UHundreds of thousands of internal documents, dated from 2013 to 2017, were recently leaked by Mark MacGann, former head of lobbying for a few key regions at Uber. These bring to light the practices carried out by what was then still a start-up, aimed at exerting pressure on a number of political leaders around the world.
The documents transmitted testify to a cleverly elaborated and aggressive strategy intended – given the announced anger of those who could be the main victims, the taxi drivers – to present this model as an economic promise such that it would be a historical error, or a patent lack of lucidity, to curb its ongoing development.
Because it is indeed a new model that had been inaugurated, among others and since 2009, the VTC company, becoming one of the main symbols of a new kind of economy: that of data and platforms. Thanks to the rise of smartphones, their location via the GPS system and advances in artificial intelligence, it became possible to exploit the interpretation of individuals’ behaviors through their uses, with the possibility of suggesting to them a potentially infinite number of hyper-personalized products or services.
In the initial philosophy of the Web
Thus, a technological architecture has made it possible to bring about the principle of a supposedly “direct” connection between service providers and consumers. Like Airbnb, for example, launched in 2008, making it possible to establish agreements between hosts and occasional tenants.
The specificity of this configuration was to appear to give full substance to the initial philosophy of the Web, based on a dehierarchical structure, now able to stimulate, almost without barrier to entry, the entrepreneurial spirit, or for a large number, in particular the most disadvantaged populations, to engage in new professions without long periods of prior training. As for the users, they were suddenly allowed to benefit from additional comfort.
For lobbying practices to be fully effective, substantial financial means and skilled opinion makers are not enough. These still require a decisive element: a favorable context. And such a context was more than ever at work in the triumph of a doxa which, at the time, affirmed on all sides that this industrial turning point augured gigantic deposits of wealth, would promote job creation, but also new management methods, “cool and horizontal” – those supposed to prevail in start-ups.
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