Every time we take an Uber we’re spreading its social poison: Laurie Penny
here are very few things
that $5bn can’t buy, but one of them is manners. This week video emerged of Travis Kalanick, the CEO and founder of ride-share
app Uber, patronising and swearing at one of his own drivers, who complained
that harsh company policies had forced him into bankruptcy. “Some people don’t
like to take responsibility for their own shit,” sneered Kalanick. Truer words
were never spoken by a tycoon: for Uber, along with many other aggressive
corporations, not taking responsibility for your own shit isn’t just a
philosophy, it’s a business model.
Uber has barely been
out of the news this year, with a succession of scandals cementing the
company’s reputation as a byword for cod-libertarian douchebaggery. Accusations
of strike-breaking during protests against Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban” sparked
a viral campaign to get customers to delete the app. A week later, a former employee went public with
accusations of sexual harassment and institutional misogyny. Kalanick, who was
pressured to withdraw from a position as a business adviser to Trump, is
now facing legal suits across the world from drivers who insist that they would
be better able to “take responsibility” for their lives if they could earn a
living wage.
Liberal outrage has
been a chorus to Uber’s apparently unstoppable rise, but it has never before
been a bar to its expansion: the company continues to grow, even as it
registers record-breaking revenue loss around the world, much of which it puts
down to the inconvenience of still having to pay its drivers. Given what we already
knew about Uber’s institutional sleaziness, why is this clip so shocking?
Because it reveals an uncomfortable truth about the character of our modern
power elites. Part of us would prefer to imagine the svengalis of exploitative
businesses as polished, scheming villains, geniuses enviably unencumbered by
such old-fashioned burdens as ethics and morality.
From Trump down, these
men would prefer us to picture them as competent and potent – a little brash,
perhaps, but that’s all part of how corporate power brands itself. This is why
it matters that this video exposes Kalanick, one of the world’s richest men, as
a thoroughly unpleasant person. There is an ugly entitlement in the way he
swears at the driver – sorry, his “partner”, albeit one without a seat on the
company board. He doesn’t come across as ruthless. He comes across as rude…
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