Guerilla (Outlaw) Operations
The thing about Uber’s operating conduct that drives many people nuts is their seemingly total disregard to the idea of playing by the rules. Admittedly, some rules of conventional structure are just asking to be violated, but what drove Uber’s highly negative reputation is their insistence upon acting like there were no rules at all that actually had to be obeyed. The imagery of this operating conduct cannot help but bring to mind the phrase “slippery slope.”
“What England didn’t know was that Uber’s general managers, engineers, and security professionals had developed a sophisticated system, perfected over months, designed to help every city strike team—including the one in Portland—identify would-be regulators, surveil them, and secretly prohibit them from ordering and catching Ubers by deploying a line of code in the app. The effect: Uber’s drivers would evade capture as they carried out their duties. Officers like England could not `see’ the shady activity, and could never prove it was happening.”
Mythological Allusion
Not as popular as it once was due to the educational system’s concerted move away from teaching the classics, mythological allusion used to be a foundation of imagery. The author of this tome apparently did not get the memo that the knowledge of ancient mythical figures among modern readers barely makes it past Zeus:
“Over a series of entries on his personal blog...Gurley slowly morphed himself into Silicon Valley’s Cassandra. Like the mythical Greek figure, Gurley forecast a collapse of apocalyptic proportions. Gurley howled about the impending downturn in venture capital, exacerbated by the waves of new money. Savvy investors in the Valley assumed this was Gurley playing the game; the more he scared off late-stage, institutional funds from investing in tech companies, the better the chance the landscape would return to the old model.”
That’s All Folks!
On the other hand, pop culture references also carry the risk that what was a worldwide phenomenon one year may be almost literally forgotten by everyone in ten years. At this point in time, Warner Brothers cartoons seems to be a pop culture reference point with at least a few more decades of sticking power. Once it runs dry, however, the following imagery will become the stuff of research:
“the Fed raised interest rates several times in quick succession in 1999 and 2000, closing the faucet on free-flowing capital. That, in turn, forced many startups to rely on actual revenues—not those artificially propped up by venture capital dollars—a feat that eluded many. And since so many of the companies purchased products from one another, an economic downturn hurt all the companies in the sector. One investor compared it to a collective Wile E. Coyote moment. Startups had run off the edge of a cliff. When they stopped to look down, they realized there was no ground beneath their feet.”
The Inauguration Day Blues
January 20, 2017 was a day tens of millions of Americans will never quite manage to put behind them. In just one single afternoon, the pompous circumstances capable of undermining everything many Americans thought about their fellow countrymen exploded into a chilling ice storm of brutal reality. The perception of that day through Dan O’Sullivan effectively uses imagery to sum up the feelings of at least sixty-nine million other voters that day:
“The swearing-in ceremony in January was painful to watch. He winced as the group of tycoons and robber barons surrounded Trump at the Capitol, celebrating the triumph of evil over good. The travel ban carried out less than a week later seemed sadistic to him. The cruel execution of the announcement perfectly symbolized Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon—two of Trump’s most xenophobic, nationalistic advisors—and their desire to inflict pain on immigrants.”
