Summarizing in a way that is applicable to the whole sharing economy, Melissa Gregg puts it well when she says that "liberation [from employee contracts] frees up Uber from the traditional responsibilities of being an employer. It is ingenious to make employment less predictable, and thus less costly, in the name of independence and choice." As such, regardless of its size or long-term success, Uber remains an important exemplar of a projected direction for global capitalism: it represents the potential to create new forms of exploitative work, to substantially increase the levels of exploitation within established forms of work, and to circumvent human labor altogether (the company is currently investing heavily in driverless cars and trucks). Data-gathering and data tracking are essential to all these functions, the fact of which makes exploitation seem like the "natural" outcome of algorithmic processes. Gone are the narratives of a benign form of capitalism in which institutions still acknowledged a social responsibility. Instead, we have institutions that merely engineer "processes" or "interfaces," and society has to live with the results.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 225