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Pluralistic: Uber's labor crash (12 Nov 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow


Today's links

  • Uber's labor crash: Replacing serfs with robots just doesn't pencil out.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Asimov inspired Al Qaeda; PATRIOT Act scares Canadian customers off US servers; EFF v Trump; Internet infrastructure is unsupported and failing; Nominative determinism debunked; How to fight Trump; Burglars v burglary; NYT said Hitler was only kidding; Folky Song Funny Note; Surviving autocracy; Corporate criminals.
  • Upcoming appearances: Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Santa Barbara, Montreal.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


A vast, multilane queue of bright yellow, old fashioned taxis. Standing amidst them are 16th century etchings of ragged mendicants. Looming over the scene is a black pillar with the Uber logo.

Uber's labor crash (permalink)

There's a specific kind of lie that tech bosses tell: the "premature truth." That's a lie that they excuse by saying it'll come true soon:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

Elon Musk is the world's most enthusiastic teller of these lies. That's not surprising: any kind of radical promise about the automotive sector has a 90% chance of being this kind of bullshit. Musk can barely mention the subject of transportation without lying his face off: from "full self-driving" to "hyperloops" to "tunnels" to "flying cars," Musk is a fountain of extremely untrue "premature truths":

https://karlbode.com/musks-fake-flying-car-and-ceo-said-a-thing-journalism/

But Musk has plenty of competition when it comes to lies about futuristic cars. Long before Musk switched on his first bullshit factory, Uber was spending billions to spray the world with lies about cars. Uber has always lied about everything, from driver pay to the company's finances.

Now, lying about driver pay is relatively low-risk for a company like Uber. After all, the company created the app-based worker misclassification playbook, designed to make vulnerable and precarious workers even more vulnerable and precarious. The lies Uber tells about its workforce only have to survive contact with credulous municipal governments so that they keep up a supply of get-out-of-jail-free cards for Uber's many labor, licensing and consumer rights violations.

But lying about your finances is another matter altogether. When Uber lies about its finances, it is lying to rich people, and (unlike workers), rich people have many ways to punish people who lie to them. Despite this, Uber spent more than a decade lying flagrantly and lavishly about its balance sheet.

The most shameless financial lie Uber told is that it was profitable due to the increased valuation of the many ride-hailing companies around the world that Uber owns large shares in. How did Uber come to own large shares in these companies? It happened after Uber's competing ride-hailing companies in countries around the world failed.

Uber's subsidiaries lost billions of dollars, and eventually Uber sold them to its (also money-losing) domestic rivals in all-stock deals that saw Uber acquiring vast amounts of worthless, illiquid shares in the world's failing ride-hailing companies. Then, for years, Uber would announce that its stake in these companies had appreciated in value. These revaluations were purely vibes-based. Uber's former rivals were privately held, and while small volumes of shares traded hands in private deals, Uber's pronouncements that, say, the Chinese company Didi was now worth vastly more than it had been worth a few months before was sheer fantasy dressed up as profits:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft

Uber did this over and over (and over and over), relentlessly dogged by Hubert Horan, an aviation analyst who became the world's foremost close-reader of Uber's financial statements:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/09/accounting-gimmicks/#unter

Despite these lies, Uber eventually found a way for its early investors to cash out, through a very successful IPO that saw the House of Saud made whole (and then some) on the $31b they plowed into the business so that it could lose $0.41 on every dollar it brought in for the preceding 13 years.

The most remarkable thing about Uber's IPO was the company's S1, the prospectus that tells normie investors how the company will eventually find its way to profit. That's where you'll find Uber's claim that its "total addressable market" is every journey made by taxi, private car, train and bus, for everyone in the world:

https://stratechery.com/2019/uber-questions/

Despite the wild implausibility of this ambition, the company did achieve actual profitability after its IPO. It got there through the simple expedient of paying drivers less and charging riders more. The company spies on its drivers to calculate the lowest wage they'll accept, based on their inferred economic desperation, a process that Veena Dubal calls "algorithmic wage discrimination":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

They also use surveillance data about riders to calculate the highest price you'll pay for a journey. Investors call this "personalized pricing," while everyone else calls it "surveillance pricing." It's a way for Uber to reach into your bank account and reduce the value of your dollars, by charging you more than the next person would pay for the same service:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/

This is something AI turns out to be extremely good at. Businesses can program chatbots to automatically segment their customers and employees based on surveillance data and then perform a series of automated experiments to find the highest prices and lowest wages they'll accept:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/30/pay-for-privacy/#ab2654

When it comes to wage theft and price gouging, Uber leads the pack. They've really demonstrated just how much consumer and labor surplus can be diverted to capital with the aid of AI.

Of course, it helps that they're willing to lie like crazy. Uber routinely claims that it pays its drivers hourly rates that are far in excess of minimum wage, but it helpfully omits that drivers only get paid while they have a passenger in the car, and that the company punishes drivers who turn down too many unprofitable jobs.

Drivers only get paid for a fraction of the time they spend working for Uber, and on top of that, they have to pay for fuel, insurance, depreciation, loan interest, and the cost of getting vomit out of their back seats. Add it all up and Uber drivers make peanuts. In Toronto, Uber pay nets out to something like $2.50/hour:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

$2.50/hour isn't a living wage anywhere in Canada, but it's especially terrible in Toronto, one of the world's most expensive cities. Uber can only be profitable for so long as drivers continue to subsidize its business, and so long as riders are willing to pay more than they ever did under the traditional taxi system (much of which was seen off by Uber's Saudi-subsidized decade of predatory pricing, which also induced a lost decade in global transit investment).

Inflation (supercharged by AI pricing) has hit all workers, but it's been especially hard on Uber drivers, who didn't have any financial cushion to start with. Eventually, drivers were bound to turn their backs on Uber. "Eventually" is now, according to Uber's Q3 earnings call, where CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told investors that "driver supply [was] not keeping pace with strong consumer demand in several international markets":

https://s23.q4cdn.com/407969754/files/doc_earnings/2026/q3/earnings-result/Uber-Q3-26-Earnings-Press-Release.pdf

As The Gig Economy Project writes, the driver shortage is especially sharp in India and Brazil, two gigantic countries where (according to Uber CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy), there is too much consumer "price sensitivity":

https://thegigeconomyproject.substack.com/p/has-uber-finally-pushed-its-workers

Uber's also having trouble getting drivers to accept the rock-bottom wages they're offering for food delivery. Despite this, Krishnamurthy assured investors that the company's measures to "improve driver availability" wouldn't affect their bottom line. Instead, Krishnamurthy promised to raise prices on riders elsewhere, something he called "re-balancing incentives":

That is part of the art that we’ve got and then there is a lot of algorithmic science that goes into, if you have a dollar, what is the maximum predicted return for that dollar and should I invest that dollar in a driver in Brazil or should I invest that dollar in a rider in India, for example. The algorithm can structurally make these choices based on training on billions of trips and allocate these investments in the way that humans just can’t.

The Gig Economy Project goes on to say that "robotaxis will fundamentally alter the unit economics of taxis, but we are still some time away from the point where robotaxis are price competitive with human-driven vehicles."

Boy is this an understatement. Remember, Uber is already paying drivers sub-minimum, sub-starvation wages, which drivers must spend to cover all the capital, depreciation, maintenance and insurance costs, along with (skyrocketing) fuel costs. I can't think of any way in which replacing starvation-wage drivers who provide their own cars with $200k robotaxis that the company must operate, maintain and insure will work out better for the company than the current situation.

This is as good as it gets for Uber, in other words. Being able to tap an army of desperate workers who supply 99% of Uber's business's capital and variable costs out of their own pockets is vastly superior to operating a fleet of expensive robots that Uber has to purchase and service.

Profitable "driverless" cars have been around the corner for more than 15 years now. Waymo claims to have delivered this through the brute force expedient of using the most expensive sensors and vast amounts of incredibly expensive cloud computing, but their balance sheet remains stubbornly opaque. We don't know how often a "driverless" Waymo is just a remote control car, being piloted by a low-wage worker in an overseas call center (there's a reason Indian technologists joke that AI stands for "Absent Indians"):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

We also don't know how often a Waymo is being overseen by a high-waged engineer. What we do know is that that when GM was forced to reveal this number, it turned out that they'd replaced a single, low-waged cab driver with 1.5 engineers, each of whom earned an order of magnitude more than the cabbie they'd displaced:

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/could-cruise-be-the-theranos-of-ai

Uber's claims that they were profitable (based on accounting gimmicks) were lies, but they were also premature truths: the company did become profitable (though price-gouging and wage-theft). But there's a limit to how low you can push your workforce's wages, and even if the AI crash delivers a fresh cohort of desperate workers who subsidize Uber's operations for a few more years, they, too, will eventually find that they can't live on $2.50/hour.

When that day comes, robo-taxis won't save the business model. Robots may cost less per hour than Uber drivers (though not by much), but owning a robot is always going to be more expensive than getting drivers to supply free cars to Uber. If Uber can't sustain profitability with that massive subsidy, it is going to hit a wall, and it won't be pretty.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago ObL got the name "Al Qaeda" from Asimov's Foundation;

#25yrsago Folky Song Funny Note https://craphound.com/misc/Folky_Song_Funny_Note.mp3

#20yrsago PATRIOT scares Canadian unis off US servers https://web.archive.org/web/20080204033238/http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/Page/document/v5/content/subscribe?user_URL=http://www.theglobeandmail.com%2Fservlet%2Fstory%2FRTGAM.20061111.wxuniversities11

#15yrsago Minimum wage hike coming to Guangdong, the world’s factory https://web.archive.org/web/20111110113740/http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/china/111109/china-economy-manufacturing-guangdong

#10yrsago EFF in Trump’s America: Protecting Tomorrow https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/11/protecting-tomorrow

#10yrsago America’s actually had worse presidential races than this one https://www.loweringthebar.net/2016/11/worst-presidential-race.html

#10yrsago The internet’s core infrastructure is dangerously unsupported and could crumble (but we can save it!) https://web.archive.org/web/20170222232454/https://fordfoundcontent.blob.core.windows.net/media/2976/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure.pdf

#10yrsago Fact-checking Trump’s plan for the first 100 days https://www.npr.org/2016/11/10/501597652/fact-check-donald-trumps-first-100-days-action-plan

#10yrsago Dennis the Dentist: on the unkillable wrongness of nominative determinism https://timharford.com/2016/11/rich-the-banker-whats-not-in-a-name/

#10yrsago How to fight Trump, starting right now https://medium.com/@anildash/forget-why-its-time-to-get-to-work-c49ac5f0da20#.l0xpc3pps

#10yrsago Anti-burglary advice, from burglars https://web.archive.org/web/20161118141701/https://www.kgw.com/news/investigations/we-asked-86-burglars-how-they-broke-into-homes/344213396

#10yrsago Serbian ultra-nationalists celebrate Trump’s victory https://globalvoices.org/2016/11/10/nationalists-and-populists-in-serbia-and-macedonia-celebrate-trumps-victory/

#10yrsago Leonard Cohen wrote the perfect anthem for our times https://memex.craphound.com/2016/11/11/leonard-cohen-wrote-the-perfect-anthem-for-our-times/

#10yrsago “Hitler’s only kidding about the antisemitism” New York Times, 1922 https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2015/02/10/1922-hitler-in-bavaria/?_r=0&smid=tw-share

#10yrsago Rules for surviving an autocracy https://web.archive.org/web/20161111205036/https://www.nybooks.com/daily/s3/nov/10/trump-election-autocracy-rules-for-survival.html

#1yrago American corporate criminals in the crosshairs (finally) https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/12/with-a-fountain-pen/#recidivism

#1yrago A tale of three customer service chatbots https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/11/sorry-to-bother-you/#we-dont-care-we-dont-have-to

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 516 (35512 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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Pluralistic: Workplace "flexibility" isn't (11 Jul 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow


Today's links


A giant arachnoid woman arched backwards on the banks of a tropical river alongside which stand armed men. Behind loom palms, mountains and a smoking volcano. Rain sleets down over the scene.

Workplace "flexibility" isn't (permalink)

Here's an irony: the "gig economy" is a statistical black hole. Workers, customers and regulators know very little about the most basic aspects of it: how much workers get paid, for example, or much unpaid time on the clock a worker puts in before they get a job from the app.

The reason this is ironic is that the "gig economy" is dominated by a handful of massive, data-driven firms that know the precise, up-to-the-second answer to these questions. The problem is that they won't share the data. Of course, workers and customers have the data, too, but our data is widely diffused, with each worker and each customer only representing a single, infinitesimal pixel in this massive picture.

Most of our industry-wide figures about the sector come from painstaking, expensive survey work. The expense and effort involved in conducting this analysis means that the public's understanding of the gig companies' business is fragmentary and thin.

But every now and again, we get a flashbulb glimpse of the full picture. One of those glimpses was captured by David Weil, the former labor standards boss at the US Department of Labor. In 2024, the Massachusetts Attorney General sued Uber over worker misclassification, with Weil serving as an expert witness, who was able to access the raw data on Uber's business operations.

In a new American Prospect longread called "The Dangerous Myth of Flexibility," Weil builds on the public record developed in the case to demolish the central myth of the gigwork companies: that they enter into a mutually beneficial arrangement with their workers by offering "flexibility" that lets workers "choose work that fits the rhythms of their lives, not the other way around":

https://prospect.org/2026/07/09/dangerous-myth-of-flexibility-uber-lyft-gig-economy/

This quote comes from Tony West, the Uber executive who has led the company's efforts to formalize its worker misclassification program, notably California's Prop 22, a $225m statewide campaign that overturned the state's landmark gig work standards. West is also Kamala Harris's brother-in-law, and he served as her campaign's corporate liaison, senior strategist and economic policy advisor.

On its face, West's statement sounds reasonable, and most of us have heard a version of it, possibly even from an Uber driver. But what Uber calls "flexibility" is really a way for the company to offload its operational risks onto its drivers.

Anyone who runs a business has to manage a key operational risk: staffing levels. A restaurateur who doesn't schedule enough cooks, bussers and servers might have to turn away business at the door if there's a rush. But if the restaurateur schedules too many people for a shift, they'll end up paying for those workers to stand around scrolling Tiktok.

In America, Congress and state legislatures have created a system that allows restaurateurs to transfer this risk onto their employees: the "tipped minimum wage." Federally, the minimum wage for tipped employees is only $2.13/hour, with the caveat that employees are obliged to "top up" their workers' pay if the tips from their shift don't add up to $7.25/hour. So if you work five hours and don't wait on a single table, your boss has to pay you $36.25 ($7.25/hour * 5 hours). But if you have a busy shift and you make $40 in tips, your boss only has to pay you $10.65 ($2.13 * 5 – the tipped minimum).

This is a transfer of risk from bosses to workers. The boss can schedule extra servers and offload most of their wages to diners who come through the doors. If your boss overestimates the amount of business, much of the cost of that miscalculation comes out of your paycheck.

This is quite a sweet deal for bosses. After all, servers have virtually no control over the amount of business a restaurant attracts. It's the boss, not the server, who decides where the restaurant will be, which hours it will keep, which food it will serve, how much the food costs, what advertisements to run, and where and when to run them. The boss controls the decor, staff attire and the music. They make the decisions, and workers pay the price if they decide poorly.

For most businesses, workers are less exposed to risks from their boss's strategic errors. If your boss screws up, you might see a lower annual bonus, or take a career hit thanks to the bad company's presence on your CV. Of course, if your boss really messes up they might lay you off or go out of business altogether, but it's a rare business that gets to externalize its risks onto its workers on a shift-by-shift basis the way restaurants get to.

But as sweet as restaurateurs have it, that's nothing compared to the incredible deal that gig platforms get. Companies like Uber and Lyft get to shift nearly all their risk to their workers, and then insist that they're doing workers a favor by offering them "flexibility." Like a restaurateur, Uber and Lyft control all the mechanisms by which the number of riders is set. They decide how to advertise and how to price their rides. When a driver signs on and makes themselves available – at no charge – to Uber, it is the company's actions, not the driver's, that determine whether that driver gets a job, and how much they'll get paid.

Uber and Lyft claim that drivers have control, too – when (if) they're offered a job, they get to decide whether to take it. This is true, but it's more complicated than that. Drivers get about 15 seconds (!) to decide whether to accept a job, which means they have 15 seconds to calculate the mileage and time-based rate on offer, all while operating a vehicle in traffic. Drivers who accept lowball offers risk having their base pay permanently eroded through "algorithmic wage discrimination," which is when the gig platforms infer that workers who accept very low wages are economically desperate and can be offered even lower wages in the future:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But workers can't simply refuse offers and wait for the wage on offer to increase. That increase may happen, but if a driver is too picky, the platform will punish them for turning down too many offers by excluding them from future opportunities. If this happens often enough, the driver may end up broke enough to start accepting those lowballs, triggering the inexorable downward trajectory of their expected earnings.

This is "flexibility," but mostly it's flexibility for Uber, not for drivers. Uber controls when a driver gets paid, and they control the data about that payment. This allows Uber to claim to be paying well north of minimum wage, while drivers average less than $2.50/hour. Uber exploits its information asymmetry to publish only the numerator (the amount a driver makes when a passenger is in the car) while hiding the denominator (how many hours it takes for Uber to put a passenger in that car):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

Uber has perfected a system of algorithmic pricing that allows it to dangle just enough money in front of drivers to maximize their number on the road, irrespective of how many riders are looking for cars. The fact that they have all the information (while drivers have none) allows them to extract vast amounts of totally unpaid labor from those drivers. And then, once a passenger gets in the car, Uber's informational systems let it pay that driver the absolute minimum they will accept for the ride.

Of course, it works the same way for passengers, each of whom is offered a different price for the same ride, based on the company's surveillance data and its realtime calculations about how much the rider is willing to pay. When Uber launched, driver pay and passenger fares were linked (the same way a server's tips and the cost of a meal are linked). Today, these are fully decoupled. Uber runs a kind of cod-Marxist operation where workers are paid according to their desperation, and passengers are gouged according to their ability to pay:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

This works so well (for Uber) that Uber has launched a side hustle selling algorithmic pricing and algorithmic wage discrimination systems to companies in other sectors, so expect this arrangement to infect ever-wider swathes of the economy:

https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2025/Uber-Expands-AI-Data-Platform-to-Power-Next-Gen-Enterprise-and-AI-Lab-Needs/default.aspx

(And this is neither here nor there, but holy shit, is Uber's investor relations site seriously serving ASPX pages in 2026?! Hey Khosrowshahi, the DOJ called and it wants its Clinton-era antitrust evidence back!)

Back to algorithmic pricing: this opaque, take-it-or-leave-it algorithmic pricing arrangement sets Uber apart from other platforms where sellers offer temporary use of their property to buyers. As Weil writes, at least Airbnb hosts get to override the nightly rate suggested by the platform (though I'd add that the platforms will downrank and bury people who resist their suggestions).

As Weil points out, even if Uber had to pay the minimum wage and assume other operational risks associated with running a business, they'd still have access to these algorithmic tools, albeit with different parameters. Rather than setting the wage floor for drivers at $0/hour, they'd have to pay $7.25/hour (the federal minimum wage, or more, depending on the state). This would force the company to refuse shifts to drivers when there were enough workers on the road to handle demand, but drivers would benefit from this arrangement – rather than driving around for a shift, burning gas and putting wear on your car without getting paid, Uber would just tell you to stay home.

Uber could try to offload those risks onto passengers, but remember, Uber is already charging riders a personalized price based on massive troves of surveillance data that is continuously re-analyzed to guess the largest sum you're willing to pay for any given ride. You're already paying the highest price Uber can set for you, in other words.

Weil has been in many forums – including that Massachusetts courtroom – where Uber touted its "flexibility" as a benefit to drivers. But as he shows, Uber could offer all the same flexibility to drivers without the downside risk of driving around for hours without earning a dime. Sure, forcing Uber and Lyft to extend rights and protections that every employee gets would raise their costs – but "the same is true for any company having to comply with employment law and work protections."

Outside of the US, these companies are being forced to shift the risk from their workers' backs to their own balance sheets. As Weil writes, the UN's International Labor Organization has set binding labor standards for gig companies, called Convention 193, "Decent Work in the Platform Economy":

https://onlabor.org/a-win-for-platform-workers-ilo-convention-no-193/

The US government is pulling out all the stops to prevent these standards from being applied to US gig companies, even abroad. Trump's labor boss Keith Sonderling told the world that the US government "will not sit on the sidelines while some foreign governments push to hamper American innovation in the gig economy worldwide":

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/3435961/america-must-lead-gig-economy/

But, as Weil says, this isn't about innovation, flexibility or AI. It's about gig companies changing the distributional outcome of whole sectors, to shift money from workers to investors.

The rest of the world has its own ideas. In Switzerland, the Supreme Court found that gig companies' businesses were illegal and ordered them to extend normal labor protections to gig workers. Naturally, the gig companies just ignored the law and continued to screw those workers. Gig workers, as noted, are diffused. They don't work in the same place. They have no way to find out who else works for the same boss as they do. The same factors that keep us from gathering stats on gig work also keeps gig workers from comparing notes on how they're getting shafted.

What's a labor organizer to do? The Swiss labor union Syndicom came up with an ingenious solution. They partnered with a popular, pro-union pizza restaurant, listed it on the delivery platforms, and then placed orders for tons of pizzas through the scofflaw food-delivery platforms. They transformed the pizzeria into a pop-up union labor hub, and had an organizing conversation with every rider the company dispatched to the restaurant:

https://vimeo.com/1203473793

This is deliciously ingenious, and the labor organizing need not stop there. Companies like Para have shown how, by jailbreaking the apps used by gig workers, they can allow those workers to comparison shop for the best wage. Rather than getting 15 seconds while navigating traffic to decide whether a job is worth taking, drivers and riders could use a "counter-app" that evaluates all the offers on all the platforms and coordinates with other workers to mass-reject lowball offers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#boss-app

The only problem is the "anticircumvention" laws that criminalize this kind of reverse-engineering and modifications of apps. These laws make it a literal crime to change how an app running on your own phone works. These laws were invented in America, with 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but in the ensuing years, the US Trade Rep has used the threat of tariffs to force every country in the world to adopt their own anticircumvention laws. By caving into US bullying, all of America's trading partners have left their workers and consumers vulnerable to technological surveillance, manipulation and price-gouging, to the great benefit of the US tech companies that have fused with the Trump regime.

This is the hidden silver lining to Trump's lunatic tariffs: they take away the threat that kept all those US-protecting foreign IP laws in force. When someone threatens to burn your house down unless you do as you're told, and then they burn your house down anyway, you really don't have to keep complying:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

The possibilities for counterapps in gig work are endless. In Indonesia, gig rider co-ops commission "Tuyul" apps that mod their dispatch apps in ways small (upsizing the font) and large (spoofing the GPS):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

In his article, Weil cites a study showing that customers for gig apps tend not to comparison shop – once you choose your default taxi-hailing app, that becomes your go-to. But with counter-apps, your default could be a price-comparison app that bids out your job to all the platforms and chooses the cheapest one, forcing the gig companies to compete with each other:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5729723

The platforms like to pitch themselves as "frictionless," but the reality is that they don't reduce friction so much as reallocate it. Because they control the technology, because the law makes it a literal crime to wrestle that control away, they can shift all the friction from their side of the ledger to yours, whether you're a worker or a customer:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/23/become-unoptimizable/#downward-redistribution

Tony West isn't lying when he says Uber values flexibility – they value their flexibility, which arises out of the constraints (technical, legal) they impose on us: the drivers and passengers.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Alanya to Alanya: feminist science fiction adventure https://memex.craphound.com/2006/07/12/alanya-to-alanya-feminist-science-fiction-adventure/

#20yrsago Soviet jokes https://web.archive.org/web/20060708144926/http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7412

#10yrsago Empirical proof that Terms of Service are “the biggest lie on the Internet” https://web.archive.org/web/20160712233511/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/nobody-reads-tos-agreements-even-ones-that-demand-first-born-as-payment/

#10yrsago Fox’s employee contracts may mean Gretchen Carlson will never get her day in court https://web.archive.org/web/20160712123858/https://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/07/11/3797060/dirty-trick-fox-news-using-undercut-gretchen-carlsons-sexual-harassment-suit/

#10yrsago To see the future, visit the most remote areas of the GBAO https://medium.com/studio-d/6-1-glimpses-of-the-future-e3fdb510dcc1#.iwyo4x141

#10yrsago Benjamin Frisch’s “Fun Family”: good old American narcissism https://memex.craphound.com/2016/07/12/benjamin-frischs-fun-family-good-old-american-narcissism/

#5yrsago The Sacklers will get to keep billions https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/12/monopolist-solidarity/#sacklers-billions

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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