movies, TV shows and music more affordable (think Spotify and Netflix among others).

Wait, you don't think "the gig economy" of Uber, Lyft, Instacart, Doordash has anything to do with the underclass? That's the workforce that actually does the job that they consistently try to stifle and pay less under the guise of being "a tech company".

The proliferation of companies like that has probably increased the total number of jobs available in the economy. I don't see that as a bad thing.

If you have a problem with wages, then you really have a problem with the whole economic structure of our society. Most of those companies couldn't exist if they paid their grunt workers more so it's not like they have much of a choice.

There's a number of economists (not to mention the actual drivers of those services) who argue that these companies are bringing up the underclass by offering work opportunities to those who otherwise would find employment very difficult.

Uber massively empowered the underclass by destroying the taxi cartels. Lyft exists because of Uber. Even if one argues that Uber deserves to be punished for its various sins, the revolution they helped spark will improve transportation over time. Just demolishing the medallion racket alone is a vast improvement for the underclass, of which pretty much all taxi drivers belonged. Pre-Uber, Taxi drivers were more like indentured workers, with between little and zero hope of ever owning or controlling anything. Medallion prices in New York City reached $1+ million before Uber tanked the scheme.

Not sure why this comment was voted down, it's actually quite true, as I was a NYC resident for 25 years and my dad drove a cab there as well.

Uber the company may have been egregious in many ways, but along with Lyft and the iPhone and their interpretation of the TLC laws they were able to bring competition to a much needed market and displace the old monopoly that taxi owners had. Which by the way, were much worse on their employees than Uber ever was.

It's also important to note that the experience of using Uber/Lyft is much better than a taxi: 1. You can get back lost items 2. You have some idea that the driver picking you up is professional 3. You have recourse against a bad ride 4. Likewise, it's a two way street, as a rider the driver now also knows that you are going to act appropriately 5. Convenience of being picked up where you are 6. Convenience of not having to explain how to get a to place that isn't often frequented by taxis 7. Convenience of never having to take your wallet out 8. Overall better quality cars, both in terms of comfort and safety since they are newer and more well maintained

Stop repeating this, it is wrong. Uber copied Lyft, Uber was initially another high end black car/limo service, the whole history was documented on TechCrunch articles, here is one to start: https://techcrunch.com/2012/05/22/zimrides-lyft-is-going-to-...

App based rideshare brokering would have happened one way or another. If it hadn't been Uber or Lyft it would have been someone else, or possibly many others. Nobody in particular deserves special credit for coming up with the idea. Although Uber was quite exceptional in their aggressive growth and willingness to challenge the law. I think without Uber and specifically Kalanik, it wouldn't have happened as fast.

Huh? Part of your comments is wrong. Lyft existed before Uber as zimrides. Not only that Lyft and another competitor Sidecar pioneered ride sharing - Uber started out as a black car service and borrowed it's current business model from those two. Even more, Lyft was the first to take on city regulators, when Uber was still a black car service and Uber initially opposed the move to make ride sharing legal and only jumped on the bandwagon when it looked like Lyft was going to succeed and eat Uber for lunch. It's actually the other way around- Uber exists because of Lyft (source of all this - the Upstarts by Brad Stone which I'm currently reading). But everything else you said I agree with: Taxis were just plain awful.

Depends on where, really. Some places had real taxi mafias, other had taxi market that got stuck in the 80s, yet others had well-functioning taxi services.

But "destroying the taxi cartels" wasn't a good thing, because it replaced an imaginary taxi mafia (that supposedly spanned cities) with a single taxi mafioso that's a global corporation. Uber tried to paint itself as an underdog fighting the establishment, but the truth is that in this battle, it's Uber who was the only large player. That's how they won, too - they could strategically allocate funds to beat taxi networks on a city-by-city basis.

I'm not going to defend all taxis. I happen to live in a place with nice cabs, but I've heard plenty of horror stories from elsewhere. But - ironically, as I warned years ago, back before Uber was a frequent guest of newspaper headlines, but right about time when their rotten-to-the-core culture became visible in their dishonest and unethical behavior - this is a story of unleashing a monster. We should have slain it long time ago, before it got the chance to grow. Alas, here we are.

> But "destroying the taxi cartels" wasn't a good thing, because it replaced an imaginary taxi mafia (that supposedly spanned cities) with a single taxi mafioso that's a global corporation.

This is simply bullshit, through and through. Uber, at best, is just a middleman that provides billing services. Those performing the service are local corporations that are free to pick whichever billing service they want. In fact, after Uber started to cover my region the local cab companies were quick to setup a competing service. With them, other multinational ridesharing services started covering my region as well. In two occasions I took a ride whose driver stated he also worked through two Uber competitors.

This is a huge improvement over the old cartel system.

> Uber, at best, is just a middleman that provides billing services.

That's the bullshit they try to sell to the taxmen. It isn't how it works in reality, though.

Oh cmon. Travis may have demonstrated himself to be an unmitigated douchebag over the years but he’s still orders of magnitude above VCs on the scale of being a decent human. Being “despised and never trusted” by those guys is a good signal. Uber may have issues also, but they’re arguably much better than SV establishment companies in terms of screwing their userbase. Uber just doesn’t hide it behind “don’t be evil” BS.

how many levels of rationalization are you on

What does Sterling mean by the “underclass”? That usually refers to the street criminals, permanently unemployable, and others who have fallen off the bottom end of the formal economy.

But the argument Sterling seems to be making seems like it more naturally would apply to the working class; while the underclass may be oppressed and SV may play a role, the way he ties Uber in just doesn't seem to connect to underclass as opposed to working class oppression.

yeah, I think he's playing a little fast and loose with the word underclass here. Perhaps it's simply for dramatic effect. However the main point to me doesn't hang on exact parsing of this word - one could imagine related terms (working class, the have-nots, the little people, the proleteriat) with similar effect. It does matter exactly who he's talking about, but parsing this differently is not exactly at the level of Refutation of the main point. the whole theme is rather high level and abstract to begin with, anyway, which is not quite at the level of precision of concrete examples.

VC-driven Silicon Valley innovation is directly aimed at making money.

The fact that money making overlaps significantly with oppressing the underclass is not the fault of Silicon Valley, though SV isn't doing anything to help. It's a side effect of the fact that we are in an extremely demand constrained economy.

Demand constrained economy is a fancy pants way of saying "everyone is broke so they can't buy anything so why make anything for people to buy?" Below the upper middle class, nobody has any expendable income. That means there are few customers for things designed... well... for customers. That means entrepreneurs can't make money selling things to people unless they're luxury goods, and that's a tough market to break into. (Juciero wasn't such a dumb idea from this perspective. VCs aren't stupid. It was a gamble on creating a new luxury market for the top ~10%. Better executed it might have succeeded.)

As a result Silicon Valley (along with every other industry) must turn elsewhere for customers. Elsewhere is advertisers, propagandists, oppressive regimes, etc., hence surveillance capitalism. The other alternative is to try to find ways to crush margin ("disrupt" as its been redefined to mean) out of some existing industry, which usually means slashing wages and killing jobs and ultimately making the demand constrained economy problem worse.

The ultimate blame for this situation goes to Washington for pushing supply side economics in a demand constrained economy and to New York for abandoning productive capitalism in favor of financial gambling and bubble inflation.

Quite right. Both can be true - it's not either-or.

I encourage you to watch the talk, if you're willing to stomach his gen-x sensibility. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2O_fxmrP_Q

> that means entrepreneurs can't make money selling things to people unless they're luxury goods

"[Moore's law] is ending. It hasn't quite ended yet, but in ten years it'll be obvious that it's over.

Apple is selling jewelry. That's what they sell.

And there is no singularity of California. There is.. I mean Intel could not make it pay. I mean I saw them struggle to keep Moore's law alive.. they were heroes about it - it didn't work."

> The ultimate blame for this situation goes to Washington for pushing supply side economics in a demand constrained economy

"The mausoleum for Moore's law. They couldn't make it pay under the Washington Consensus, and their version of global neo-liberalism. They just couldn't make it pay.

So now Silicon Valley is becoming Detroit, because that's the logic of American industrial development. Tech has lost its charmed life. Even the Apple AppStore has died.

It's quite like the space race after the American moon landing, or it's quite like the end of a Californian Gold Rush. This is California's DNA, and time passes for everyone, and consequences always arise.

Stuff that seems revolutionary and disruptive in 2017 is mostly frills for rich people."

Do you happen to know that California is still dealing with the environmental effects of the gold rush?

Aside: Isn't Moore's Law dead, as strictly defined? We've been at ~.25TB to 1TB phones for a few years now.

Moore's Law has to do with transistor density in integrated circuits. The analogue for storage is apparently something called Kryder's Law.

Silicon Valley innovation now is directly aimed at oppressing the underclass, and everybody knows it and can see it. They hate Uber. People hate Uber. It means the death of the era of good feelings that came with this constant Moore's Law style innovation.

This has been coming down the pike since at least 2012, in days when Sidecar was still a big deal. One good practice all the world religions and philosophies worth a damn tell us: Keep checking your level of smug. Put a dipstick into your smug-sump and read off the level, because it is directly correlated with your douchebag index!

How does Uber 'oppress the underclass'? Puhlease.

In the medium term, they get public transit systems shut down or reduced in service by pricing fares artificially low for a period of time. This enables them to then exercise monopoly pricing power on the market (or oligopoly with Lyft or whatever local competitor) and ultimately harms the lower classes.

Thus the $5 splurge for an Uber instead of the $2 bus hypothetically becomes the $10 Uber with no alternative short of driving yourself.

I'm not super convinced by this argument but it is a reasonable argument. Especially given that Uber wields billions in venture capital specifically to systematically underprice both regular taxis and public transit options.

I haven't seen this actually happen, though. In Denver, at least, RTD has been expanding routes and light rail service (albeit slowly, but that is most definitely NOT Uber's fault), even as Uber, Lyft, etc. have become more popular.

Well Denver won best transit in America recently to be fair. This article points at what I'm saying: http://fortune.com/2017/10/13/uber-lyft-public-transit-rider...

Fewer people ride public transit when ridesharing is available. Ridesharing actually substitutes more for public transit than for driving, which means it puts more people into small vehicles and creates more pollution and congestion. Whether you see it in growing Denver or not, less riders ultimately means less fares, less funding, and less service.

Thanks, that was the sort of article I was hoping for. I am surprised to see Denver winning best transit in America, though; it still takes me 2-3x the time to travel light rail or bus than driving. Sometimes the convenience is worth it, but usually not.

Yeah I think ultimately NYC still has the most usable transit network. I am not sure the details of the award without searching but they had it plastered up inside the buses when I was there. It probably gets good user ratings because its been improving as opposed to NYC which is overwhelmed with riders and maintenance. I did notice Denver had a lot of buses compared to most places in America, but it is still a car culture after all.

> In the medium term, they get public transit systems shut down

This sounds like grade-A bullshit. At best rideshare services reduce the use of personal cars and compete with taxi services, but they can't or won't compete with mass transit.

Moreover the upper or even middle class aren't exactly the target market of public transportation services. If anyone was switching from public transportation to rideshare services, that would be the class you assert is being oppressed, which makes absolurely no sense.

First of all, I don't think your tone is very kind or conducive to a productive conversation.

You state with no evidence whatsoever that rideshare services "can't or won't compete with mass transit" while the truth is that millions of people decide between the two on a daily basis. In places like NYC and SF where transit is viable, it is widely used by the lower, middle, even upper middle classes. It has become much more prevalent to simply take Lyft to work every day (some employers just pay for it) which leaves less people on MTA or BART. That hurts funding for maintaining extremely expensive public transit systems which often leads to cutbacks in service during tough times as "we can't support the long hours with so few passengers"

Yes some of the lower class benefits from ridesharing (in the short term at least) and I acknowledged there were two sides to the argument. But ultimately if people get some cheap rides for a few years but then have to choose between expensive rides or degraded public transit, then they've almost certainly lost out unless driverless cars or some other innovation saves the day.

Here is a recent article about how people are switching from public transit to ridesharing and not from driving as many people expect: http://fortune.com/2017/10/13/uber-lyft-public-transit-rider...

It doesn't make sense to say ridesharing "can't or won't compete with mass transit" when its literally the main thing it competes with.

I do not understand how it is possible. Public transit is soo much cheaper. In many cases, it is just unaffordable for someone to switch from taking the bus to Uber.

For example, in San Francisco the bus costs $2.50 to $2.75 depending on how you pay. If two people want to go somewhere, thats at least $5.

Instead I can get door to door service with Lyft for between $3.90 and $4.10 for the first person and an additional $0.90 for the second person. This means I typically come out slightly ahead with Lyft with two people and its way more convenient.

Its great... for now. Who knows how long it will last at these prices?

3.90? Are you going like half a mile or what? Most of the city people usually have bus passes, because jobs are often far away.

Usually 1-2 miles. We don't need to do it every day so it isn't worth having a bus pass. If we wanted to do it daily though, there are ridesharing passes too. Some people pay like $20-25 a month for a pack of Uber passes that give a certain number of rides.

This is just talking about the daily commute. Say I want to go to the airport. Its $12-14 in a Lyft usually and about the same for two people on BART. Even if I had a bus pass for work, I'd still need to pay for either BART or Lyft and Lyft saves at least 45 minutes (including 15 minutes of walking to get to a station) for an approximately equal price so it ends up being a no brainer until prices go up.

Obviously if you go large distances then a commuter rail pass or maybe a bus pass would make more sense.

> Usually 1-2 miles. We don't need to do it every day

You hardly count as mass transit traffic if your only use is sporadic and it covers close to a walking distance.

False. Everyone who decides to use a bus/train instead of a Lyft counts as a public transit user. In aggregate, our decisions determine how many riders use public transit. It serves no purpose to ignore anyone who rides less than 30-40 times a month (which is around what you need to break even on a pass)

> For example, in San Francisco the bus costs $2.50 to $2.75 depending on how you pay.

According to Google, sfmta fares are $2.25 per adult. Those fares however are for single trips for sporadic users. Those are don't represent mass transit users. People who use mass transit with some relevant frequency use it with enough to justify paying for a monthly pass, which sfmta's goes for between $68 and $80 a month.

Well that will teach you not to trust Google, won’t it? The cost is $2.5 to $2.75 as I indicated: https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/muni/fares

Please don’t start a conversation with a rude tone and then cite incorrect info to “correct” the facts that I provided.

As I’ve already mentioned, Lyft and Uber have frequent rider passes too so it isn’t fair to compare a single Lyft ride to the cost of a monthly bus pas per ride.

Monthly passes have also gone up $12-14 compared to what you cited. The bus is a great deal if you pay prices from 5 years ago ;)

Think about it this way: if you already own a car, why would you use ridesharing? Taking a uber instead of public transit because you're late, or because it's faster than taking 2 buses to some one-off destination, however, seems entirely reasonable.

> Think about it this way: if you already own a car, why would you use ridesharing?

To avoid traffic, to avoid parking problems, to avoid driving drunk, to avoid leaving your car unattended in a dubious neighborhood, to avoid parking costs, etc...

BART never solved the last-mile problem before ridesharing. The nearest station is a 10-minute walk to a 20-minute bus ride after a 30-minute wait. And that's a pretty direct 4 mile trip, from most locations it'd be worse. Driving myself isn't even an option unless I get there before dawn because BART can't keep up with demand for parking.

Commoditizing labor is very disruptive and stuff, yet it drives down the price to commodity levels - right above subsistence. The entire gig economy is like this. And not just them either.

If there were better options available, people would work there. Folks drive ubers not because they want to contribute to the 'gig economy', but because that's the best option they have. Removing someone's best option never helps them.

Same argument can be applied to labor conditions in the factories 100 years ago. It was wrong then, and it might be wrong now.

Factories were a huge improvement over peasantry/starvation actually. Yes, they were still horrible, and we've improved since; but there was a reason people moved en masse to the industrial towns.

I suggest Polanyi's The Great Transformation if you want to find out more about this.

Perhaps some of that $50 billion valuation can be used to pay their workforce a proper wage and give them benefits? Just a thought...

Valuation is not revenue nor any other form of money. They don't actually have $50 billion. At best you could claim the markets expect the future worth of the company be on average around $50 billion (modulo preferential stock impact, so actually a bit less).

So, basically Amazon is a form of Charity then; they basically have "no form of money" under that perspective. (Dispite knowing the fact they could turn on the money spigot at any time if so desired)

Amazon is a publicly traded company, so their valuation isn't really impacted by preferential stock. Also, if you think amazon has access to 1.6 trillion dollars, you're crazy.

And, well, they actually make money.

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