How to Get Away with Uber
By: Bobbie Johnson
Tags: Uber, Big Stories Matter, Tech

If you really want to think about why we hate Uber, the best place to start might actually be 20 years and 800 miles away, in the suburbs of Seattle. That’s where Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, the company that is the best single model for understanding what Uber is, and what Uber wants to be.

Amazon also started out with a simple, attractive proposition in a single, focused market. It sold books online! Suddenly, at least theoretically, the sum of all human knowledge could be delivered to your doorstep with a click. Who could argue — I mean really argue — with that? Sure, booksellers could feel the pinch. And publishers got collywobbles about the changing relationship between the producer and the distributor. And Jeff Bezos was a notorious shitbag, who became infamous for upbraiding employees, pushing them to work every waking hour, treating them like dirt. But the reality? It didn’t take long until Amazon seemed indispensable. For every human being who was being trounced behind the scenes, there were many more who started using Amazon and just couldn’t stop. It made everything so easy. A glance, a click, a package delivered right to your door. The pure convenience was an addiction.

Bezos, in between those spittled attacks on his own staff (“Are you lazy or just incompetent?”), masterminded one of the greatest Trojan horse campaigns in business history. Now, of course, Amazon delivers everything: books, toys, video games, kitchen equipment. It delivers media. It makes e-readers, it makes tablets. It makes phones, for God’s sake, even if nobody buys them. Its Web services division builds the infrastructure that helps run many of the sites and services you use every day (including the one you’re reading right now). And you probably never realized all this was happening until it had all happened.

Travis Kalanick certainly knows who his heroes are. He rejects the Amazon comparison, but he’s made no secret of his admiration for Bezos (who was, in fact, an early Uber investor), or his envy of Amazon’s relentless march from a mere supplier of services to a business that maintains a choke hold on modern life (Amazon was, in fact, almost called Relentless.com). “Amazon was just books and then some CDs, and then they’re like, you know what, let’s do frickin’ ladders,” Kalanick told Wired earlier this year. “We feel like we’re still realizing what the potential is… We don’t know yet where that stops.”

Amazon — more than any other company, more than Google, more than Facebook, more than Apple — taps into what people desire in a terrifyingly primal way: We want a thing, fast and preferably cheap. Not much else matters. We know Amazon’s not a nice company, and that the people who work there are treated poorly. We don’t always like it, but there is absolutely, definitively, nothing we will do to stop it. We are happily addicted.

That same feeling is there with Uber, except one thing: We know where Amazon has ended up, more or less, but we don’t know where Uber’s going to stop. Maybe, for Uber, it doesn’t stop at all. For Kalanick and his team, the means are the end. There is no greater mission. There is only hunger.

Raw, pure, unbridled ambition is an uncomfortable thing to look at. It’s not that it’s ugly, necessarily. It’s just brutally, shockingly honest. Uber does not pretend to have a glorious philosophy—it wants to make transport easy, but there is no aspiration as lofty as “organize the world’s information” or “make the world more open and connected.” And perhaps that’s the way it should be. After all, would it be more offensive if Uber had a mission beyond itself? It certainly feels like less of a betrayal to know that it just wants to be as big, as powerful, as necessary, as it can be.

That ambition shows, though, perhaps too often. Uber likes to think of itself as secretive, but rumors slip constantly out of the mother ship. There was the one about it hiring executives away from Google Shopping Express, in a move that could help it build out its delivery network and damage one of its potential rivals in one fell swoop (confirmed earlier this month). Or the one that it’s about to start on-demand booze deliveries. It usually denies these rumors, even though depending on where you live, you can already Uber courier services, groceries, restaurant meals. When these things turn into publicly available services — on-demand weddings, on-demand ice cream — they’re often positioned as stunts. But in reality, they’re all trial balloons, tossed out onto the breeze to float upward, as the company’s ambitions stretch toward the sun.

Yes, it’s hubristic. The company’s rise has fuelled plans for a gigantic new office complex in San Francisco, with 425 parking spots included (ironic for a company that says it will eliminate car ownership). And yes, it’s absurd — at least it is if you think that it’s just a fucking taxi app. But all of these pinpricks point toward an endgame that goes way beyond most of the companies we’ve seen before: They point to Uber as a central service provider for urban living.

It doesn’t want to be just an on-demand transport company, and it doesn’t even really want to be the Amazon of on-demand services. The next step in its ascent is to become the Uber of everything, and then — eventually, Uber wants to be the Everything of Everything.

The dick-swinging, the gluttony, the not-quite-lies and the full-on bullshit… All of these things, and in particular the spectacular combination of all of these things, are enough to dislike a company, and even to hate it. But it’s incredibly popular, too, because, man, if people vote with their feet — or in this case their fingers — then they keep voting, again and again, for Uber.

And that, in the end, is the real reason so many people hate Uber: Because whatever we do, we can’t stop ourselves from making it bigger and more successful and more terrifying and more necessary. Uber makes everything so easy, which means it shows us who, and what, we really are. It shows us how, whatever objections we might say we hold, we don’t actually care very much at all. We have our beliefs, our morals, our instincts. We have our dislike of douchebags, our mistrust of bad behavior. We have all that. But in the end, it turns out that if something’s 10 percent cheaper and 5 percent faster, we’ll give it all up quicker than we can order a sandwich.

A previous version of this story forgot to state that Andreessen Horowitz is an investor in Uber rival Lyft. Matter regrets not spotting the pink mustache.

More from Matter:

Follow Matter on Twitter | Like us on Facebook | Subscribe to our newsletter