Link tags: uber

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Pluralistic: With Great Power Came No Responsibility (26 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Like I was saying:

The web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker (which is also a privacy blocker). But no one installs an ad blocker for an app, because it’s a felony to distribute that tool, because you have to reverse-engineer the app to make it. An app is just a website wrapped in enough IP so that the company that made it can send you to prison if you dare to modify it so that it serves your interests rather than theirs.

Uber, Lyft, Taxis, Design and the Age of Ambivalence + Subtraction.com

Design has disrupted taxis in a massive, almost unprecedented way. But good design doesn’t merely aim to disrupt—it should set out to actually build viable solutions. Designers shouldn’t look at a problem and say, “What we’re going to do is just fuck it up and see what happens.” That’s a dereliction of duty.

Against Sharing | Jacobin

But under the guise of innovation and progress, companies are stripping away worker protections, pushing down wages, and flouting government regulations. At its core, the sharing economy is a scheme to shift risk from companies to workers, discourage labor organizing, and ensure that capitalists can reap huge profits with low fixed costs.

There’s nothing innovative or new about this business model. Uber is just capitalism, in its most naked form.

Daring Fireball with Comments

A self-documenting explanation of why John Gruber doesn't have comments on his site.