More Pulp Fiction Than Research

ADAM LASHINSKY — WILD RIDE — INSIDE UBER, QUEST FOR WORLD DOMINATION — 2017

The book, at Uber’s temporal scale of things, is already old. It wa published five years ago, before COVID-19, and written over a quite longer period of time. The book has a tremendous defect: it is journalistic and as such there are repeats, and the objective is not to analyze a situation, here a corporate project, and to find the logic of it. It is, all the more difficult because Travis Kalanick does not use standard words in their standard meaning, so that a sentence may mean nothing. In other words, you need a Kalanick-English dictionary constantly. And what’s more, he also considers the only way to speak is metaphorically, and not only that, but also symbolically, parabolically, imaginatively, and so many other distantiation from normal language. This language is never seriously analyzed and even considered. On page 204, the author enumerates Kalanick’s “‘brand pillars’ — grounded, populist, inspiring, highly evolved, and elevated.”

The author starts examining “grounded”: “By ‘grounded’ he [Kalanick] generally means practical: it uses technology to move people from…