This incident is likely to be treated as so many others before it: it will cause a commotion and attract attention, some fire-fighting measures will be announced, then it will slowly fade in the background and it will be business as usual.

The governor of Arizona, where the accident happened, has already withdrawn support for Uber and recalled its licence to conduct self-driving tests in Arizona. Others like Nvidia, the company providing much of the technology used in self driving cars, have called for giving Uber a chance, while at the same time holding off further testing on the streets, and rolling out simulations. It may seem preposterous to justify Uber at a time like this, but there are some important points to be made here.

It has been argued that the goal for self-driving cars is not to be perfect, but to be better than humans. This sounds like a pragmatic position. And it is true that no technology is introduced without having its side effects and its wild west period. But this was literally an accident waiting to happen.

An accident waiting to happen. Image: Reuters

Part of it has to do with the process of developing and introducing new technology, and it can be that in the long run the benefits will outweigh the side effects. But there is another part of it, the wild west part, that has to do with the lack of will and ability to oversee and regulate the use of technology.

Recent research on the deep learning algorithms used in self driving cars revealed thousands of errors. This somewhat expected outcome, given the technology’s breakneck progress and rapid application, seems to have been ignored by companies and authorities alike. In all fairness, the accident that Uber’s car was involved in may not have been related to this.

The fact that this research has been ignored however should be telling. It’s not the first time Uber has been in the limelight, scrutinized and criticized, for all the wrong reasons.

Uber is still operating in London, in you case you did not notice. Uber will continue to do so while a legal appeal process that could take a year lasts. What’s more, the fire-fighting statements and apologetic tone adopted by newly appointed Uber top management seem to appease some, including London’s mayor.

But to focus on Uber’s misconduct and ethics, to lay personal blame and to seek and accept apologies and promises is to miss the point entirely. Uber, and organizations like Uber, are neither good nor bad – they are signs of the time. Even if Uber was ran by Arizona’s Governor or London’s Mayor, it would still have the same defining qualities and effects.

Its efficiency is based on optimized and evolving algorithms, clever marketing and big data. Its self centered nature is inevitable, as it has no one to answer to except its shareholders.

Uber may be revolutionary, but not for the reasons you think. A future in which car ownership is obsolete and you can be picked up in no time and driven safely and efficiently to your destination for cheap is something many people would stand behind. Except there won’t be drivers in those cars, and it will be up to Uber to run things as it sees fit.

It’s clear that the combination of big data, processing power and algorithms can progressively automate every task to the point of making it more efficient than what humans are able to achieve. Driving and dispatching is no exception, and that’s what Uber and its ilk are doing.

But that’s only part of the reason why Uber is displacing traditional taxis. The other part is Uber’s employment model. Instead of employing full time, properly trained drivers, Uber will employ just about anyone with a car and willing to spend hours behind the wheel.

These people will be precarious workers with minimum rights and income, be manipulated to stay on the road as long as needed, and be disposed of when self driving technology and legislation are in place – which should not be too long.

In the meanwhile, Uber can sit back and watch the divide and conquer strategy that has played out so well throughout time work in its favor. Uber drivers operating as an army of low-paid disposable contractors before the algorithms take over completely are inadvertently helping dispose of everyone else’s rights and livelihoods as well.

As Wired reports, New York City’s cab drivers are in crisis, and they’re blaming Uber and Lyft. Since December, four taxi drivers have killed themselves, seemingly in response to the intense financial pressures that have accompanied an increase in for-hire vehicles on the city’s streets.

So it’s freelancers versus full time employees, and now Uber sympathizers versus the people and regulators. Uber sympathizers who have signed an Uber petition to keep it in the streets of London are closing the one million mark, citing safety and loss of jobs. Many would probably cite innovation and better service as well.

While these claims are not entirely unfounded, they are hollow. These jobs will be soon lost anyway, and there have been enough reported incidents to undermine security claims. But this brings us to the core of the issue: the emerging data driven monopolies.

Efficiency and safety are both based on a foundation of data. Data collected, processed and used by Uber to power its algorithms in complete opaqueness. By gaining market share, Uber is amassing ever more data, in a reinforcement loop that makes it harder and harder to compete against.

The fact that Uber ditches every notion of ethics and legality in the process, by doing things such as collecting data from user devices without consent even when the application is not running, using that data to drive analytics that determine pricing and using backdoors to spy on users and apps to evade control is just adding insult to injury.

But, should not the market self-regulate, and will there not be competition from other innovative companies? Let’s look at another part of the world for answers: Russia.

In Russia Uber was facing stiff competition from Yandex. Yandex is a Russia-based technology giant that dominates its home market in search, cloud services and ride hailing among other things.

Both companies have been using similar approaches to capture market share, resulting in driving prices down and owning a combined near 90% of the local market. Now Uber and Yandex Taxi have made a deal to work together, in essence forming a monopoly. What are the chances of anyone else, let alone independent drivers, competing in this landscape?

Greg Abovsky, Yandex CFO, responded to a request for comment by citing the deal is subject to approval by Russian regulators, and the argument is that since there is room for growth in the market this is not a monopoly.

Yandex is often called the Russian Google, and this does sound a bit like what Google would sound like if they said they are not a monopoly in search because more people will be searching online in the future.

First mover advantage in the big data and AI age will be tremendously important if left unchecked. There’s an interesting implication of this however. These technologies will make the market smarter and make it possible to plan and predict market forces so as to allow us to finally achieve a planned economy.

If you’re wondering where such a bold claim may be coming from, it’s none other than Jack Ma, the founder of another one in the league of giants: Alibaba. Companies of this caliber already dwarf governments in nearly every aspect, including their ability to gather and process data.

Some economists argue that the online platform monopolies resemble central planning institutions, so it would be more “legitimate and rational” for the state to become a “super-monopoly” platform.

This may sound scary and big-brother-ish. But before we get lost in the arguments in favor of one or the other monopoly, let’s think about the real issue: allegiance and control. Where does corporate allegiance lay, and how much control do we have over it? Then what about the state?

In a world that is increasingly becoming data-driven, reinventing algorithms and institutions seems like more than a realistic option – it seems inevitable. The real question is by whom, and for whom. If we want to be actors and citizens rather than users and consumers, it’s time we reinvented our collective identity and started taking control.

This assassination of character is what we should be really worried about.

This article was first published as Keep on Uberin the free world, on the Linked Data Orchestration blog.

Photo by marki1983

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‘As an open platform, anyone can use our platform no matter who they are, where they live, and what they believe… This is why you’ll see an extremely wide range of petitions, as they’ve all been created by people in the community.’ Ben Rattray, founder and CEO of Change.org

Steve Andrews: Uber’s huge online petition, hosted by Change.org, protested the removal of its London licence for refusal to comply with safety concerns. At first glance, the petition looked like an emphatic show of support by citizens for a cab company popular for its low fares. Yet the e-petition raises serious questions about contemporary civil society, transparency and corporate power.

Uber’s petition demonstrates how large companies can manipulate democracy through contemporary modes of political participation – and also reveals some uncomfortable contradictions in the business model of the petition platform Change.org.

Uber’s lobbying strategy

It’s first worth putting Uber’s ‘mass’ and ‘viral’ online mobilisation in context. Uber faces significant challenges in convincing people and politicians that the problems caused by the platform are worth the cheap fares and precarious jobs.

The controversy is not just about Transport for London’s concerns over safety. Problems also include the welfare of drivers without rights to sick, holiday or parental pay, and their vulnerability to being removed from the platform or pay reduced without any accountability or consultation. The long-term sustainability of the platform itself, which runs at a significant loss, is also under question – this too puts drivers’ pay and continued employment at risk.

In response to these challenges, the company has developed a wider political strategy that has given the firm a reputation for ignoring, defying or co-opting elected politicians the world over. After a ban in Germany, Uber simply carried on operating until the ban was lifted. The firm spends vast amounts of money on lobbying politicians behind closed doors.

Uber’s petition on Change.org

 

Their use of online petitions on platforms marketed as progressive is just an extension of this extensive PR and lobbying work, and it appears to be part of Uber’s standard strategy for pushing back against regulation. The company initiates petitions on its own behalf, for its own interests, either hosted on its own website or on Change.org. We found examples in numerous North American cities and states (e.g. Dallas, Seattle, Houston, Baltimore, Chicago, San Antonio, Calgary, Pennsylvania, Portland) as well as many other countries (Denmark, Spain, India).It also promotes these petitions aggressively, through its access to user data, drivers and mass marketing. Uber customers are mass emailed asking them to sign the petition, Uber drivers have been instructed to sign petitions with emails and splash screens, and app users receive notifications. Uber even promote their petitions using Google advertising space (we found these by accident when searching for information about Uber). Far from being a spontaneous ‘viral’ exercise, mass marketed and widely promoted petitions are part of a wider strategy to maintain market position.

Petitioning for profit

The corporate use of petitions already contradicts a basic premise of grassroots organising. Petitions have a long history as a mode of participation allowing ordinary people with a grievance to collectively address political actors and hold them accountable: particularly important for those without other recourse to political action. The Chartists petitioned parliament to demand the right to vote, while the petition to free Nelson Mandela from political imprisonment allowed international civil society to address South Africa’s apartheid regime.

The internet has revolutionised petitions, lowering the costs for producing and administering them, which has led to a host of mainly non-profits (eg. 38 Degrees, SumOfUs and Avaaz) as well as public platforms (such as the UK parliament’s own petition website), and a rise in the use of petitions as a mode of participation easy to engage with and cheap to administrate.

Change.org, however, also allows huge corporations a platform on the site, giving them the opportunity to orchestrate civil society methods to advance their agenda alongside the usual campaigns started by ordinary citizens. And the idea of the petition as a democratic, bottom-up tool for demanding social change is further thrown into question by Change.org’s other practices, which suit Uber’s aggressive political strategy rather well.

Unusually for a petitions website, Change.org Inc is a for-profit company rather than a charity and, following a controversial change of direction in 2012 after hosting a union-busting organisation’s petition, it became the only petitions site to stop filtering causes (apart from excluding hate speech), thus opening up the platform to anyone and everyone – including corporations and conservative organisations with a rather different agenda to those of citizens.

Yet it’s the site’s business model that must really appeal to Uber, as despite now refusing direct advertisements, Change.org allows ‘supporters’ (anyone) the opportunity to ‘chip in to help specific campaigns get seen by more people’ (‘promoted petitions’). Like Facebook advertising, promoting a petition means an increase in visibility.

Of course, ‘chipping in’ if you are a company worth $62 billion gives the corporate petition a significant advantage over the rest of us – certainly the traditional petition, where ‘going viral’ depends on the work of citizens and the level of commitment of its adherents. A lack of transparency on the part of Change.org means we can’t know just how much Uber, or any other company that might want to run a petition, has paid. This makes it hard to trust petitions and evaluate their significance.

Might a company that carries out screenings for the NHS have ‘chipped in’ to a petition asking that routine cancer screenings are carried out at a younger age? Might a building company be ‘chipping in’ to a petition on the building of more homes? While these may seem relatively benign scenarios, the point is that the platform model could give added weight to campaigns backed by corporations who happen to share a single goal with an individual – or perhaps more problematically, as could be the case with Uber, it offers them the potential to buy a successful campaign all of their own. Thanks to the opacity of the platform, we’ll never know.

Corporatising democracy

Change.org argues that these features allow a win-win situation. Its commitment to democracy, it suggests, is furthered by its openness to petitions begun by anyone. Oddly, their characterisation of petitions as set up by ‘people in the community’ includes the UK head of Uber Tom Elvidge, who initiated the London petition.

More insight into Change.org Inc’s vision comes from further statements of its CEO Ben Rattray, in the context of having raised $25 million after a funding round (investors were largely drawn from the tech sector, perhaps drawn to Change.org’s access to rich user data (see their privacy policy). He said: ‘This investment is recognition that there’s an opportunity to democratise democracy in the same way that we’ve democratised everything from media and communications to commerce to, increasingly, transportation… It’s about lowering the barriers to entry in industries that traditionally are difficult to participate in.’

This is quite a novel understanding of democracy. Rattray’s vision of democracy appears to refer to a new company’s right to corporate advantage in an ‘industry that is difficult to participate in’ (ie. regulated), and extends citizenship to corporate actors. In the case of Uber, the ‘democracy’ also comes from the company using its own drivers and customers as proxy voters against regulators in theory answerable to an entire population.

The Uber London ban and petition is part of a shift in the way transportation is organised, one that may not, as the evidence suggests, be sustainable. Yet it seems clear Uber will continue to fight legislation here and all over the world to guarantee its investors a return. There is potential for innovation around ‘sharing’ to use resources and deliver services in a way that is more responsive to our needs and more accountable to workers and consumers – but this isn’t it.

The petition controversy highlights another attempted shift: to radically change the meaning of civil society and the traditional tools of citizen participation by ‘opening them up’, ‘democratising’ them – to businesses. The growth of online civil society platforms can empower people who otherwise don’t have a voice in democracies largely unaccountable to their populations. However, the Uber Change.org petition suggests they can further entrench corporate power, ensuring that here, as elsewhere in contemporary democracies, businesses will enjoy huge advantages over ordinary people.

Photo by meliesthebunny

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These investors rewarded criminality, and may have emboldened those who find civility and the law inconvenient. The company’s “don’t ask permission, ask for forgiveness later” strategy is now part of the Silicon Valley startup playbook. Thousands of entrepreneurs now likely believe that breaking the law is fine for the sake of disruption. I think many people underestimate the damage that Uber has done because they look mostly at the individual actions of the company, and not at the long-lasting, toxic impact of its example.

By choosing to back such an enterprise, investors have attacked the common good. Like Uber’s ex-CEO himself admitted that he needs to “fundamentally change as a leader and grow up,” they need to do the same — as does the tech industry in general. Tech leaders need to start acting like states persons because that’s the level of power they now wield on the national and global stages. Tech is now the establishment, but the greed, insularity, insensitivity, and hubris exhibited regularly tower over whatever wisdom there is in this space.

Firing the CEO doesn’t solve the systemic problems that run rampant not just at Uber, but other companies that emulate it and Silicon Valley’s startup ecosystem in general. It doesn’t redeem the company’s chronic wrongdoing. Investing isn’t just a financial decision, it’s also a moral one. Deciding to back Uber so lavishly despite its criminality is a moral failure of epic proportions. Users can #DeleteUber. Pundits can call Uber what it is — an illegal enterprise. Reporters can investigate Uber further. Or regulators can just shut it down.

But no one is beyond redemption. Investors can do a thorough job of reforming the company (if that’s even possible). As for Kalanick, he’s a product of his environment. He’s responsible, but so is the ecosystem he’s part of. It enabled him. He can turn a new leaf.

Society can do better too. People can can support and create alternatives, like platform cooperatives, where all stakeholders can have a say and a share in a tech enterprise. There’s RideAustin in the U.S., Stocksy United in Canada, and Fairmondo in Germany, all examples of enterprises that put people and community first. We can also create alternatives to Silicon Valley’s wealth-concentrating ecosystem, like the Emilia Romagna region in Italy, where wealth-spreading cooperatives produce 30 percent of its GDP. More than a possibility, it seems a necessity if we value freedom, fairness, and a future worth having.

Cross-posted from Shareable.

Photo by marki1983

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Nithin Coca: With all the controversy engulfing the global ride-hailing giant Uber, there is more attention on alternative platforms that meet people’s transportation needs and don’t have the company’s ethical baggage. One of the newest and most promising alternatives is LibreTaxi, founded by Roman Pushkin, a San Francisco-based developer and architect with a decade of experience in the technology sector.

LibreTaxi is a completely open-source project, meaning that developers can take the source code and adapt it for local uses. Since it was launched in Dec. 2016, the app, which can be used to find rides across the globe, has grown to 20,000 users. The highest use so far is in Taiwan, Iran, and Russia.

Currently, it is a simple app that can be downloaded and used on the messaging platform Telegram. Through its easy-to-use bot, riders and drivers are directly connected and negotiate prices independently of LibreTaxi, and pay fares in cash. We talked with Pushkin about LibreTaxi, its origins, and how it fits into the larger, ride-hailing and ride-sharing ecosystem.

Nithin Coca: Where did the idea for LibreTaxi originate from? Why did you decide to make it an open-source project?

Roman Pushkin: The idea came from where I was born, in Russia, in a village located far from any big city. There, there were no services like Uber. There was just this list, a piece of paper with phone numbers, and when people were looking for a ride, they were just calling by each number from this list. It was not very convenient, so we tried to improve it with computers. Initially we used Skype chat for this purpose. It worked, but it was not very convenient either – when someone needs a ride you have to scan through all of the messages — where you go, your location, etc.

Public chat is not solving this problems efficiency — it works, but not that great. So I started looking for a way to create application for this purpose. The aim was to create something like Uber, but open source, and free for everyone. Hence, LibreTaxi. LibreTaxi was originally created for rural areas – but also works in cities too.

LibreTaxi is open source because people from India, North and South America, China, from Russia, from any part of the world should be able to use it and customize it.

How is LibreTaxi different from Uber and Lyft?

There are three main differences. The first thing — LibreTaxi is free for drivers. Second,  anyone can register, and anyone can become a driver in just one minute. And the third difference, there’s no built in payment system, so passengers have to pay drivers with cash.

Actually, the aim of LibreTaxi is not to compete with Uber directly. If someone tries to build an application to compete with Uber, this battle is lost already. They spend a lot of money on app development and promotion in different countries.

LibreTaxi is different, and its target is different audiences. For example, in many Latino Communities across the U.S., there are people who are not eligible to work in the U.S., so they can’t drive for Uber. Also, in those communities, many people have outdated vehicles, which are more than 10 years old, so Uber won’t accept you as a driver. There’s no such problem with LibreTaxi. It will be much easier to use LibreTaxi inside that community, to give rides to people you already know. LibreTaxi has the same concept as Uber, but in reality, it is completely different.

We’re targeting different people, people who already know who their passengers are, who their drivers are, and we hope that LibreTaxi can help their own community.

What is your growth strategy going forward? How can you achieve financial stability while also meeting user needs?

Right now, I am working on this only when I have time, in evenings, weekends, but I am planning to work on this full-time. For this, LibreTaxi needs to be more organized.

The very first thing is that we are planning to do create a nonprofit organization for LibreTaxi, because I want people to know that this service is absolutely free, and will stay that way. We are not going to charge drivers and cut their earnings like Uber does. Second thing is that the nonprofit can help us make this application more user friendly, safer, and help us polish some rough edges. Our financial model will be based on donations. We’re not looking to make a lot of money, and we’re not going to be a middleman between passengers and drivers.

Right now, I am paying for all the servers out of my pocket. I can afford that for now, but for the future, if we reach one million users, as is our goal in the next two or three years, we may need more servers than we have now.

Actually, the name LibreTaxi is inspired by LibreOffice, which is a free and open source replacement for Microsoft Office, and they are our model. They are a nonprofit that takes donations, and they’ve grown to 75 million users, and they expect it to be 200 million users by 2020.

Another thing we are considering is to add Blockchain technology to LibreTaxi. Not sure how this will be implemented, as Blockchain is something very new, and we are very early in this game, but, for example, we could enable payments via Bitcoin.

Have the recent, seemingly non-stop headlines about Uber brought more attention, or more users, to LibreTaxi?

Partially, the success, so far, of LibreTaxi was possible because of these events that happened to Uber. But only partially, because LibreTaxi is not the same as Uber. I am working on this application alone, by myself, so it’s not possible to build a shiny app, with all these features like Uber.

How many users do you have? Can Shareable readers download LibreTaxi and expect to find rides (or riders) easily?

It is very [easy] to install the application — just need to install Telegram, and then you can find LibreTaxi, or you can go to our website and follow the instructions.

As for finding rides, we have little bit more than 20,000 users worldwide at the moment, a good number for a two-month-old project. If you look for a ride in areas like Taiwan, or Iran, or Moscow, I think it is possible to find a ride. But if you are looking in other cities, maybe you’ll find a ride, or maybe you won’t.

Even if you can’t find a ride, I hope your readers will be interested in this application because they can use it for their own communities, their own small cities, and even for their own buildings. For example, I live in a complex with 100 apartments, and I’ve listed an advertisement on the wall, where people usually walk by. Now, sometimes I give rides to my neighbors, so you can use this application right now and even try it in your building, or family.

What’s the next step for LibreTaxi, and how do you plan to grow in the future? Do you have a financial plan to ensure both a better product, and sustainability?

Our plan for this year is to add more languages. We’ve already translated the application to 17 languages, and the website is translated to 12 languages. By adding more languages, we hope to reach more people in these countries.

The next step is for us to listen to people about what they need, expect, and see in the application. We want to deliver features they would like to see. Right now, LibreTaxi is something very fresh and it has minimal functionality.

Users are the key to our growth. That’s why we ask, if they like this application, please spread the news — share it in Facebook, public chat channels, etc. It is very important because we do not have any budget for promoting LibreTaxi.

I’m constantly looking for feedback, connections, so if anyone is interested in talking to me, they can find my email on GitHub. Feel free to reach out and tell me about your community, about transportation problems you have, and I’ll try to help you and learn something new from you.

Header photo of traffic in Bangkok, Thailand, by Connor Williams via unsplash

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On the customers’ side, there have been major disputes around the safety of these services, which have come to light following stories about unsafe Airbnb properties and reports of large numbers of drivers assaulting riders. In response, many cities have started to regulate these services.

Last month, residents of Austin, Texas, voted to affirm city rules that regulate ridesharing services like taxis, NPR reported. What this means, among other things, is that these companies would need to do background checks and fingerprints on potential drivers. Uber and Lyft had sunk $8 million into their public campaign to defeat the law, and boycotted the city in protest by immediately halting operations. Many users were dismayed to find their go-to mode of transport evaporate overnight. Meanwhile, countless drivers suffered when their new source of regular income was abruptly shut off.

But their anguish may have only been temporary. In the absence of Uber and Lyft, alternative ridesharing services have sprung up in their place, The Atlantic reports. It had been difficult for new players to challenge the duopoly, given their advantage of having many drivers and customers already use their service. However, the two companies’ disappearance created an opening for other enterprises to emerge. In the month since the election, several smaller rideshare startups have attempted to fill the void.

One of them is even challenging the very premise of having corporate middlemen coordinate the rides. Arcade City started as a Facebook group — which is still going strong with over 32,000 members — where drivers self-organize into teams to refer and coordinate passengers. The founders of the group plan to release their mobile app this summer — first to be launched in Austin in July, followed by a global version in August. The service will rely on blockchain technology and is designed to be completely decentralized, so that there would be no organization overseeing the coordination of drivers with riders.

RiseAustin is yet another alternative. It’s centralized like Uber, but rather than being a corporation, it’s a non-profit. RideAustin’s organizers hope that their their nonprofit status will enable them to provide the best terms for both drivers and riders, without the pressures of having to turn a maximum profit for shareholders.

In the midst of these new alternatives, the city itself has been taking proactive steps to boost driver-owned taxi services. Even before the vote on the regulation, the Austin Transportation Department invited people to submit applications to start a co-op taxi franchise, as per a report on KXAN. In May, Curbed Austin reported that the Austin City Council voted unanimously to approve one of them, giving a franchise agreement with ATX Coop Taxi. The city even lifted the existing cap on the number of permits the cooperative could have for their drivers from 150 to more than 500.

Some argue that these new regulations were designed to stifle emerging ridesharing services. The fact that these alternatives have cropped up despite the regulations undermines these claims.

Austin demonstrates how the sudden loss of an unregulated would-be monopoly (or an Uber, Lyft duopoly in this case) can create an opportunity for people to re-imagine how these services can be better designed and governed to serve the public. It’s also a case study in how cities can encourage city-scale enterprises to be democratically-owned and operated by locals for locals, ensuring that the public interest comes before shareholders’ interests.

Photo credit: rutlo via Remodel Blog / CC BY

Cross-posted from Shareable.

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As Uber’s popularity has grown, Tang’s hometown of Taipei, like cities worldwide, has been forced to reckon with the service’s potential impact on stakeholders including would-be drivers, riders, and established taxi operators. The very nature of Uber’s operation—civilians can become drivers without purchasing a cab medallion or passing a municipal test; riders “flag” a vehicle in virtual rather than real space—necessitates a new approach to policy-making. For Tang and others involved in Taiwan’s burgeoning open government movement, the Uber question presented a prime opportunity to test a new, web-based mode of public deliberation.

Taipei’s relative receptivity to citizen participation is almost as new as the technologies that present such a regulatory puzzle. The Taiwanese press has been free of government control only since 1988; as recently as 2014, widespread dissatisfaction with the lack of transparency on fundamental questions including Taiwan’s trade relationship with China led to protests, including the Sunflower movement and the occupation of Taiwan’s parliament building. By the end of 2014, the national premier had resigned, to be replaced by a civil engineer with a PhD from MIT and a commitment to reinventing policy-making. Meanwhile, the central government made a concerted effort to expand its open data program, with the result that the country achieved the top slot in the Open Data Global Index in 2015.

To begin to untangle the Uber issue, the Taiwanese government partnered with hacktivist network g0v (gov-zero). g0v originated in 2012 when a group of citizens, frustrated by the opacity of the government’s new economic reform agenda, created a series of shadow websites with data and visualizations on policy operations. (g0v website urls are identical to government urls, except that the sequence “gov” in the latter is replaced by “g0v.”) The network subsequently launched vTaiwan, a participatory rulemaking project modeled on Cornell University’s RegulationRoom.

Digital tools including online polling platform pol.is facilitated public discussion on Uber regulations. (Audrey Tang / pol.is)

During the summer of 2015, g0v launched a four-week-long public opinion survey on Uber regulations on the pol.is platform. The platform guides stakeholders through a series of opinion statements that become increasingly nuanced as users respond to both the text before them and data on other participants’ reactions. The 3,000 survey participants produced a handful of points of consensus, which helped set the agenda for a live-streamed public meeting on August 27, 2015.

According to Tang, 1,875 individuals “attended” the August meeting, including representatives of Uber, Inc., relevant government ministries, Taipei’s largest taxi operator, and a Taipei-based taxi drivers’ association. Over the course of the discussion, which Tang helped moderate, Uber agreed to encourage drivers to secure professional driver’s licenses and register as taxi operators, as well as to review its liability insurance with the transportation minister. The taxi drivers’ association, meanwhile, “expressed a willingness to work with the UberTAXI platform under mutually-agreeable terms.” Taiwan Taxi Fleet promised a service upgrade in exchange for a shift to demand-based pricing. On May 23, 2016, the government of Taiwan agreed to ratify the points of consensus determined by poll participants. Beginning this July, certain restrictions on taxi operators will loosen: vehicles will no longer be required to be painted yellow, for instance, and “high-end” app-based operators will be permitted as long as they do not undercut existing services on price.

But while the digital decision-making experiment was a success in terms of bringing previously antagonistic parties into conversation, the 2015-2016 public opinion poll and open meeting do not appear to have “solved” Taipei’s Uber problem. Tensions between government actors and the ride-sourcing company remain high, with Taipei Times reporting a recent increase in fines for Uber drivers.

Tang nevertheless remains convinced that the process of the conversation over Uber regulations is as—or more—laudable than any conceivable product. Pre-Internet, she writes, “what was called ‘public opinion’ was usually limited to some representatives of trade unions, the mass media, and certain scholars and councilors. If the public were to directly participate, it was usually only in the form of street protests.” Now, however, technology has rendered a redefinition of “public participation” not just possible, but necessary. “The speed at which the public can form bonds of mutual trust in cyberspace has now far outpaced the speed of the traditional method of policy-making,” she argues. “If governments cannot make room to include these voices, then there will be no way to convince the public to accept it.”

Lead image: Tomás Fano / Flickr

Cross-posted from Shareable.

Photo by bryan…

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“The more powerful model, more sustainable — and certainly more in line with where tech, and I think society in general, is moving — is more of a distributed model where power and wealth are pushed out more to the edges of the network. We can set it up such that we have, kind of a ‘rising tide that lifts all boats’ type thing, where drivers all over the place have a little bit of stake and they’re all incentivized to build the network in their area.”

Joe Carmichael, writing for Inverse Magazine, profiles Arcade City, a driver-led alternative to Uber, and its founder, Christopher David:

Christopher David thinks Uber and Lyft are already relics. He’s created a ride-sharing app that drivers, themselves, will one day own, and he’s gamified the app in the process. Arcade City is the name of the game, and – if David continues to coax this fledgling app out of its nest – it could pose a threat to these established industry leaders.

From their inceptions, Uber and Lyft have made driver recruitment a beautiful, enticing process: Sign on and we’ll give you $500, they say. What these companies don’t explain, except perhaps in the small print, is that these perks are ephemeral, that they can lure drivers in and then cut rates or increase the amount they, Uber and Lyft, pocket at any time they chose.

And that’s just what happened in early January this year: Uber trimmed down on fares, then Lyft followed suit. Drivers nationwide complained and then protested. In their eyes, “trimming fares” just meant “slashing wages.” But these protests were altogether ineffective. If you were a disgruntled Uber driver and protested, three more drivers signed up in your wake. Scabs abounded. Both companies told drivers that everything was fine, that they’d still be taking home as much money as they had been, but this did little to assuage suspicions. And, all in all, it signaled to drivers that Uber and Lyft did not respect them, and that each company would do what it could to outperform the other — even if this meant throwing drivers under the bus (or ride-sharing car).

Last year, David was one such Uber driver. “I signed up mainly because I loved the idea of the sharing economy and I wanted to be on the front lines of it,” he tells Inverse. But he grew frustrated, he says. “As I was driving for Uber, and kind of chafing against some of their rules and how they were structuring things, I just kind of started daydreaming about what a decentralized, Uber-on-the-blockchain would look like.”

The founder of Arcade City, Christopher David.

Looking around, David noticed that most drivers in his area — New Hampshire — shared his displeasure. Note that this was before the companies even started making cuts to driver compensation: these drivers were unhappy with Uber’s general lack of support for drivers. So — already versed in bitcoin technology — David’s inner lightbulb went off: “I started to see that there was an opportunity in the short-term, beyond just some kind of longer term vision. That was enough to get me to pull the trigger on something, and it’s massively taken off since then.”
Arcade City will soon realize its goal of becoming a “decentralized ride-sharing app.” To accomplish this lofty goal, it will rely on Ethereum, a new virtual technology, often used as a virtual currency, that’s looking to decentralize just about everything. A wonderful example of a centralized business is Uber: there’s a HQ and there’s a power structure. Centralization, many think, is bad, in part for two reasons: the employees are vulnerable to the higher-ups’ whims and greed; the organization writ large is vulnerable to outside attack. But a decentralized organization is run by all involved, and an organization decentralized through Ethereum is, in effect, immortal — and immune to governmental impositions.

Ethereum follows bitcoin’s lead, taking the blockchain out of the financial realm and making it applicable to anything that can be computed. Blockchains are good because they’re supported by comprehensive, global computer networks, and they make data records immutable and public. For bitcoin, the blockchain legitimized virtual currency: without the possibility of fraud and interference, given its immutability, the currency could be trusted.

David hopes that Ethereum’s custom-built, programmable blockchain will do the same for Arcade City and ride-sharing. “I love Uber’s long-term vision, but I think they have miscalculated by assuming the continued relevance of central intermediaries into the future. They want to be this kind of central arbiter of the transportation networks. I share the same vision, except I see that it’s not going to be some central intermediary. It’s going to be an open ecosystem distributed on the blockchain.”

The Arcade City app as it stands.

Arcade City, as an app right now, much resembles a young Uber. It had to shut down onboarding after 3,000 drivers in 30 cities swarmed them. (While its creators tweak the supply and demand balance, Arcade City will only offer scheduled rides. Hailed rides are in the pipeline.) There’s a functional app in the App Store that will, in the first week of April, get a facelift, David says. With 1,400 organizers nationwide, a core team of Chief Officers, and more than enough reason to draw drivers away from the competition (soon, it’ll offer its drivers insurance, like Uber and Lyft), Arcade City may well be on its way. And it’s made all this progress on a “budget of zero,” which will soon change — fundraising is up next.

“We’re building an actual company, now, instead of a million-mile-an-hour scrappy startup type thing.”

Unlike Uber and Lyft, though, drivers and riders can negotiate rates with Arcade City, and the feedback system is more transparent than a mere star-rating. That’s where the gamification comes in. “Gamification is actually a needed part when we’re talking about reputation,” David explains. “When you’re building any decentralized system — especially a marketplace, and especially one where people are getting into strangers’ cars — you need to be able to have the right information about that person’s trustworthiness, and other relevant metrics that different people may care about in different ways.”

The Arcade City logo.

Specifically — as in a video game — that means drivers and riders can advance in level. “When you search for drivers, you see a list, and you see every driver’s level.” To advance from Level 1 to Level 2, and so forth, David says, you have to meet certain requirements. Give 100 rides and get X percent positive reviews, for instance. “Down the road a little bit, you’ll be able to input your route, and that’ll run through the pricing algorithm of all the different drivers. We want drivers to be able to set their own rates, so it’ll allow for a marketplace, or someone to say, ‘Okay, I can go with the Level 10 Arcade with all of this extra insurance for $50. Or, I can go with the Level 5 peer-to-peer ride for $30.’”>

Spiffy designs and catchphrases are crucial to an app’s success.

On top of that, Arcade City users will soon be able to vote to edit the Ethereum smart contracts. These smart contracts, in distilled form, are how Arcade City and other applications connect to the Ethereum blockchain. “Down the road, we’re going to also have processes whereby drivers can, through some kind of consensus mechanism, vote to edit smart contracts.”

He elaborates: “So, for example, when a Level 3 rider gives a Level 10 driver a thumbs down, we want that to be weighted a little differently than a Level 10 rider giving a Level 3 driver a thumbs down. The more experienced rider is going to want their rating to carry more weight. And that should all be transparent; people should be able to test that out. But having that be in Ethereum — that’s the first thing where it makes sense: ‘Hey, let’s put this on the blockchain, where people can see and edit this.’”

Uber has faced legal battles, too. David explains that decentralization could also — if need be — skirt these impediments. If it comes to its full realization,Ethereum may become an unstoppable world computer. If that sounds dramatic, it’s not: “You build an app on Ethereum and the only way to take it down is to destroy every computer that’s running the node.” When no one is in charge and there’s no destroying the entity deemed problematic, legal conversations grow … complex. “The goal is for us to get ourselves out of the way and to just provide a set of tools, a set of expectations, a shared culture around how people can connect with each other, peer to peer.” Governments and competitors looking to interfere, David quips, are “welcome to try and whack-a-mole” and shut down each individual computer. “I don’t think they’re going to do that. It’s just an example of technology moving faster than government, as well it should.”

David’s okay with the fact that he’s built something that will one day unseat him. He’ll still benefit some, he says. (“Well, I’ll be able to get free transportation wherever I can go.”) Of course, if he were in it for the money, he would’ve struck a balance and created an app like Juno. Juno treats its drivers more kindly than does Uber, but it doesn’t go to the lengths that David and Arcade City are willing to go. “I’ll only do well if everyone does well,” he ensures.

“The more powerful model, more sustainable — and certainly more in line with where tech, and I think society in general, is moving — is more of a distributed model where power and wealth are pushed out more to the edges of the network. We can set it up such that we have, kind of a ‘rising tide that lifts all boats’ type thing, where drivers all over the place have a little bit of stake and they’re all incentivized to build the network in their area.”

Photos via Christopher David and Arcade City and http://www.newtorideshare.com/

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What makes a lot of people uncomfortable about a phenomenon like Uber, when you get right down to it, is how it is owned. As in other mega-Internet companies, a small number of owners poised to take over a global industry—in this case, the taxi industry with ownership currently spread out among local drivers and operators. In response to Uber’s rise, there has been a flurry of proposals for driver-owned alternatives. But what if the real Uber-killer were owned by nobody?

Meet La’Zooz, a project that began in Israel but belongs to nowhere. Like Uber, Lyft or Sidecar, it’s an attempt to implement real-time ridesharing, but without the company. Using the same technology underlying the virtual currency Bitcoin—a distributed online ledger, or “blockchain”—the La’Zooz network would exist on the phones and computers of its community of users, rather than any central server. Rather than Bitcoin’s “proof of work” method of generating new tokens, which requires enormous computational power, La’Zooz generates new tokens—called “zooz”—with “proof of movement.” Basically, turn on your La’Zooz-enabled phone and drive. As you drive, you earn zooz tokens. Then, when you want a ride from someone else in the community, you can pay in zooz.

So far, La’Zooz is still a work in progress. Nobody has gotten a ride yet with it, though an Android app is available for those who want to start earning zooz by driving and bringing friends on to the network, for instance, by inviting them to download the app.

When I spoke with founders Matan Field and Shay Zluf, the ambition of functional ridesharing seemed like just an excuse for creating a truly decentralized, autonomous organization—an entity without owners, without central servers, a pure child of the Internet. But to make that happen, the ridesharing has to happen, too.

Nathan Schneider: Let’s begin by talking about where this all came from. How did La’Zooz get started, and how has it developed?

Shay Zluf: Sometimes things come to several people at around the same time. I became interested in real-time ridesharing when I was stuck in a traffic jam. And the same happened to Matan. I tried to make this idea a reality a few years ago, but back then people didn’t think it could happen. The evolution of social networks and the sharing economy has since changed people’s minds.

Matan Field: When we met each other and started talking with others, there was immediate positive feedback. It was completely clear that this was something that needed to happen. Initially we just talked about ridesharing, but from day one we knew that we weren’t just speaking about ridesharing. We would try to build a model of participation. Then we stepped into the Bitcoin space, and learned about decentralized organizations, and found out that the ideas we were abstractly thinking about had been born and raised on another side of the planet. Ridesharing was just the excuse. There’s a whole movement that’s going on—a movement for building the future of society, the future of organizations.

And is that where cryptocurrency comes in? Is that an essential part of making real-time ridesharing possible, or is it more of an add-on that you happen to be interested in?

MF: From the beginning, irrespective of the obstacle in ridesharing, we wanted to do things differently in terms of our own operations. But when we began to understand the difficulty of establishing enough of a critical mass of users to have a working system, we found that doing things differently could be a solution to that problem.

Making this a community project is not just a bonus or a nice thing—it’s what will overcome what caused others to fail. With blockchain technology, power is automatically distributed to the whole community. To raise a critical mass of participation, you can invent a token, then distribute that token to whoever contributes. They can be developers, founders, purchasers, or even early adopters. In that way there is an incentive for early participation. Then, as soon as the thing that you are trying to build is operational, there is a critical mass of participants ready to use that same token in the system. In our case, riders will share the cost of a drive with zooz tokens.

So this is how you’re financing the project right now? Is it being financed in some other way as well?

MF: At first we remunerated ourselves with zooz tokens according to a community decision. But since zooz didn’t have a market, we had to rely on our day-jobs and savings. We generated a market by selling some of our zooz tokens in a pre-sale three months ago, and there will be another presale as well. In the process, we are building a new model of full-scale decentralization, where any sort of contribution can be evaluated and price-tagged by the community in a decentralized manner.

How did the pre-sale work? How much was raised through it?

MF: We did a first pre-sale round about three to four months ago, and raised around $80,000; this round was mostly among family and friends, plus some other people who’d heard about us. Now we’re opening a more official pre-sale round this week, still not fully public—not announced in general media, at least. But we are telling everyone who has ever contacted us about it, and we announced it at Bitcoinference 2015 last week. There is a web interface dedicated to the sale, which will open on Wednesday, January 28. It will stay open for one week, allowing purchases of zooz with bitcoin or wire transfer up to total of $200,000. These funds will be used to support development until the opening of the crowd sale sometime in the near future. The rate for this pre-sale is a 12 percent discount from the what we call the “zooz peg rate,” which we expect to be the opening rate at the crowd sale.

How much adoption have you seen, and is it actually working? Is it possible to get a ride with zooz tokens?

SZ: The application that is out right now is for zooz mining. People are being rewarded with tokens when their phones send their location data and help to create the network. When the network reaches a certain critical mass, the ridesharing application will become operational. We learn a lot from our beta users—about 1,000 beta users. You can see their distribution around the world on our website.

In the context of a region where, for instance, the West Bank has separate roads for Israelis and for Palestinians, does this kind of technology create opportunities for new kinds of connections?

MF: For the problem you mention, I don’t think so because it’s controlled by the government, by the army. But I do truly believe that this kind of technology will lead to solutions and to peace because it will connect similarly minded people without relation to their geography.

SZ: People are much more interested in building bridges than governments, which have their own agendas.

How does your platform help facilitate the building of trust where it doesn’t already exist?

SZ: Part of the system will be a social matching algorithm, which will identify people’s similarities and dissimilarities from very esoteric data on the network—for instance, Facebook data. For security, also, we’ve thought of having an alert button connected to the application. Since the system is community-based, people driving nearby can respond to an alert if someone finds themselves in a situation that is not wanted.

That makes me curious about what kind of privacy protections there are. If mining takes place through movement and through transmitting location, then that location data would go on to a public blockchain—isn’t that right?

MF: Here, we need to distinguish two stages. Right now, everything is in testing, so the data is going to our servers. We are not looking at it for any reason. But eventually all this data will sit on a blockchain—on many, many servers, not one. For that we need a programmable blockchain, which Ethereum is building, and we are waiting for that to go live in a couple of months. Then we will gradually decentralize everything. This will be the most private scenario, actually, because all information will sit on a cryptographic blockchain, which means that nobody—including us—will be able to access the information. Whenever a rider and a driver are matched, only the part of the information that is necessary and public will be available between them.

So, the network will know everything, but people will only be able to access select parts of it. Have you run into any legal obstacles in developing this platform? Do you foresee any challenges with regulators?

MF: Above all, we are building infrastructures for multiple applications, not just ridesharing. We are building economic protocols, distributional protocols, decentralized reward mechanisms, and more. Included in that is also the legal structure. We have worked for almost six months on the structure that will enable us to function without any special regulation.

But you’re not forming a traditional corporate shell?

MF: The point here is that we have a model for full-scale decentralized operation. Many, many companies are talking about decentralization but not acting on it. They are building decentralized applications, but they are building them in a centralized way. Until the technology is mature, we are holding it in a centralized way as well, with a company that we just established. This company will have a legal structure that binds it to follow the rules of the protocol. Of course that’s not the ideal solution, but it’s a middle step before we reach full decentralization.

What are you expecting to see in the near future?

MF: We’ve been working for 15 months, and we have developed a lot of the protocols, a lot of the crypto-token technology, and what we call “vending machines” that implement these protocols. We’ve developed the beta version of the zooz-mining Android app that people can drive with in the background and collect zooz tokens. We still need to develop the app in iOS. We’ll soon develop the ride-sharing app. We will open the whole protocol probably around mid-February. From that day on, the protocol, the issuance, the distribution and the decision-making will be active. People will be able to start purchasing zooz tokens. At the same time, we are in touch with venture capitalists and private investors who want to inject funds into the project. Just as Shay and I are participants, companies can participate, contribute, and be rewarded with zooz tokens.

We haven’t pushed to expand the community of users because we don’t want to reach the critical mass before we have ridesharing all worked out. Yet without any marketing effort, the community of users is constantly growing. After three months of operation there are already more than 1,000 users. Gradually, we are also building the generic, decentralized platform. You can think of transportation as a test case where we develop these ideas and test them on the community. Then we will bring them to full scale, replacing all known industries one by one. Within five or six months, at least, we hope to have a working, real-time ridesharing service with a critical mass somewhere.

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