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The seductive nature of ride-hailing apps

✇Disconnect
Par : Paris Marx
7 juillet 2026 à 20:43
The seductive nature of ride-hailing apps

This year on Disconnect I’m trying to interrogate how we use technology and what capacities we have to change it. But that work is only possible because of readers like you.

Become a paid subscriber today so I can keep examining the parts of the tech industry the billionaires prefer us to ignore. Thanks for your support!

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Before May of this year, I had never used a ride-hailing app. I had been in an Uber before — precisely two times, when friends had called them after a night out — but never had I actually downloaded the application to my phone to get the full experience.

That changed when I went to South Africa. After having a number of people warn me about my safety and advise me not to use taxis, paired with how the malaria meds I was on were messing with my mental health, I finally gave in. I couldn’t bring myself to download Uber. Having written about its exploitative business model for a decade, that was still a bridge too far. So instead I opted for Bolt, the European alternative.

It didn’t take long for me to see how so many people have been seduced into abandoning taxis for ride-hailing services over the past decade and a half — their attacks on workers’ rights, harms to transportation networks, and exploitation of customers be damned.

The user experience of the ride-hailing app makes you feel like you are in complete control. You are Big Brother for the exploited drivers trying to make a meager living from driving people around.

When you open the app, you can see the cars plying the roads of the digital map on your screen. You choose which kind of driver you want, and can send them specific instructions. You watch them make their way toward you, until you enter the vehicle where very frequently you control the music and might even be offered snacks and amenities — all in the hope you’ll give the driver a good rating at the end. They likely won’t even try to speak with you unless you strike up a conversation. I’ve had some drivers tell me they can drive around for hours with customers not saying a word to them — an incredibly dehumanizing experience.

All of these design decisions and impositions on workers are designed to give drivers the illusion of control, authority, and ultimately of power. It doesn’t matter that Uber has been known to fake the vehicles shown on the screen, has fought being covered by disability legislation, has been sued for failing to address sexual abuse by drivers, has tracked customers, and even used the data it holds to push up fares while driving down driver pay. Once you get used to that feeling of control, it’s hard to quit — something I found myself even after I left South Africa.

Once I arrived in Lisbon, I wanted to stop using Bolt, but I found it hard to give up that sense of control. I downloaded a local taxi app and when I used it I was flooded with worries that weren’t previously there: Would the driver even find me? Would I know how long it would take them to get there? Were there even many taxis in the area? Would I be able to easily pay in the car? They were mostly foolish concerns, but were borne of giving back a certain degree of autonomy to the driver and the anxiety of being in a place I wasn’t familiar with.

Back in Canada, using taxis was no problem. I deleted the Bolt app — it wouldn’t work there anyway — and simply went back to the companies I was used to relying on. I didn’t think twice about it. But a few weeks later in Copenhagen, I needed to get a ride somewhere and my mind immediately went to downloading Bolt again. The sense of security it claimed to provide had worked its way into my psyche. I didn’t give in, but I was fascinated by the staying power it had over me.

The whole experience was an instructive one for me. My writing about the tech industry started with criticism of the gig economy, so I’ve long felt those services were not something I could reasonably use without a degree of hypocrisy. To this day, I still haven’t used a food-delivery app. But actually downloading a ride-hailing app showed me how so many people have gotten hooked on them and resist any pressure to return to using taxis, even as ride-hail prices have risen since the pandemic.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how the digital services and platforms we’ve come to rely on over the past couple decades have affected how we act, how we see ourselves, and how the world around us even functions. I feel like we’re all becoming familiar with that when it comes to things like social media apps, which is part of the reason the efforts to regulate them are getting so much attention. But there are so many smaller, pernicious ways our lives have been transformed by the screens and apps that have been pushed on us in recent years — and in most cases we don’t take the time to consider how they affect us.

I feel like the ride-hailing apps stood out so much to me because they’ve become so normalized for so many. Most people are used to the experience of using them now, and it’s been optimized over time to lock people in and make them overlook the drawbacks of these businesses. Yet, I was coming in after all that work had been done and the rapid way it affected how I saw taxis was startling as someone who’s never felt the need or compulsion to download Uber.

Very quickly, I was finding it hard to imagine doing anything other than using a ride-hailing service. I couldn’t help but think about how many other apps and services have affected us in similar ways that we never stop to question.

Why I wrote Hyperscale

✇Disconnect
Par : Paris Marx
3 juillet 2026 à 19:27
Why I wrote Hyperscale

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that people all over the world are turning against data centers.

Residents of Great Torrington in England are trying to stop one of Europe’s largest data centers. Australians recently dealt a blow to one planned near the Blue Mountains, as more than 60,000 people have signed petitions to put a pause on data center projects across the country. Canadians took to the streets of Vancouver to stop two AI factories planned for their city while Hamilton, Ontario was forced to put a moratorium on data center plans because public opposition was so great. And let’s not forget the United States, where 75 major data center projects were blocked in the first three months of 2026.

Just a few years ago, most people wouldn’t have even known much about data centers, let alone decided to turn up at public meetings and demonstrations to stop them. But after the tech industry decided generative AI was its next big thing and accelerated the buildout of massive hyperscale data centers to power it, that all started to change.

People saw their power bills shoot up, their water sullied by nearby data center projects, and had to deal with new industrial neighbors bringing light pollution and an incessant hum to their communities. Not to mention that AI itself hasn’t delivered on its promises, while sticking the public with a growing list of harms that includes everything from flooding the zone with AI-generated lies to pushing friends and family members into spirals after they get addicted to chatbots.

I dig into all that and more in my new book, Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech's Data Empires.

A little over two years ago, I had a feeling we could be headed in this direction. I’d heard about the chaos data centers were wreaking in Ireland, Northern Virginia, Chile, and even The Dalles, Oregon. Everyone was talking about generative AI, but what about the infrastructure that made it all possible? Before the AI boom, communities in those places were already struggling to shoulder the costs of hyperscale development. But with the proliferation of chatbots and image generators, so many more would come under pressure as the tech industry sought to expand its computing power at any cost.

I felt that was a story more people needed to understand: how the hubris of tech billionaires is putting our communities and our planet at risk to serve their fantastical pursuits of power and profit.

The industry wants us to feel this is all inevitable; that we have no means to fight back agains this wave of supposed progress. But around the world, regular people were showing that wasn’t true. They were taking matters into their own hands, and pushing back some of the most powerful companies in the world.

As the tech industry abandons its climate targets and any pretense of having the public good in mind, these are stories we need to hear and learn from. In Hyperscale, I explain how we got to this place and why this scale of development is inherently unsustainable. I tell the stories of attempts to fight back in different parts of the world and, maybe most importantly, I show that we don’t have to go down this path. We can develop technology in a very different way that puts the public good at the forefront, not shareholder profits or billionaire dreams.

Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech's Data Empires is out on October 20 in Canada and the United States, and on November 5 in the United Kingdom.

You can preorder it wherever you buy your books, including by asking your local bookstore to bring it in! You can also grab a copy from Bookshop in the US or the UK, or get more information on the book’s webpage.

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