After last year’s whistleblowing revelations relating to practices at Facebook, the Uber files published by the Guardian on Monday constitute another seminal big tech morality tale. The vast cache of documents – leaked by a former employee – offers a unique and salutary insight into the arrogance and hubris of a digital giant as it sought to expand at any cost. At the same time, it chronicles the complicity of a political class which, itself drunk on Silicon Valley Kool-Aid, went along for the ride.
Comprising more than 124,000 documents, including 83,000 emails, iMessages and WhatsApp communications, the files demonstrate that as Uber sought to expand across the globe between 2013 and 2017, the Californian cab-hailing service treated existing employment law as a merely temporary obstacle – one to be undermined by establishing facts on the ground. Aware that the company’s use of unlicensed drivers broke the rules in countries such as France, Germany and Russia, executives celebrated the fact as evidence of an impressive and even endearing iconoclasm: “we’re just fucking illegal” reads one message; in another an executive jokes that Uber staff had become “pirates”.
