   Horror stories about the increasingly unpopular taxi service Uber have
   been commonplace in recent months, but there is still much to be learned
   from its handling of the recent hostage drama in downtown Sydney,
   Australia. We’re told that we reveal our true character in moments of
   crisis, and apparently that’s as true for companies as it is for
   individuals.

   A number of experts have challenged the idea that the horrific explosion
   of violence in a Sydney café was “terrorism,” since the attacker was
   mentally unbalanced and acted alone. But, terror or not, the ordeal was
   certainly terrifying. Amid the chaos and uncertainty, the city believed
   itself to be under a coordinated and deadly attack.

   Uber had an interesting, if predictable, response to the panic and mayhem:
   It raised prices. A lot.

   In case you missed the story, the facts are these: Someone named Man Haron
   Monis, who was considered mentally unstable and had been investigated for
   murdering his ex-wife, seized hostages in a café that was located in
   Sydney’s Central Business District or “CBD.” In the process he put up an
   Islamic flag – “igniting,” as Reuters reported, “fears of a jihadist
   attack in the heart of the country’s biggest city.”

   In the midst of the fear, Uber stepped in and tweeted this announcement:
   “We are all concerned with events in CBD. Fares have increased to
   encourage more drivers to come online & pick up passengers in the area.”

   As Mashable reports, the company announced that it would charge a minimum
   of $100 Australian to take passengers from the area immediately
   surrounding the ongoing crisis, and prices increased by as much as four
   times the standard amount. A firestorm of criticism quickly erupted –
   “@Uber_Sydney stop being assholes,” one Twitter response began – and Uber
   soon found itself offering free rides out of the troubled area instead.

   That opener suggests that Uber, as part of a community under siege, is
   preparing to respond in a civic manner.

   “… Fares have increased to encourage more drivers to come online & pick up
   passengers in the area.”

   But, despite the expression of shared concern, there is no sense of
   civitas to be found in the statement that follows. There is only a
   transaction, executed at what the corporation believes to be market value.
   Lesson #1 about Uber is, therefore, that in its view there is no heroism,
   only self-interest. This is Ayn Rand’s brutal, irrational and primitive
   philosophy in its purest form: altruism is evil, and self-interest is the
   only true heroism.

   There was once a time when we might have read of “hero cabdrivers” or
   “hero bus drivers” placing themselves in harm’s way to rescue their fellow
   citizens. For its part, Uber might have suggested that it would use its
   network of drivers and its scheduling software to recruit volunteer
   drivers for a rescue mission.

   Instead, we are told that Uber’s pricing surge was its expression of
   concern. Uber’s way to address a human crisis is apparently by letting the
   market govern human behavior, as if there were (in libertarian economist
   Tyler Cowen’s phrase) “markets in everything” – including the lives of a
   city’s beleaguered citizens (and its Uber drivers).

   Where would this kind of market-driven practice leave poor or
   middle-income citizens in a time of crisis? If they can’t afford the
   “surged” price, apparently it would leave them squarely in the line of
   fire. And come to think of it, why would Uber drivers value their lives so
   cheaply, unless they’re underpaid?

   One of the lessons of Sydney is this: Uber’s philosophy, whether
   consciously expressed or not, is that life belongs to the highest bidder –
   and therefore, by implication, the highest bidder’s life has the greatest
   value. Society, on the other hand, may choose to believe that every life
   has equal value – or that lifesaving services should be available at
   affordable prices.

   If nothing else, the Sydney experience should prove once and for all that
   there is no such thing as “the sharing economy.” Uber is a taxi company,
   albeit an under-regulated one, and nothing more. It’s certainly not a
   “ride sharing” service, where someone who happens to be going in the same
   direction is willing to take along an extra passenger and split gas costs.
   A ride-sharing service wouldn’t find itself “increasing fares to encourage
   more drivers” to come into Sydney’s terrorized Central Business District.

   A “sharing economy,” by definition, is lateral in structure. It is a
   peer-to-peer economy. But Uber, as its name suggests, is hierarchical in
   structure. It monitors and controls its drivers, demanding that they
   purchase services from it while guiding their movements and determining
   their level of earnings. And its pricing mechanisms impose unpredictable
   costs on its customers, extracting greater amounts whenever the data
   suggests customers can be compelled to pay them.

   This is a top-down economy, not a “shared” one.

   A number of Uber’s fans and supporters defended the company on the grounds
   that its “surge prices,” including those seen during the Sydney crisis,
   are determined by an algorithm. But an algorithm can be an ideological
   statement, and is always a cultural artifact. As human creations,
   algorithms reflect their creators.

   Uber’s tweet during the Sydney crisis made it sound as if human
   intervention, rather than algorithmic processes, caused prices to soar
   that day. But it doesn’t really matter if that surge was manually or
   algorithmically driven. Either way the prices were Uber’s doing – and its
   moral choice.

   Uber has been strenuously defending its surge pricing in the wake of
   accusations (apparently justified) that the company enjoyed windfall
   profits during Hurricane Sandy. It has now promised the state of New York
   that it will cap its surge prices (at three times the highest rate on two
   non-emergency days). But if Uber has its way, it will soon enjoy a
   monopolistic stranglehold on car service rates in most major markets. And
   it has demonstrated its willingness to ignore rules and regulations. That
   means  predictable and affordable taxi fares could become a thing of the
   past.

   In practice, surge pricing could become a new, privatized form of taxation
   on middle-class taxi customers.

   Even without surge pricing, Uber and its supporters are hiding its full
   costs. When middle-class workers are underpaid or deprived of benefits and
   full working rights, as Uber’s reportedly are, the entire middle-class
   economy suffers. Overall wages and benefits are suppressed for the
   majority, while the wealthy few are made even richer. The invisible costs
   of ventures like Uber are extracted over time, far surpassing whatever
   short-term savings they may occasionally offer.

   Like Walmart, Uber underpays its employees – many of its drivers are
   employees, in everything but name – and then drains the social safety net
   to make up the difference. While Uber preaches libertarianism, it
   practices a form of corporate welfare. It’s reportedly celebrating
   Obamacare, for example, since the Affordable Care Act allows it to avoid
   providing health insurance to its workforce. But the ACA’s subsidies,
   together with Uber’s often woefully insufficient wages, mean that the rest
   of us are paying its tab instead. And the lack of income security among
   Uber’s drivers creates another social cost for Americans – in lost tax
   revenue, and possibly in increased use of social services.

   The company’s war on regulation will also carry a social price. Uber and
   its supporters don’t seem to understand that  regulations exist for a
   reason. It’s true that nobody likes excessive bureaucracy, but not all
   regulations are excessive or onerous. And when they are, it’s a flaw in
   execution rather than principle.

   Regulations were created because they serve a social purpose, ensuring the
   free and fair exchange of services and resources among all segments of
   society. Some services, such as transportation, are of such importance
   that the public has a vested interest in ensuring they will be readily
   available at reasonably affordable prices. That’s not unreasonable for
   taxi services, especially given the fact that they profit from publicly
   maintained roads and bridges.

   Uber has presented itself as a modernized, efficient alternative to
   government oversight. But it’s an evasion of regulation, not its
   replacement. As Alexis Madrigalreports, Uber has deliberately ignored city
   regulators and used customer demand to force its model of inadequate
   self-governance (my conclusion, not his) onto one city after another.

   Uber presented itself as a refreshing alternative to the
   over-bureaucratized world of urban transportation. But that’s a false
   choice. We can streamline sclerotic city regulators, upgrade taxi fleets
   and even provide users with fancy apps that make it easier to call a cab.
   The company’s binary presentation – us, or City Hall – frames the debate
   in artificial terms.

   Uber claims that its driver rating system is a more efficient way to
   monitor drivers, but that’s an entirely unproven assumption. While taxi
   drivers have been known to misbehave, the worldwide litany of complaints
   against Uber drivers – for everything from dirty cars and spider bites to
   assault with a hammer, fondling and rape– suggest that Uber’s system may
   not work as well as old-fashioned regulation. It’s certainly not
   noticeably superior.

   In fact, prosecutors in San Francisco and Los Angeles say Uber has been
   lying to its customers about the level and quality of its background
   checks. The company now promises it will do a better job at screening
   drivers. But it won’t tell us what measures its taking to improve its
   safety record, and it’s fighting the kind of driver scrutiny that taxicab
   companies have been required to enforce for many decades.

   Many reports suggest that beleaguered drivers don’t feel much better about
   the company than victimized passengers do. They tell horror stories about
   the company’s hiring and management practices. Uber unilaterally slashes
   drivers’ rates, while claiming they don’t need to unionize. (The Teamsters
   disagree.)

   The company also pushes sketchy, substandard loans onto its drivers – but
   hey, what could go wrong?

   Uber has many libertarian defenders. And yet, it deceives the press and
   threatens to spy on journalists, lies to its own employees, keeps its
   practices a secret and routinely invades the privacy of civilians –
   sometimes merely for entertainment. (It has a tool, with the Orwellian
   name the “God View,” that it can use for monitoring customers’ personal
   movements.)

   Aren’t those the kinds of things libertarians say they hate about
   government?

   This isn’t a “gotcha” exercise. It matters. Uber is the poster child for
   the pro-privatization, anti-regulatory ideology that ascribes magical
   powers to technology and the private sector. It is deeply a political
   entity, from its Nietzschean name to its recent hiring of White House
   veteran David Plouffe. Uber is built around a relatively simple app (which
   relies on government-created technology), but it’s not really a tech
   company. Above all else Uber is an ideological campaign, a neoliberal
   project whose real products are deregulation and the dismantling of the
   social contract.

   Or maybe, as that tweeter in Sydney suggested, they’re just assholes.

   Either way, it’s important that Uber’s worldview and business practices
   not be allowed to “disrupt” our economy or our social fabric. People who
   work hard deserve to make a decent living. Society at large deserves
   access to safe and affordable transportation. And government, as the
   collective expression of a democratic society, has a role to play in
   protecting its citizens.

   And then there’s the matter of our collective psyche. In her book “A
   Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in
   Disaster,” Rebecca Solnit wrote of the purpose, meaning and deep
   satisfaction people find when they pull together to help one another in
   the face of adversity. But in the world Uber seeks to create, those surges
   of the spirit would be replaced by surge pricing.

   You don’t need a “God view” to see what happens next. When heroism is
   reduced to a transaction, the soul of a society is sold cheap.
