Chapter Twenty-Six · Part V, The Pocket Revolution

Move Fast and Break Things

Forthcoming

In her first weeks at Uber, Susan Fowler, a preacher's daughter who wrote her own curriculum at night, reports her manager and is told it is his first offence. Disruption, told from underneath: Sunil Paul, who patented the idea in 2000 and lost the company; Douglas Schifter, a livery driver who wrote columns about regulation; and Elaine Herzberg, crossing a road in Tempe in front of a car whose last six seconds of belief were recorded to the tenth of a second. How a surge price works, and who pays.

This chapter has not been serialised yet. It will appear on Substack first, and this page will carry its opening when it does.

In this chapter
Susan Fowler, Sunil Paul, Garrett Camp, Travis Kalanick, Douglas Schifter, Elaine Herzberg, Rafaela Vasquez
The idea it builds
Surge pricing: count riders and drivers in every hexagon of the city, multiply the fare where they do not match, and let both sides change their minds.