> <i>An Uber or Lyft is a jitney, basically. Black people have been “Ubering“ each other for decades. […] I have been thinking a lot lately about how all this safety and convenience divides us. About how every birth, death and marriage notice I’ve received lately has come via a screen. Every movie I’ve ever wanted to see is easily available from my couch. And I can get all the ersatz social interaction I want from my smartphone, where I can control the narrative. I am left wondering how these conveniences truncate connections and who controls the outcome. And the answer is, by and large: White men with a lot of money who have the power to monetize ways of life that used to help unite communities.</i><p>I'm not from the US but as a European I think it's a common global/ western problem, isn't it? Interactions between people worked fine back then in the "analog times" (say: helping old folks in the neighborhood), then we started using apps to "streamline" the experience, now we rely on these digitalized versions of those interactions so much that we forget that those 0ld sk00l non-digitized versions are an option in the first place.