I think there is a distinction to be drawn between open technologies that anyone is free to implement, and proprietary technologies where artificial scarcity is enforced through "intellectual property" -- copyrights, patents and other bogus monopolies on ideas.
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Replying to @JulieMontoya20
Lol, no Uber's source code being proprietary has like 0.0001% to do with the great harm it has caused the world I don't actually give a shit about code -- if all the code on the entire planet were FOSS it would reduce the human suffering caused by tech by like one tick
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Source code isn't the only thing that's harmed by being caged up, though. The harm Uber are doing is ultimately facilitated by artificial scarcity. In this case, the artificial scarcity is: it only works with *their* drivers.
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Replying to @JulieMontoya20 @arthur_affect
There is no shortage of empty seats in vehicles covering any given route. That is an abundant resource, yet it is going to waste for want of any way of getting those seats filled. Which sounds like a great task, but the underlying bit is actually pretty trivial.
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Replying to @JulieMontoya20 @arthur_affect
The awkward bit is getting the data together to search through in the first place. Even then, it needn't be, considering the market penetration of smartphones. It would be entirely possible for every driver of a car with an empty seat to be alerted to a hitch-hiker.
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Replying to @JulieMontoya20
This idea was the original sales pitch for Uber - "Let's just scale up the idea of hitchhiking, or a slug line" It very quickly turned into something almost totally dissimilar to that - an unlicensed taxi service - due to obvious structural financial incentives
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Replying to @arthur_affect @JulieMontoya20
Some of which, sure, can be attributed to Uber being profiteering capitalists who want to get rich But others of which are obvious huge problems that are the whole reason no one wants to be a "nonprofit Uber" and why slug lines never turned into any kind of formal service
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Replying to @arthur_affect @JulieMontoya20
Letting someone into your car is actually kind of a big fucking deal Hitchhiking and picking up hitchhikers was always a pretty big risk to take Coordinating your intended route with a hitchhiker's intended destination so the trip is "worth it" is pretty hard
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Replying to @arthur_affect @JulieMontoya20
Which is why slug lines evolved around a pretty specific scenario of a particularly long and crowded commute all going the same direction (NoVA suburbs to DC) and never spread globally as a general thing
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Replying to @arthur_affect
It's an effort to put the infrastructure into place in the first place. Once that's done, though, there are minimal ongoing costs, and everyone benefits from it. This means there is an incentive to build broken infrastructure that only benefits some people when it is in place.
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No, widespread hitchhiking is never going to be normalized, not in a system still built on privately owned cars and amateur drivers The way you "scale up" hitchhiking is you fund a public transit system and you buy a bus and you hire a trained professional to drive it
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