Uber is not a business in the traditional sense. It's a "bezzle" ("the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it").
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The only reason Uber was able to attain growth was because investors gave it billions to lose. First, it was the Saudi Royals, hoping to spend their way to a transportation monopoly.
Sometimes, a casual conversation turns out to be prophetic and stays with you for decades to come. In 2006, I had lunch at the LA World Science Fiction Convention with @EricFlint when the subject of Barack Obama came up. I admitted that his incredible rhetoric gave me hope.
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Flint - a union organizer from Chicago - quickly disabused me. Obama, he said, was a Chicago Machine Democrat, and that meant he was a cynical horse-trader whose version of "democracy" was for insiders to do deals in back-rooms, without accountability or transparency.
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Those words stayed with me through the Obama years, as Obama literally shut off the server that grassroots organizers used to coordinate the campaign that got him elected and told us all to shut up and go away so he could strike deals with the GOP to get stuff done.
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Kim Stanley Robinson's 2020 novel "The Ministry for the Future," is a fierce imaginative work. Robinson doesn't just depict a future beyond the climate emergency and capitalism itself, he depicts the specific, wrenching transition that takes us there.
(If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:)
As I wrote in my review, the (variously attributed) maxim "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism," isn't quite right. Imagining postcapitalism is an easy lift, but imagining the path to that world is VERY hard.