Uber Stupid.

By Peter M. De Lorenzo

Detroit. Heaven forbid anyone deigns to criticize the switched-on geniuses in Silicon Valley. After all, when you transform the world with your brilliance on a daily basis, why shouldn’t the world genuflect to every new idea the New Masters of the Universe come up with?

It’s clear that the rest of us are mere impediments to Silicon Valley’s idea of a visionary future, and the sooner we get with the program or just get out of the way, the better off we’ll be.

And nowhere is that more evident than in the $17 billion that the visionaries in Silicon Valley have valued the Uber ride sharing service, rewriting the concept of “stupid money” and taking it to an entirely new dimension of stupid.

After reading the tide of coverage about Uber appearing in every corner of the media – both new and old – of late, it’s clear to me that a considerable portion of Silicon Valley has flat lost their minds, and are hell bent on taking all of us with them.

The most odorous of the articles – in a vast sea of many, I might add - was penned by one Farhad Manjoo, in The New York Times last week. In “With Uber, Less Reason to Own a Car,” Manjoo mounted a full-tilt embrace of the anti-car intelligentsia and a targeted indictment of anything and everything to do with the automobile. Manjoo’s piece was a outrageous pinwheel of derision and condescension aimed at burying the automobile industry once and for all, to wit, “Uber could pull this off by accomplishing something that has long been seen as a pipe dream among transportation scholars: It has the potential to decrease private car ownership.”

From there the writer sought out comments from some of those so-called “transportation scholars,” who, not surprisingly, were located in Berkley, San Francisco and New York City, three hotbeds of the burgeoning anti-car movement in this country.

The gist of all of this is that Uber — if left unchecked by the burdensome regulations that the company insists shouldn’t apply because its service is so transformative that to regulate it would only serve to perpetuate the simplistic, narrow-minded notions of people steeped in the past who are incapable of understanding its brilliance — could transform our congested city centers into urban nirvanas ripe for holding hands and frolicking while blowing bubbles, free of all the detritus and bad karma that the automobile has rained down upon our cities for decades.

Really? A bunch of cars of varying degrees of condition available at your beck and call from your cellphone is going to do all of that? This could be the new quintessential definition of unmitigated bullshit, as if we needed another one.

Look, I’m well aware that we live in a brand-new era controlled by The Entitled Generation, the shiny happy hordes who have been coddled since birth and told that their brilliance is undeniable, that they can be and do anything they want to, that the world will be a more huggable and benign place of wonder and beauty because of them, that they’re special in every way and nary a discouraging word has been allowed to jostle their perfect beings because that would be “harsh” and really not very nice.

I also understand that these same people have been driven around their entire lives so that their upbringings could be free from stress and so that their childlike wonder could remain intact despite all the nasty business associated with growing up, but ladies and gentleman, $17 billion with a capital “B” because The Entitled Generation shouldn’t have to be bothered with all the ugliness associated with growing up and being accountable and doing adult things like owning a car? Or, as Manjoo wrote, “Compared with that kind of convenience (of Uber), a car that you own — which you have to park, fill up, fix, insure, clean and pay for whether you use it or not — begins to seem like kind of a drag.”

Indeed. As in why deal with the reality of functioning in the real world when you can create your own altered reality with a tap of an app on your smart phone? And when a car will magically appear, since your parents aren’t around to drive you anywhere as you pursue your doctorate in Self-Fulfillment and the Enrichment of Life Untethered, you are free to be blissfully self-absorbed in a perfect little world that is comforting and like, doesn’t suck, conjuring memories of your childhood?

That there are burgeoning hordes of people out there who are sharpening their pitchforks and mounting an all-out assault on, in their minds, the “tyranny” of the automobile is no big surprise. To them, the freedom of mobility is scary, because with that freedom comes basic accountability and responsibility, something that they’ve learned can be yucky and remarkably enough – a drag.

So why not create car services that are extensions of fond memories of their youth? After all, when you’ve been chauffeured around for most of your life, why not create a pitch-perfect world where you never have to worry about it ever again? And even better, why not create autonomous cars because responsibility behind the wheel is so tedious and so mired in yesterday? And then you’ll never have to take your eyes of off of your smart device ever again.

Advancements in technology can be breathtaking and life altering and I often marvel at them, at least to a point. But technology can never replace common sense, accountability or responsibility.

Is the decongestion of our cities a noble goal? Sure, but so is eliminating food waste and a long list of other things we should be worrying about to improve our world.  But there’s an underlying cynicism with this Uber business that at the very least is distressing, and that’s not even getting into the stupidity of the $17 billion.

That cynicism emanates from what seems to be a fundamental belief held by the minions in Silicon Valley that all of their ideas are not only brilliant, but also infallible, even if the rest of us don’t get it. It’s that old “you’re just not hip enough to understand” argument that is used by practitioners in various professional pursuits. (Often used by auto designers when their designs are met with an underwhelming response from the unenlightened.)

This collective “they” envisions a lovely little world of its own making, free of hassles and ugliness and of aggravations and bad days. A world devoid of harshness because everything is thought of and everything is wonderfully taken care by visionary technology that asks nothing of you and requires no effort on your part.

Don’t want to step up to the realities of mobility and the freedom that comes with it? That’s okay, Uber will take care of you and then you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, because after all, that would be “harsh.” This warped logic is a natural outgrowth of a generation that has been told since Day One that they’re indeed special, that if you try but fail it’s okay because everybody gets a trophy, a hug and some ice cream afterward.

Combine that thread of orchestrated, unnatural bliss with the burgeoning anti-car movement, which is powered by insular, narrowly focused zealots unburdened with a shred of reality, and you have the makings of a muddled mess of a lethal cocktail, comprised of equal parts rancor and flat-out stupidity.

Or, in short, the orchestrated bleating of a few who are trying to impose their will on the many, couching it in the platitudes of “it’s for your own good.”

Swell.

This just in: Life isn’t orchestrated. And life doesn’t always happen the way it’s supposed to, or at least the way we think it should. In fact, life is messy, as Rodney Crowell once so eloquently put it. And no matter how much the Silicon Valley hordes think they can create their own manufactured reality to avoid the realities of life, it just isn’t going to go down that way.

If people want to value Uber at $17 billion that’s just fine and dandy. Here’s an old school adage that applies nicely: Fools and their money are soon parted.

But the rest of us are still free to withhold our gushing praise until further notice. Or as George Packer so perfectly commented in The New Yorker last year, suggesting that Uber was a perfect example of Silicon Valley’s new found focus on “solving all the problems of being 20 years old, with cash on hand.”

And that’s the High-Octane Truth for this week.