Uber And The Anarchists

One morning I woke up and wrote down what an ideologically-bizarro world would look like: the communists would writhe about centralizing the means of production, the libertarians would welcome big government, and the anarchists would violently tear down peer-to-peer ridesharing services that remove the exploitative middleman from the picture.

Turns out, unlike the desperate last move of tired, spent Hollywood scriptwriters, this wasn’t just a dream. Seattle Anarchists don’t like Uber. Counterforce, one of the groups responsible for violent reaction, calls Uber “one of the most disgusting tech companies in existence.” Read the post. It’s seething with hysterical rhetoric and sociological fantasies about the prevalence of the Uber Man in Silicon Valley, in the tech world—pictured in all its Nietzschean implications.

In effect, the libertarians don’t really know what to make of it. A few I’ve talked to are starting to slowly grasp the SWPL mindset—but they don’t really know how to conceptualize it properly. They don’t know what fits where and why. Organ sales? Prohibited. Peer-to-peer services that excise the exploitative middleman from the picture? Use a taxi, instead. That slurpy? No. Shop at Whole Foods and have a $25 arugula salad topped with fine figs and exotic pine nuts. The bleeding heart libertarians argue that market processes help the least well off, but market-bigotry cropping up from elite Brahmins is puzzling to them, mostly because the libertarians don’t have a single, encapsulating term for Brahmins.

So opposition to Uber is clearly from two angles: Brahmins in city councils, and anarchists on city corners. Obfuscation at the object-level allows anarchists a semblance of public tolerance. If the object-level was explicitly centered around violence for violence’s sake, or just violence for Thede preservation, then there would be little to no public sympathy, and public sympathy is important.

To focus purely on the anarchist perspective, what we’re seeing here in their response to Uber and Lyft is an indication of higher-level processes, of the structure of the economy rapidly shattering and being born anew across the country, due to capital becoming concentrated in the hands of the gentrifying class. But it’s not merely the concentration that does it. It’s the concentration in a particular Thede with similar enough preferences to displace the existing Thede.

That’s why the traditional philosophy-as-such approach is so at odds with the dynamics of current activist anarchism. In terms of the philosophy, opposition to Uber seems like bizarro-world anarchism, but it actually makes good sense. Capital is power, and as a self-defense mechanism, anarchism represents a successful schelling point for disaffected and displaced Bohemian tribes to glom onto. Capital is power. This isn’t just in San Francisco. The anarchists tend to adopt as a pet whatever minority-group-of-the-week is experiencing the pressure in a very close and personal manner. As the author of the Counterforce piece writes, “With the click of a button, Kalanick [creator of Uber] will completely destabilize and undermine African immigrant communities in Seattle.” Also of import is the confusion between anarchism and socialism the author makes (as if they were mutually exclusive), further supporting the point that the philosophy-as-such approach isn’t a useful model here.

Who deserves the resources? Whose way of life? The anarchist answer: our resources, our way of life. Voluntary transfer and capital accumulation are just discourses–attempts to maintain order, ease the transition, and mitigate violence—at least that’s how they see it. Legitimacy: what’s happening is what’s supposed to happen, and how it’s happening is acceptable.

Anarchists obfuscate, too, in response. It’s not really about safety. It’s not really about marketing practices. It’s not about Uber’s ‘use of the state’ to force itself upon innocent drunks, drunks who are preyed on not once, but twice! by capitalism. First, capitalism causes Seattlites to drink themselves half to death. Second, the capitalist response isn’t pity, but Uber cars, driving in circles around the carrion like buzzards, meant to extract as much wealth as possible from the intoxicated.

That the transfer of resources is happening through ‘right process’ is irrelevant. For the anarchists, the transition is wrong because the wrong outcome is being generated, which is somewhat amusing in light of their obsession with the will-of-the-people as mandating peaceful and voluntary regime transfers. Democratic legitimacy, and all. If I were a boring, run-of-the-mill conservative, I’d spend an entire article noting how dreadfully hypocritical the anarchists are being. That’s a starting point—not worth wringing hands and taking up space. It isn’t about consistency and never was, and while charges of hypocrisy might provoke deep, pain-filled self-soul-searching on the right, the left moves forward. Fail to acknowledge, los geht’s.

Gentrification is churn, and churn is painful. Pushing back against the churn is what motivates the anarchist response. Changing material conditions forces the development of new rhetoric, and even if it weren’t permitted by the anarchist philosophy, anarchists would likely rationalize the switch from old to new: to protect the Thede, to protect the tribe. As an example elsewhere, Christians will eventually come around to accepting genetic enhancement, switching from the old rhetoric of ‘don’t play God’ to a new theological construct that can be twisted to endorse the new arrangement of material conditions.

The betters are supplanting the worsers. I have no complaints. Uber is just an ephemeral phenomenon, a beacon to concentrate firepower. It signals the advance of the bourgeoisie.

So if the anarchists and Bohemians are unsuccessful, do they move to the suburbs? No. The reason why the homeless don’t congregate in the suburbs is the same reason the Bohemians don’t, either. Where will they go? Guided gentrification might be a good idea, but mostly gentrification shouldn’t be hampered by the state at all. It should be fast and hard. Private security guards and risky young-uns will fill in the blanks. However, in the case that unguided gentrification speeds up the transition, violence in return should be more than expected. If you squeeze too hard, too quickly, and there’s nowhere else to turn to preserve the life and the tribe, there will be backlash.

Churn is tribe-disruption: the invading tribe has a strong measure of stability, since there is a homogenization of values and access to capital, such that they are able to live in close proximity. The invaded tribe, no matter what sorts of social technology they possess, are violently fragmented. All the social technology in the world is for naught if you can’t maintain the basic pre-conditions necessary for its deployment.

Fleshed out, let’s look at three roommates: Jim, John, and Jennifer. Jim and John work together. Jim doesn’t make quite as much as John, so he has to quit and find another job. Jennifer is a dilettante artist, who while formerly supported by the generous donations of her fellow bohemians, is now seeing a negative income stream, since excess capital is being directed not to value-endeavors, but to the baseline of rent and necessities. She has to move out of the city. The company John works at, too, is seeing a marked decline in business. We’ll call the company Bohemian Central. The tech folks don’t even know it exists, nor do they care. Bohemian Central is not their Thede. John gets laid off and, again, is forced to move to a less developed portion of the city where rent is cheaper. A few years later, further encroachment by the moving tide of gentrification necessitates a repeat.

John, now a committed anarchist, joins a violent, counter resistance movement.

Uber is coming because gentrification is coming, and there’s no closing Pandora’s box—but if some sacrificial anarchist were so inclined, all it would take is an abduction case, wherein an anarchist-as-uber-driver kidnaps and kill himself and his passengers. There’s nothing quite like an outlier case to forever poison, scar, and shutdown a nascent area of development—for good, in some cases.

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