Uber really started to become a thing in 2012. It was a spectacular revelation.
Gone were the days of worrying about calling a cab or hailing one in order to get to the airport. Similarly gone were the days of worrying about being able to secure a ride in bad weather. Thanks to “surge pricing,” Uber was serving its customers well by treating its drivers equally well. They would be handsomely compensated for being on the road amid heavy rain, snow, traffic, or any other condition that tended to keep price-controlled cabdrivers out-of-sight when their services were most needed.
What’s important is that by 2012 Uber was already a 3-year old service. Young people in particular had been using it long before it became essential to relatively late adopters.
Yet even as late as 2012 “you can Uber your way to the airport” still generated a lot of blank stares. Particularly among older people. What’s an app?
This came to mind quite a lot while reading Time correspondent Andrew Chow’s new book, Cryptomania: Hype, Hope, and the Fall of FTX’s Billion-Dollar Fintech Empire. In Chow’s words, “this book is the story of crypto’s craziest sequence yet,” but it’s also a look into a world that will have “other-century” qualities for a lot of readers.
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