Bill Johnson of StructureC3 referred to Uber and Airbnb as Death Star platforms in a recent chat, particularly Uber. Uber’s big bet is global monopoly or bust. What if Uber was owned and governed by its drivers? What if Airbnb was owned and governed by its hosts?
What forces are driving the rise of Death Star platforms? And what’s at stake?
Uber leaders express an explicit ideology of domination and limitless, global ambition.
Their business model relies on precarious 1099 contractors. They mix technology, ideology, design, public relations, community organizing, and lobbying in a powerful new formulation that’s conquering cities and users around the world. They wrap themselves in the cloak of technological progress, free market inevitability, and even common good. As a result, cities allow them to break their laws with surprising frequency (Uber and Airbnb are simply illegal in most cities). Weak city governments either drink the Kool-Aid or struggle to contain them.
Most Millennials use these services and implicitly accept their ideology as Death Stars mask the complexity of their services—and their politics—behind slickly designed apps. As a result, they along with many others unknowingly join a movement with totalitarian goals, all for the sake of often negligible income, savings and convenience.
The sound of a new hegemony coming to power
Airbnb is running an $8.3 million campaign to defeat a San Francisco voter proposition (Prop F) designed to limit Airbnb’s negative impact on the city’s skyrocketing housing costs. This lobbying activity is just the tip of the iceberg. Uber and Airbnb are using a good bit of their $10 billion+ collective war chest to hire a global army of lobbyists. In their language, they’ve put “boots on the ground” in hundreds of cities.
If you’re outraged by the power of tech giants now, just wait until tech dominates the majority of services you depend on to live.
If you’re frustrated by how tech companies wield power over you as user now, just wait until you’re algorithmically fired by a Death Star because of one random bad rating. If you think incumbents like taxi companies suck, just wait until a win-at-all-cost tech titan like Uber’s Travis Kalanick rules the roost.
If the diversity of your city’s locally-owned businesses is already suffering, just wait until sterile, centralizing Silicon Valley apps create an even more boring and unresilient monoculture.
If you’re worried about housing costs, just wait until every city’s housing market is like San Francisco’s, where one bedroom apartments rent for an average of $3,500 a month, the highest in the US.
If you’re pissed by today’s unprecedented inequality, just wait until Death Star platforms destroy millions of jobs, what seems like a bad situation for the 99% today could become much, much worse tomorrow.
Platform Cooperativism
The central premise of platform cooperativism is that those who create the most value for the platforms— providers like drivers and hosts—should own and control the platforms. Current arrangements tend toward exploitation of providers as Death Stars shift the cost and risk of providing a service to providers. Unlike most incumbent service providers, such as taxi companies or hotels, Death Stars providers are 1099 contractors who do not enjoy the benefits and protections of employees. Death Stars rely on this arrangement to avoid the costs of managing a workforce and grow quickly. It’s true that Death Stars often provide superior service by leveraging technology, but they probably wouldn’t be viable if they did not exploit this huge labor-related cost advantage.
But how can the platform coops survive? Continue to read the article.
The question is: How will this next platform coops movement not become just the next another new tech hegemony power in the course of their competition with airbnb and Uber as the movement grows big?
How to break the curse spell that today’s rebel and ‘revolutionist’ will inevitably become the next dictating and exploitive hegemon? This phenomenon applies to political, economic and social changes.
The whole point of what drives people to work so industriously to disrupt the status quo is because should their betting bingo, they will have the greatest stake to be the next ruling class, and in the course, they need A LOT of mules (and possibly their corpses) to lay down the new strata of the new pyramid.
The ‘sharing’ economy of Uber and Airbnb has turned out to be another communist type of ‘liberation’ agenda and propaganda. A by-product is the ‘sharing’ economy such as the ‘sharing’ bicycles turn out to be THE GREATEST producers of new environmental Armageddon of hire and dump SUPER WASTES in some cities, while in the course, these globally ‘sharing’ bikies disrupt local conventional bicycle hire small businesses.