In other words, they played us like fiddles.
Any revolutionary, disruptor or change agent will be perceived as an asshole. They're looking at the state of things, saying that doesn't do, and then launching into the machinations necessary to replace it. Rooting for "your asshole" is perfectly rational.
Disruption is all fun and games when it stays within business context. When all you play with are abstract spending points on your bank account. When you breach that, when you start to disrupt law and social order, that pretty much always end in tears and blood for many, many people. You don't do that unless you're very, very careful or the goal is extremely important. You definitely don't root for assholes who don't give a flying fuck about society, and want to mess things up only to line up their pockets.
Uber is literally behaving like evil megacorp since almost day one. Why people would root for that is something I can't really comprehend. You don't cheer the plunderers that came to the village just because they just slaughtered the neighbour you didn't particularly like - because when they're done with him, they'll come for you.
I hope not.. that's not progress!!!
Some folks may hate them because of Susan Fowler, but that doesn't change the fact that they've drastically improved the world for consumers.
Initially, Uber set itself out as the hero of the day, riding on a shining horse to fight the Evil Taxi Mafia. Anyone who looked closely at how they did that could easily predict that what they want to become is the new, but worse, Taxi Mafia. They've been assholes almost from the start, they continue to be assholes now. That so many people only got angry after sexism accusations, of all the things, only makes me sad about the state of humanity.
As a consumer, what exactly should I be angry about?
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/10/uber-ly...
Started for me when they updated the app to ask for location information 100% of the time a few months back. I remember seeing the notification and thinking to myself "do I really trust Uber with all my location data?" and realizing the answer was no. They made the app much more frustrating to use if you didn't provide that level of location so I deleted it shortly after.
You seem to suggest that Uber's toxic culture gave them a business advantage. Like, riders got some benefit that a conscientious person ought to have guessed was derived from the suffering of others.
I think what really happened is that Uber successfully assailed a bunch of stodgy monopolies just by taking a modern approach to dispatching. Then others saw the opportunity and there was a goldrush. Today Uber and everyone else are squeezing the drivers (same is true for all the "Uber of X" sharing economy variants). But the crappy backoffice culture surely didn't make it more convenient or cheap to get a ride.
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[0] - I really, really don't get why people only started caring after information about back-office sexism came to light, like if this was the worst thing Uber is doing; it isn't even remotely.
It did. Unethical miserable people broke laws and cleaned up. And people loved them for it. Until they didn't.
