Last week, taxi drivers in France protested the Uber ride-sharing service by blocking access to airports and train stations, erecting barricades, destroying vehicles, and assaulting rival drivers in confrontations that led to injuries. American celebrity Courtney Love Cobain, caught up in the chaos, tweeted: “they’ve ambushed our car and are holding our driver hostage. they’re beating the cars with metal bats. this is France?? I’m safer in Baghdad.”
The government of France then responded to the violence in oh-so-French fashion: it arrested Uber’s executives.
My Cato colleague Matthew Feeney wrote the whole story up and you should go read his Forbes piece now. My humbler role is to set the episode to music, by way of a tune you may have found hard to get out of your head if you’ve ever seen Les Miserables:
Do you hear the drivers honk
Smashing the heads of random chaps
It is the music of a people
Who will not give way to apps
When the tapping of a screen
Summons a ride with just their thumbs
It is the future we are fighting
When Uber comes
When technology disrupts
The cozy pasture where we graze
We’ll challenge it with fisticuffs
And self-serving Luddite cliches
[repeat chorus:]
When the tapping of a screen
Summons a ride with just their thumbs
It is the future we are fighting
When Uber comes.
[thanks to Rogers Turner and John Strong for suggestions on the lyrics]
