Whether or not taxi medallions are a good thing I hope we can agree that there's a gulf between Rosa Parks and Travis Kalanick?
Whether or not taxi medallions are a good thing I hope we can agree that there's a gulf between Rosa Parks and Travis Kalanick?
There's a difference in terms of their motives and methods and the surrounding context, but, ultimately it's just actions and consequences and a messy collective decision-making process. The collective ruling body has thus far decided that Uber be allowed to continue and the conversations and laws continue to evolve around these things. Nobody is calling Travis a hero but we've [collectively] agreed that there was some value to some of those decisions.
Let's look at that gulf. One's a poor black woman in the 1960's and the other's a rich white guy in the 2010's. It's easy to see which one we've been programmed to be supportive of. But picking someone based on the color of their skin and not the content of their character isn't what we're going for. So we have to be explicit in saying that the documented actions by this particular rich white guy are what people find offensive about him, rather than simply that he is one.
In terms of societal change though, they both had a bad law in front of them, they both broke it. In Rosa Parks' case, the law got changed. In Travis Kalanick's case, new laws got passed specifically regulating his company. But the thing is, the taxi medallion laws haven't actually gone away. This results in Uber having to do things in weird ways to satisfy the letter of the law in order to comply with the various laws that exist in each jurisdiction.
Travis Kalanick got rich off the backs of an army of drivers and a swath of passengers. Rosa Parks did not.
He did some pretty shitty stuff along the way, sure.
One thing about Rosa Parks is that she wasn't the first. It was because she was the woman who wasn't going to fall to ad hominem attacks. We can name the logical fallacy, but unfortunately it works in the unregulated court of public opinion.
Neither was Travis, but they were both the ones that succeeded. She succeeded in changing minds and laws, and he succeeded in making a pile of money.
So there's absolutely a gulf between the two, and that gulf is that the laws about sitting in the back of the bus got struck down. The taxi laws did not. One happens to be a rich white guy and the other happens to be a not-exactly-well-off black woman, and the black woman actually managed to get the laws changed.