IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2015 - 15

continue working. This can now easily continue outside the doors of
their office as they ride in Uber cars.
People can keep working continuously, much in the same way that
Google employees can as they ride
the Google buses offering transportation to Google employees.
There is something else though,
with the Uber story, that bothers
me, and also isn't really being talked about. That is the "leverage" that
happens in disruption.
What some call "leverage," I call
the theft of ideas, hard work, and
livelihood without conscience. It is as
if all available data from the Internet,
and now society, is free for any person or company to take, and to use
at will, without boundaries, responsibility, reciprocity, or respect for
others. It is also that this data is available to mix and match at will, without
credit, attribution, or acknowledgement - into videos, articles, essays,
music, work, ideas, theories, and
hypotheses. Thanks to nearly ubiquitous mobile technology usage,
directions, intent of movement, and
mobility patterns [9] are up for grabs
as well. Uber (with Google) appear to
be extending this territory by leveraging the available Internet data in
combination with their aggregate
customer data, to build the intelligence required to successfully disrupt

Book rEvIEws

transportation (and the privacy of
transportation) as we know it.
It is as if Uber has become a Russian nesting doll of disruption: while
Uber is collecting data on those passengers, they themselves are rocketing farther into the economy (as
they ride in the back of Uber cars),
leveraging the ideas that took other
people years to develop, create, and
document - without doing any work
themselves because ...
They're busy.

Author Information
Sally A. Applin is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Kent, Centre for Social Anthropology and
Computing, Canterbury, Kent, U.K.
email: sally@sally.com.

References
[1] K. Albrecht and K. Michael, "We've got to
do better, IEEE Technology & Society Mag.,
pp. 5-7, Spg. 2014; http://ieeexplore.ieee.
org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=6763240.
[2] S. Applin and M. Fischer, "Blurry borders
and blended boundaries: PolySocial reality in digitally individuated communities, in
Proc. Society for Applied Anthropology
72nd Ann. Meet.. Baltimore, MD: Society for
Applied Anthropology, 2012.
[3] S. Applin and M. Fischer, "Everybody is
talking to each other without talking to
each other: PolySocial reality and asynchronous adaptation," presented at 111th
Ann. Meet. Amer. Anthropological Association (AAA) (San Francisco, CA), 2012;
https://aaa.confex.com/aaa/2012/webprogram/Paper17685.html.

[4] S. Applin, "Connected car becoming the
cyborg chauffeur," Society Pages, Mar. 1,
2012; http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/03/01/connected-car-becomingthe-cyborg-chauffeur/.
[5] S. Applin and M. Fischer, "PolySocial
reality: Prospects for extending user capabilities beyond mixed, dual and blended
reality," presented at IUI Workshop on Location Awareness for Mixed and Dual Reality
LAMDa'12 (Lisbon, PT), 2012; http://www.
dfki.de/LAMDa/2012/accepted/PolySocial_
Reality.pdf.
[6] S. Applin and M. Fischer, "A cultural perspective on mixed, blended and dual reality," presented at IUI Workshop on Location Awareness for Mixed and Dual Reality
(LAMDa '11) (Palo Alto, CA), 2011; http://
www.dfki.de/LAMDa/accepted/ACulturalPerspective.pdf.
[7] S. Applin and M. Fischer, "Forced compliance - PolySocial reality,"Posr.org, 2011;
http://posr.org/wiki/Forced_Compliance.
[8] R. Lawler, "Uber confirms that it raised
$258M from Google ventures and TPG,"
TechCrunch, 2013; http://techcrunch.
com/2013/08/23/uber-conf ir ms258m-raise/.
[9] K. Michael,A. McNamee, M. Michael, and
H. Tootell, "Location-based intelligence -
Modeling behavior in humans using GPS,"
in Proc. IEEE Int. Symp. Technology and
Society. New York, NY: IEEE Computer
Society, 2006; http://works.bepress.com/
kmichael/6/.
[10] K. Michael and R. Clarke, Location and
tracking of mobile devices: Überveillance
stalks the streets," Computer Law and
Security Rev., vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 216-228,
2013; http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0267364913000587.
[11] S. Applin and M. Fischer, "Asynchronous adaptations to complex social interactions," IEEE Technology and Society
Mag., vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 35-44, Wint. 2013.

(continued from page 12)

of their criminal enterprises, and the
tools and technology of their trade.
Readers looking for a very detailed
technical history of anti-auto theft
devices might not be satisfied with
the generalist approach presented.
One area of strength in this work
is how the authors have included
media sources into their narrative about car theft as a reflection
JUNE 2015

of American's attitudes about the
subject. Overall, it is easy to recommend this book to readers, from historians and professionals interested
in automobile topics to a general
audience looking for a good read.

Author Information

Auburn University. His studies
focus on the history of technology
with an emphasis on the history
of the automobile. His current
research focuses on the history of
recreational vehicles in America.
email: dmb0034@auburn.edu.

David Burel is a Ph.D. Candidate in
the Department of History at
∕

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

http://www.thesocietypages.org/cyborgol http://www http://www.dfki.de/LAMDa/2012/accepted/PolySocial_ http://http:// http://www.dfki.de/LAMDa/accepted/ACulturalP http://www.posr.org/wiki/Forced_Compliance http://techcrunch http://www.ieeexplore.ieee http://works.bepress.com/ http://www.sciencedirect.com/sci https://aaa.confex.com/aaa/2012/webpro

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