Scale Ruins Everything

Given that we've been throwing cash at every conceivable idea for the last ten plus years, yet when speaking of unicorns we still have to refer back to airbnb and uber, seems like we're well past "peak unicorn" and well into the "horse with a mild concussion" era.

It's also disconcerting how much their success seems to hinge on using technology as a lever to break laws or social expectations, as opposed to technology as something that itself empowers humans to be more productive.

Getting a taxi in my college town in 2005 was agony. Make a phone call from a loud bar and shout at some guy who can barely tell what you're saying that you want a taxi and then maybe if you're lucky they show up in an hour and cost 3 times as much as you expected (and that's on a good night!) vs. "press a button, get a ride" (and have a feedback mechanism for horrible drivers or gross cars, etc.).

Uber has issues but honestly it's night and day compared to what taxis were like. And they decrease DUI's.

Sure, but there's a difference between "that kind of success" and "any success". To illustrate, imagine an alternate timeline with a company called "Rebu", which provides all the same phone-apps and servers and whatnot for thousands of taxi-services across the world to adopt, replacing their shitty old "computerized dispatch" systems.

Do you believe Rebu could that have managed to draw the same level of venture-capitalist money and unicorn-ness and hype, even sharing the same core technologies, code, and product features?

I don't think it would, and I'm asserting that comes from business-plans, labor relations, legal challenges, government lobbying, investor marketing, etc., which in several cases have been, er, ethically-problematic.

I'm confused to the argument you're making as some of those are clearly ethically-problematic for Uber while legal challenges, government lobbying seems core to the business.

The taxi market, in the US at least, was a textbook case of regulatory capture to stifle competition. Google "taxi medallion prices nyc" for an example. Uber was clearly the 'good guy' in flouting those laws and later getting them repealed. The cartels that controlled the medallions had no interest in improving the technology until they had competition.

Then why was uber a thing in other cities around the country where such laws didn't exist?