IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2015 - 13

LEADING EDGE

Sally Applin

"Ich liebe Dich UBER alles in
der Welt" (I love you more than
anything else in the world)

eople are busy. The
more tools we come
up with to help us
be faster, smarter,
and better at keeping up, the more entities figure out
how to create more busy work for
us to do, so we can't keep up.
Applin and Fischer [7] refer to
Forced Compliance as the state
where one doesn't have a choice to
do something, one just must do it if
one wants to move closer to a high
priority outcome. So much of our
world is online and businesses have
figured out how to shave expenses
by shifting labor to their customers. The tools that people now have
access to enable them to do the
work that used to be the paid work
of other people.
Forced Compliance takes time
away from other tasks and as a
result, people are adapting by
manipulating time where they can.
Time Compression [2]-[3] is a state
where people don't have enough
time to do things and begin to try
to compound and combine tasks.
Using the mobile phone while doing
some other task is an outcome of

Time Compression. As people have
started to shift how they use time
[11], they are adopting asynchronicity to their advantage to shift potential communications responses and
replace slower synchronous communications with faster asynchronous
nonlinear choices. Applin and Fischer [2], [3], [5]-[7] describe PolySocial Reality (PoSR) as a model of all
human relations expressed through
our communications. An outcome of
too many messages, and too much
heterogeneity, is overwhelming. That
in combination with reduced time
and Forced Compliance takes a further toll on our ability to cope.
We're busy.
Uber, the private-car-turned-cab
company, enlists private people to
do the work of licensed cab drivers, without the license, and largely without the responsibilities that
are required by the possession of a
taxi medallion. A taxi medallion is
a type of license that taxis purchase
to enable their drivers to work in a
certain area. The medallion ensures
that all passengers requesting rides
within the area will be picked up,
will be charged a fair and legal fee
and so forth. The people who drive
for Uber use their private cars. Thus,
because Uber doesn't own any

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2015.2440031
Date of publication: 19 June 2015

JUNE 2015

∕

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

cars, it is not required to have taxi
medallions, and the rules and regulations that medallions require for
taxis do not apply to Uber. As a private business, Uber can do what it
wants with fees. Furthermore, Uber
drivers can ignore riders in areas
that are dangerous, refuse or not
be equipped to pick up disabled
passengers or babies requiring car
seats, and there is no recourse for
the passengers or the law because
Uber is an unregulated car service.
"Disruption" is a label for ideas
that change an area of the market in
a broad and radical way. Silicon Valley is interested in disruption because
it is a way to leverage the hard work
that other businesses put into building a market and attracting customers, without having to do much more
themselves to add to the market.
Uber is a disruptor of the taxi industry, and the taxi industry doesn't like
that. To run their business, Uber
didn't have to explain to people what
a taxi was, or how to use one - Uber
just figured out a way to streamline
how people are connected to rides.
They did this in part by disrupting
dispatch labor (replacing the people
who are not critical to the actual job
of driving the car with a software service and the labor of the passenger),

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2015