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The War on Cars
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EPISODE 79: The End of Uber with Cory Doctorow

Hello War on Cars listeners!

For our latest episode, Aaron spoke with writer Cory Doctorow about Uber and why, as you'll hear, "geometry hates cars." We hope you enjoy it. The episode description is below.

In other news, if you aren't already a Patreon supporter of the podcast, now is a great time to sign up. We've just added new tiers with exclusive merch, including our first official water bottle. (You'll also notice that the "Cars Are Death Machines" sticker has been retired from our store and now lives on as a Patreon reward.) 

If you want to sign up at the $2/month level, lock it in now. Beginning February 1st, we will be raising our lowest tier to $3/month for new supporters. But fear not, veterans of The War on Cars! If you are already signed up at the $2/month level, nothing will change and you don't have to do anything. You'll still have access to all bonus content, old and new. If you want to switch to the higher rate, great! If you don't, you don't have to! And if you just want to keep listening and sharing the podcast with friends, that's cool too! 

The reason for this change is simple: We haven't raised the lowest rate since we launched the podcast in 2018. We're putting more work than ever into the show and are hoping to expand the scope and scale of our episodes going forward, offering more bonus content and covering more subjects in more cities around the country and around the world to help our message reach a wider audience. In addition to our normal format of guest interviews and in-studio discussions with the three of us, we're also hoping to expand into some longer-form episodes with deep dives on important subjects, something that will take more time and resources. Covid allowing, we're also hoping to get to more cities for in-person events and live shows. 

We feel very strongly that the time has never been better for our issues to become everyone's issues. More people than ever are taking a hard look at the place of cars in society, turning to e-bikes to solve their transportation problems, rethinking streets as places for people, and questioning if a world built on everyone needing to own and operate their own dinosaur-juice-powered metal box just to pick up groceries makes any sense at all. 

Hopefully, The War on Cars will be there to help lead the discussion for a long time. Your generous support makes it all possible and we mean it when we say we couldn't do it with you, whether you've been on this ride since the beginning or just enlisted this month.

Thank you!

- Aaron, Sarah and Doug

PS Look for a new edition of our newsletter, The Traffic Report, next week. It's free to subscribe!

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NOTE: This is a general-release episode. You can also listen to it on your favorite podcast app, here in your browser or check out these instructions on how to find and use your private RSS audio link from Patreon. You can also use the Patreon app.

EPISODE 79: The End of Uber with Cory Doctorow

Remember when Uber, the taxi-hailing app on your mobile phone, was going to revolutionize transportation, transform cities, and lead us to our glorious robot-car future? That wasn’t so long ago. So, what happened? Where did it all go? Cory Doctorow has some ideas. A prolific non-fiction author, sci-fi novelist, and technology activist Doctorow has been a keen observer and critic of Uber for years now. “Uber,” Doctorow writes, “is a bezzle. Every bezzle ends. And Uber’s time is up.” Plus: Reality has a well known anti-car bias.

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SHOW NOTES:

End of the Line for Uber by Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic.net: Daily Links and more from Cory Doctorow

You can find two of Cory’s most recent books, “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism” and “Attack Surface” at our page on Bookshop.org.

If you want to go deep, transportation analyst Hubert Horan’s many articles dissecting Uber can be found here.

Follow Cory Doctorow on Twitter.

EPISODE 79: The End of Uber with Cory Doctorow

Comments

Corey is always razor sharp. Good podcast.

Neil Winkelmann


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