Without tech and its “ecosystem,” if you will, the system of Uber could not have existed at all. - Advanced tech allowed Uber to reach its pervasive global sca

Without tech and its “ecosystem,” if you will, the system of Uber could not have existed at all. - Advanced tech allowed Uber to reach its pervasive global scale - Insane venture capital valuation allowed Uber to artificially deflate the price of rides to gain market share, with the explicit understanding that they would then leverage their market power to jack up prices - Near-zero marginal cost of administration allows Uber to recruit far more employees than a traditional cab company ever could, commoditizing the supply of workers and enabling abuses (someone will always take their place) - High profit margins enable faster spread, and allow the company to spend much more on lobbying and anti-union efforts - Business-side workers are complicit because they aren’t working at a taxi company with actual human workers on the other end, they’re building a killer app! - Managers and higher-ups are similarly abstracted away from their decisions Are all of these properties inherent to the notion of tech itself? No. Could Uber have been built differently, given different managerial decisions? Yes. But tech allows behaviors that were not previously possible.