The Jewelboxes
2 min readDec 2, 2019
- One of the more incisive things I’ve ever heard about Uber is that one minute of Uber worker time will always equal one minute of production time which will always equal one unit of consumer time (and time again). Of course this model is the same for a taxi but it becomes a “problematic” thought for a publicly traded company constantly embroiled in legal issues — and one that can’t turn a profit. So the real profit-making will have to come from greater numbers of drivers, greater number of users per driver, or rising prices. The technical model of Uber is all figured out — which is why all their “innovation” lies in the field of regulations.
- I am a narcissist by age and by choice. (Narcissist : read : reflection-lover.) So in this instance the beauty of a rideshare- any ride, really- is the ability to be a passenger once again. You do not ride your car to work- you drive it- you alone steer the cage from A to B. For those that bus, perhaps commuting, railroaded to work, under or over the earth, know there’s no viewpoint differential quite like the slit-sharpened driver versus the autonomous, lucid / lurid passenger. In the hands of a freewheeling beast you are free once again to dream.
- I am still accumulating and discarding possible reasons why businesses leave their lights on at night. Advertising, perhaps, but you’ll notice this always with office blocks too, as if they’ve meted out employee time such that no single stride is worth finding and manually operating each light switch. “Go home,” they say, “we’re not allowed to make you work anymore.” Fluorescent beams over glossy irises etc. It’s no skin off my nose really, there are bigger wastes of energy, but are there bigger wastes of light? What distant stars can compete with the clamor of one hundred thousand bulbs? Even the streetlights shudder and switch off at odd intervals.
- So, then : me, a passenger, reflecting, passing buildings becoming inward-to-outward lit dioramas divulging their dazzling contents, I am a content-ed rider. A sparkle-row of chairs in an auditorium. Lone men vacuuming. Identical offices, thinking of them as offspring or worse — clones : as if all of them could be traced back to one ur-cubicle that I could torch on a display floor. A car winking in captivity. Row after row of effervescent liquor made from pulped & distilled dollar bills. Dark parks, youths roaming, rangers rousting them in turn with the lie that something sans fences can be “closed”. The light in the apartment corner (tip & rate, please) before the sweet dull darkness. Optically open, all these, windows spilling their costume-jewelry guts, either untouchable or worthless, waveforms safely uncollapsed. And my eyes still cannot reciprocate.
