Recently, our world was turned into a millisecond economy, with the introduction of all things UBER. Apps on your mobile phones can give you food, the car, your bank, and now your doctor. Maybe the politicians will be next? So, if you don’t own a smart phone with all those apps you will be pushed to a fourth world of the unconnected. A place of non-existence, and a life in shadows of those who have it all. Us slow people who don’t like our lives being available for all to see over the internet, we still exist. We who still cook our own food and grow some if not all in our gardens.
Who can afford to have take-away food anyway? That is charged with GST. Does the UBER Company giant pay our country GST? Maybe the poor drive has to pay both taxes. But the faceless owner of this mega multinational, siphons the cash away. In mega multi-dollar numbers of a bank balance of an off -shore bank not belonging to the national economy, which doesn’t pay tax.
So who uses UBER?
The ultra-busy people who don’t have time to smell the roses in the garden. (Our politicians who allowed Uber to take away the work of honest people, who pay taxes to the government and support the economy in the country they live.) The Uber company is global and doesn’t pay tax to anyone. The poor drivers will need too, and they are barely earning anything, because they give the big giant global monster the stated share of all earnings. Some poorer drivers also are paying back loans to this monster for the cars they say are share rides.
The drivers break road rules, use the bus stops and the Taxi ranks to pick up their passengers. They don’t pay for that privilege, the use of ranks.
Still, I may as well scream on the soapbox a bit longer here, as I don’t advertise this site, I believe there are still some who prefer cash money or bartering over a digital readout on the internet. The villagers, who like a slow world, with less stress. Regardless of our wants, we see our world is moving into a digital read of just numbers, where all you need is to tap that phone, or a ring with a chip. The cashless society where all wealth is numbers on a screen. If this is the new world order of which many fraught hard to stop, will I for one don’t like it at all. In time the phone will disappear and be replaced by electronic chip inserted into a bar-code tattooed on your skin. One which will over ride our own will. Freewill will no longer be a given for humans on this Planet. The central Artificial Intelligence will over ride your wants and tell you your needs, then we are lost. Democracy gone. The rulers will be the oligarchies of the multinationals and the banks who oversee the numbers on the screen. Are you scared of this? I sure am.
Give me a slow world. Little single pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, all different but when put together they make a masterpiece. The slow society, being more locally based as a village member. More like the city-states of Ancient Greece than the large cities. The many against the one megalopolis of a UBER world driven economy, whitewashed and drained of difference. Please let us have a local understanding, where we help one another and not pour our resources and hard-earned wealth into a faceless multinational behind UBER. I call on my fellow villagers to stop this capacious growth of this multinational swallowing our everyday activities into a Black hole economy, of just one. We must shop locally and keep our wealth rotating in the self-sustaining economy with our own understandings of multiculturalism and the benefits of many different voices instead of just one.
I do like how the world now connects families. Many communicating with each other over continents, but the business world where human jobs are taken because of this new technology enables the mega economies to swamp the local family businesses gives me nightmares. And leaves me poor.
rosewriter3 