The American Prospect - Uber and the Impoverished Public Expectations of the 2010s

Legal director Sandeep Vaheesan discusses about a new book that shows how Uber was a symbol of a neoliberal philosophy that neglected public funding and regulation in favor of rule by private corporations.

In the telling of authors Katie J. Wells, Kafui Attoh, and Declan Cullen, the late Ron Linton is an almost tragic figure. As chair of the D.C. Taxicab Commission, he resisted the illegal incursion of Uber onto the city’s streets. On January 13, 2012, he ordered an Uber ride at a local hotel to catch the firm in an act of lawbreaking: providing taxi service without complying with municipal rules on licensing, insurance coverage, and fares. Linton, who was white and at the time 82 years old, was seemingly out of place in a plurality-Black city, which had a government that was desperate to draw a young professional class and big business into the District. He represented an old model of municipal market governance, with locally owned private enterprises regulated by public officials. And he lost the fight to preserve it.

Uber’s rise represented America’s diminished public expectations in the 2010s. Governments at the national and local levels would not build a more just economy, and in turn the public began expecting less from government. Instead, the state turned to private corporations to deliver a facsimile of justice. The global financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession offered an opportunity for an ideological break with what had been the defining neoliberal worldview of the previous 30 years. Instead it yielded continuity. Disrupting D.C.: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City, by Wells, Attoh, and Cullen, narrates that story, in careful and powerful detail.

Disrupting D.C. shows that Uber, for all its knavery, was a logical outgrowth of the political economy of the 2010s. The authors are not apologists for Uber at all, but they are clear-eyed about the pre-Uber cab system in Washington, D.C. Many cabs on city streets were old and dirty, not to mention uniformly primitive until 2012: Drivers accepted payment only in cash, even as cabs elsewhere were equipped for credit and debit card payments. Further, they avoided majority-Black sections of the city and routinely drove past Black people attempting to hail a cab.

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