Amazon
When you hear the name Uber, just think “Amazon on Wheels.” The manner in which Jeff Bezos turned Amazon from creaky site to sell books into a worldwide behemoth changing the very nature of how people shop was always the dream for what Travis Kalanick wanted Uber to become. Amazon is nothing more nor less than the symbol of everything that is right with the world of paradigm-shifting business ideas.
Chairs
Chairs also hold an elevated place of symbolic distinction within the mind of Kalanick. A Pittsburgh architectural design firm infamously placed two dozen different types of chairs inside the gaudy new futuristic office building where Uber’s engineers were working to advance self-driving car technology. The office didn’t need such a variety of styles, but over the course of the building the offices it had become apparent to everyone that Kalanick possessed an almost fetishistic enjoyment of all the myriad styles available in this particular furnishing. Mel Brooks once made a movie called The Twelve Chairs that was about greed and capitalism. A follow-up called The Twenty-Four Chairs based on this story could also pursue the same theme as the chairs are a perfect symbol of the problem with having too much money: people who have it will always find some new way to spend it unwisely.
Meeting Larry Page
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously asserted that the rich and different from you and me. This goes double for the rich of Silicon Valley. Apparently, in that wonderland of technology and riches, scoring a business meeting with Larry Page is the symbolic Holy Grail. For the rest of us, of course, we are simply left to wonder who the heck Larry Page is. (Google it—heh, heh, heh.)
China
For some inexplicable reason China has been the metonymic symbol of wealth on an absurdly fairy tale level since at least the 1980’s. The illogical rationale behind this continuing drive by almost literally every company on the planet to break into the Chinese market is obvious: there are only roughly 330 million buyers in America compared with almost 1.5 billion buyers in China. Unfortunately, the average Chinese household earns only about a fifth as much as the average American household. The math really isn’t that hard but for someone reason guys who run companies like Uber can’t seem to figure it out.
Bro Culture
Uber is hardly alone when it comes to high flying tech startup companies operating wile and loose within a “bro culture” but somehow the company managed to make what most people not operating in that culture already knew “bro culture” to be. It is a symbolic means of transferring all the idiocy of college frat culture into the workplace. Bro culture is thinking that you’re Henry Hill leading Karen through the labyrinth that ends with a front seat at the Copacabana when in reality you are Henry Hill just minutes away from stupid Lois making the call from inside the house.
