Some trends have been around a while, but it takes some time to realize it. The increasing pervasiveness of the internet is clearly evident in the "sharing" economy, largest amongst the players being Uber. New York magazine had an interesting piece on Uber's challenge to the city's vested interests.
While America is still able to lead the way in innovation, it does seem that its' government has failed to develop at anywhere near the same rate. In an increasingly complex and diverse world, it has to. In a way, there probably needs to be a revolution in the bureaucracy of government - from the IRS to City Hall. Uber is be no means an angel, but these innovators are shaking the status quo, and hopefully helping something better evolve.
Will the Uber Fight Haunt de Blasio in 2017? -- NYMag: The company’s confrontation with de Blasio was a gaudy example of how a 20th-century government structure in general, and de Blasio’s old-school, union-backed political style in particular, is struggling to figure out how to cope with a 21st-century economy. That the clash over smartphone-dispatched cars took place against a backdrop of disinvestment in public transit — with New Jersey’s rail tunnels a crumbling daily calamity and the MTA facing a $14 billion capital-budget shortfall — is both emblematic and infuriating.
“We’re in this massive shift, and our policy-makers generally don’t understand it,” says Andrew Rasiej, a civic tech entrepreneur who is on the mayor’s broadband task force. “We’re not talking just about tech start-ups anymore — every major New York industry is converting itself into a 21st-century business. Innovations need to be regulated, but the regulation mechanism we have, government, hasn’t caught up. The mayor and Uber is really a canary-in-the-coal-mine moment: Can government extract the value out of technology while protecting not the incumbent markets but the actual public who uses them?”
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