Most people know the story of the Luddites, but it is still a tale worth repeating, especially in light of recent protests over Uber. Luddites were skilled artisans and other laborers in early-nineteenth-century England who rebelled against changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution. The Luddite uprising began in Nottinghamshire in November, 1811, when a group of stocking makers destroyed the machines that made things more quickly than they could and that thus threatened their livelihoods. Within a year, the protests spread to two more counties, Yorkshire and Lancashire. It was essentially a rebellion against free markets and the Industrial Revolution. It was skilled workers raging against the influx of unskilled labor.
Earlier this week, Paris—the very city where Uber was born, in 2010—was the scene of a series of violent protests against the company and its popular taxi-replacement service. UberPop (known as UberX in the United States) is, in its own app-based way, akin to the arrival of large knitting machines manned by unskilled labor, threatening the livelihoods of a certain class of workers. It took only five years for what once seemed like a fuzzy idea—limos on demand—to become the source of riots in the streets.
“Now we go to shopping malls or go to a taxicab line to find better ways to find what we need,” Liran Einav, a professor of economics at Stanford University, said at a symposium hosted by the Federal Trade Commission this month. “The sharing economy is the natural next step in the evolution of markets, where we don't need to go anywhere to get a cab or to find what we need in the shopping mall.” To put it another way, we are transitioning from an era of going someplace to get our goods and services to a new phase where such goods and services come to us when we ask for them. Uber is a big part of that change. The company gets a lot of attention, positive and negative, in part because of its valuation (fifty billion dollars and counting) and its booming popularity.
Uber isn't alone, of course. There are startups that will park your car, get you a masseuse, find maids to clean your apartment, and do your grocery shopping. They are part of what is often called the sharing economy—though it often isn't really about sharing. It is an economy driven by our desire for instant gratification.
The need for instant gratification, in turn, is driven by the presence of a computer within an arm's reach, pretty much all the time. For several decades, computers have been a fixture in our universities and our offices. The nineties tech boom democratized computer ownership and we all brought PCs into our homes. Now we walk around with computers in our pockets. Each shift in accessibility—from computers at work to computers at home to networked computers everywhere to computers in our pockets—has allowed us to become more productive, but it has also encouraged us to become more impatient. Why wait to pay bills at home when you can do pay them while walking home? Why wait for a cab to come along when you can order up an Uber?
The Parisian taxi drivers are partly protesting against economic regulations in cities where taxi drivers have to pay for expensive medallions while Uber drivers do not. But, in a larger sense, they're actually protesting against our increased impatience. We don't have time to wait for a cab, because someone around the corner is willing to do the same job more cheaply. Our phones make us more productive while we wait, and yet we don't ever want to wait. As individuals, taxi drivers are stuck: their industry is controlled by outdated regulation and now they face ruthless free-market competition. Meanwhile, the habits and the expectations of their customers are changing—people are voting with their wallets and with their time. And that’s not something that protests in the streets, whether in Paris or Nottinghamshire, are likely to change.
