Robert Pirsig's recent death reminded me to read, much-belatedly, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. One of its central tenets is that the highest good

Robert Pirsig's recent death reminded me to read, much-belatedly, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. One of its central tenets is that the highest good, or highest Quality, in technology, results from an integrative approach where the worker doesn't separate from the work, but rather identifies with it and becomes one with it. (A prerequisite for this is an awareness of Quality that is largely precluded/prevented by the usual rational/analytic view of reality that we normally associate with technology, but anyway...) So here you have Uber, which has always been in the business of ferrying people around, but tries hard to separate itself from the business of ferrying people around. "We're not a transportation company, we're an app." "They're not employees of Uber, they're contractors." "They're not taxis, it's ride-sharing." "Uber's not liable for this tax, the driver is." It's not us, we're not the ones, we're not doing it, we're not involved, we're not responsible. The ultimate schism between the doer and the act. They're not exactly rushing forward to integrate the whole system under a unifying banner of Quality, are they? If anything they're the epitome of the rationalist/analytic view of reality complete with all its schisms, all of which results in the kind of drab ugliness (on the human end mostly) that makes people want to shoot themselves in the face. Ugliness (poor quality) papered over with cheap stylistic embellishments that make it "not just depressingly dull, [but] also phony."