PPP

I have finally found myself at the true arse end of market capitalism. I am a man of privilege, these things don’t usually happen to me, but it is important to realise that the people who pay the people who run my country want this kind of thing to happen more often. It was a relatively trivial incident, but in what it represents it was deeply troubling.

I was stupid enough to go out for drinks with old friends in Shoreditch during the tube strike. When we finally left the pub later than we perhaps intended, my friends instantly got an Uber to their relatively cool bit of southeast London. I didn’t try Uber at first, my prejudice against loss making tech firms hell bent on destroying public transport infrastructure forced me to try another (probably equally exploitative) app. I put in my (still zone 3, but much less hip) destination and watched for a few minutes as the app failed to convince any drivers to drag their arses all the way out to my particular part of north London when there was a tube strike on and there was plenty of rich pickings to be had locally. The app asked if I wanted to go for a more expensive option. Sure I did, but none of the higher paid drivers were interested either. Exasperated, I swallowed my principles and opened Uber. Surely east London would be awash with drivers only too happy for a solid fare to the arse end of somewhere. It wasn’t. Again, various cars briefly flashed up on the display, presumably as drivers saw the route and thought “sod that”. I stared at my phone for several minutes more, but nothing resolved itself. I stared pointedly at the drivers in the parked cars across the road, all of whom I imagined were swiping left on me. No one wanted my fare. I cancelled the request and started walking. This is fine for me, I’m a middle aged white man, waking through the almost entirely gentrified environs of East and North London is an entirely innocuous experience for me. If I’d been a young woman it probably would have been fine too, but it might not have felt it. That is not the whole point though (even whilst being a pretty good one). 

I am an infrequent user of taxis and an even less frequent user of Uber but I still view it as a service. A few years ago, stood outside my hotel at 6am shortly after the T6 typhoon warning had been declared, with the concierge hopelessly waving at all the taxis heading home with their lights off, I turned to Uber. The app duly informed me that surge pricing was in effect, but that was no problem because work were paying. A 20-something local duly showed up in a mean looking Prius (if such a thing is possible) and drove me to catch the last flight out of Hong Kong before they closed the airport. This particular example, where the market triumphed, is the kind of thing Uber loves: I needed to catch my flight, I had the means and someone was happy to name a price for the required service. Market economics in effect, everyone wins, but what if there hadn’t been anyone available to drive me to the airport (unlikely in Hong Kong where people drive for Uber just for the excuse to drive - but still) or what if no one had wanted to ride the fine line around what typhoon rules apply when (again unlikely given Uber drivers in Hong Kong are mainly young men)? The market would have had no answer to that. No amount of money I could have offered would have got me a lift to the airport. Of course it was a much more mundane example that stranded me in Shoreditch on a Friday night a few years later: all available drivers simply believed they could get a better fare. I was not able to offer more money (or maybe I was and I just didn’t have the knowledge of how to game the market) and I was not able to talk to them to discuss terms. The market, mediated in this way, had failed me. I’m sure Uber’s response to this would be to add the ability to up the fare offer as a passenger (enhancing the concept of transport as commodity exchange), but that wouldn’t solve the problem for everyone. At some point the transport market would become unaffordable, or ~ if there is no one available supply side ~ simply unavailable. This is why we have public transport that gets you near to where you want to go for a fixed price: everyone knows how to use it, how much it will cost, when and where it is available. 

Companies like Uber have an open policy of wanting to undermine public transport infrastructure in order to create greater dependency on their products. And we should call them products; we can’t call them services if they don’t provide a service. The problem is they’re sold to governments and authorities as services, they are sold as alternatives to genuine service infrastructure, but they shouldn’t be. Increasingly the Uber model is creeping into all aspects of what used to be service provision. Cash strapped local authorities are presented these products by venture capital backed tech execs with examples of where they’ve delivered alternatives to infrastructure they’ve undermined elsewhere. It’s effectively free! It will cost you nothing (except possibly the increased marginalisation of your most vulnerable communities). The public servants are wowed, the tech bros move in with their heavily subsidised product and smother the existing service. Once they are the only game in town, like my Hong Kong taxi driver, they can charge what they want. And provide ‘services’ at their discretion: there is rarely any kind of agreement or service level expectations for these products. The tech firms have no actual agreements with the local authorities save any licences required to meet minimal requirements (and sometimes not even those - what’s a few million quid in fines to a tech giant?) and a few vague promises in some fancy PowerPoints. 

 Whilst the rest of us gradually fall out of love with the reality of a patchy service delivered by a flashy app, (mainly right wing or at least neoliberal) governments can’t help but keep falling in love with them. It’s only a matter of time before the public service one of these technological ‘innovations’ is more essential than public transport (assuming you don’t think that is essential enough) and people start dying because they haven’t got the money or the supply isn’t there. I’m sure many people think that couldn’t happen because such injustice would not go unnoticed, but it would. Big technology has the ability to deflect the responsibility for events it doesn’t facilitate, even when (according to its publicity) it should have facilitated them. In my case there is no evidence that I couldn’t get an Uber on that Friday night during the tube strike. There is no assessment of the root causes and plan to resolve the issue. As far as Uber is concerned, its product was working optimally that evening: matching available drivers with the customers they wanted to take. In this way, if we don’t stop it, our services will be replaced by products that obfuscate away any requirement to delivery, and public infrastructure as we know it will disappear in a cloud of vapour-service.* 

 *in tech the term vapourware refers to ‘software’, usually built for demonstration purposes, that is little more than a front end. It cannot undertake the genuine operations of the final product, although it can be set up to appear as if it is fulfilling these functions so a client can see what it should do. It seems fitting then to describe these products as vapour-services, as they only appear to deliver the service they intend to replace.