Each Saturday, Farhad Manjoo and Mike Isaac, technology reporters at The New York Times, review the week’s news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry.
Farhad: Howdy, Mike! What’s going on? I’m in the middle of an arduous and expensive project to make all the lighting in my house “smart.” For instance, I can now say, “Alexa, turn off the living room lights!” and eight times out of 10, the lights go off. Isn’t that amazing? As you can imagine, my family loves me.
Mike: This sounds like when I kept trying to make “The Clapper” work on our lamps when I was a little kid. Eight times out of 10 it ended up with me giving myself a round of applause in a dark living room.
Farhad: O.K., so tech news. There was a storm this week over whether Facebook has a political bias. Some of the journalists who used to edit Facebook’s Trending news box told Gizmodo that it was common to suppress conservative points of view on the site. Facebook denied the allegation and said it had strong policies to prevent bias, but lots of people — including yours truly — worried about the larger danger of Facebook’s influence over the news.
Mike: Part of me thinks that Facebook should impose its will in that Trending box even more than it already does. Have you ever looked at that thing? Eight times out of 10, the most discussed thing on Facebook concerns celebrity genitals. I fear for the future.
Farhad: Whoa, I really should check it out! Also, Instagram changed its icon and its overall design, and lots of people — including yours truly — completely freaked out.
Mike: It reminds me of the “Saved by the Bell” color palette. I’m sure most of the designers who work there were children of the ’90s.
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Farhad: A lot of bad things happened to tech companies this week. Poor them. LendingClub’s chief executive resigned over financial shenanigans. Theranos’s chief operating officer resigned over regulatory shortcomings. Former staffers at uBeam, a start-up that’s trying to beam electricity wirelessly, claimed that the company’s tech didn’t work, and that its founders were instead engaged in marketing shenanigans.
Mike: What does “shenanigans” mean, anyway? It sounds like an Irish version of TGIFriday’s.
Farhad: Also, BuzzFeed reported that Palantir, the secretive data-mining company beloved by government snoops, has had some trouble keeping some of its customers and staff members. But Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, argued that the press was just doing what the press always does — trying to bring good people down.
Mike: To be fair to Mr. Lonsdale, if I were hyperrich I’d wonder why journalists didn’t only focus on the wonderful things the tech community does, too. Look at all the cheerleading the press did for Theranos! Er, you know, before they imploded.
Farhad: But anyway, speaking of shenanigans, let’s talk about car-sharing companies. Uber and Lyft left Austin in a huff this week, after the city insisted that the companies start performing background checks that included fingerprints. Meanwhile, in New York, Uber signed a deal with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union to create a unionlike association for its drivers. This follows an agreement to create a unionlike structure in California, too.
I don’t get this. On the one hand the companies are playing nice, and on the other they’re playing hardball. Why are they so dead set against fingerprinting? And why are they bending on unionization?
Mike: My read on the fingerprint thing, at least in Austin, is to fight against setting precedent. Not to toot my own horn here too much, but I brought up Uber’s fingerprint background checks in a front-page piece back in 2014, and it has been a giant publicity thorn in their side ever since.
Farhad: I’m pretty sure that what you just did is the definition of tooting your own horn.
Mike: The thing with fingerprint background checks is, they take time. Much more time than the three-day third-party services that Uber and Lyft (and other ride-hailing companies) currently use to bring drivers on board. And when you have a high churn rate of new drivers starting and leaving the service all the time — and I mean ALL the time — the last thing Uber wants is to make it more arduous than they believe is necessary to get new people to sign up.
My guess is they pulled out of Austin to play hardball and pressure the city, as well as to avoid setting a precedent that other city or state governments could end up pointing to when the issue comes up again in the future.
Oh, and they ended up settling a lawsuit over the issue to the tune of $25 million. O.K., done tooting.
Farhad: On the other hand, this could end up badly for them if a bunch of other cities start following suit. Fingerprinting your drivers to check their past sounds like a pretty straightforward and reasonable idea to most people, I’d guess. It doesn’t really sound like a good hill to die on — we can’t wait more than three days to let this stranger drive people around! My bet: Within a year, they’ll cave.
Mike: That’s a fun bet! And I had a really lively Twitter debate last week discussing some of the dynamics of Austin and the city’s culture, and some of the brash tactics Uber and Lyft used to barge in and plaster the city with fliers and such to try and win the referendum there. I guess fighting in Austin isn’t the same as fighting in New York.
The union thing. My read, again: Uber just settled the giant class-action lawsuit that threatened to derail the company’s entire business model. It is trying to put as many labor-issue headaches as it can behind itself, any way it can.
As part of that settlement, the company agreed to a number of concessions, including a more direct line into listening to drivers and giving them certain things as part of recognizing these quasi unions. Discounts on legal aid, insurance, what have you.
What drivers don’t have is the real reason people want to join unions: collective bargaining abilities. Uber and the guild have said that there’s nothing being left off the table for discussion. But I find it incredibly hard to believe Uber would ever, ever let drivers negotiate their pay if the company is not forced to do so.
So what does Uber do? Start listening to drivers, which really, is something that any company with a sense of decency or compassion for its workers would have done from the outset. (Lyft, according to many drivers I speak to, has a much better reputation in this arena.) That will probably take some heat off Uber’s back, and the unionization issue will be much less pressing. For now, at least.
Farhad: Right, it seems like a savvy plan — give our critics a little morsel to satisfy them, hope they don’t come back for the whole meal. I suspect this plan will work, too. Unlike fingerprinting, collective bargaining would actually threaten Uber’s core business model, so they’re likely to fight it to death. Speaking of which, I need to go work on my smart home. See you next week!
Mike: Don’t forget — clap on, clap off. The Clapper!
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