The Term is Not Disruptive, It's Criminogenic………

If the things that Silicon Valley companies did were done by black people, they would be in jail.

The avatar of such behavior is, of course, Uber.

Here is a roundup of their latest hits:

• An Uber executive arranged for the medical records of an Uber rider who was raped by her driver to be stolen so that they could imply that it was a setup by a competitor. (See also here)
• He showed the files to the CEO and a Senior VP, and was only fired when the story broke on the news.
• Uber used a  compensation algorithm that systematically underpaid women.

The obvious question is why do people patronize such an awful company, and I think that answer is that we have seen 30 years of idolizing behaviors that are at best dishonest, and at worst sociopathic.

The point here is not that Uber is a bad company peopled by criminals, though it is, it is that Uber  is merely the apotheosis of what is a larcenous culture.


If we had serious enforcement of corporate criminality and antitrust, many of the tech billionaires would be in jail.