tiers

Once upon a time, I didn’t know about driver tiers, and I drove blissfully through a garden flowing with milk and honey. 

Then another driver —a veteran of ten thousand rides—removed the veil from my blind eyes. I saw it all. A red pill moment, I beheld the system in which all this time, unawares, I’d been caught: the driver tier system. 

Lyft uses precious metals to name their tiers, except the lowest tier which is nameless. Maybe that’s like “glass” or “clear” or “plain” or “air” or something. Uber uses precious metals for its middle two tiers but “Diamond” for its top tier. Oh, and for its base tier, it uses “Blue,” which is neither a precious metal nor a gem but merely a flavor of Gatorade. Still, better than plain.

Okay! So, Listen up! Here’s how they work. 1) You get points for rides unless you don’t; 2) when you get enough points, you move up the tiers, unless you don’t; 3) when you move up the tiers, you get access to information and rewards unless you don’t; 4) —

No. Fuck the explanation. That’s exactly how they get you. You imagine that if you understand the system, you’ll get ahead. But that’s bullshit. You think that if you explained to a bear how the trap biting into his leg works, it would magically spring open? Nope. Not even if you spoke bear! Bear needs a key—also hands. 

So fuck the tiers, fuck hierarchy, and fuck the gamifuckation of this hamster-wheel world. 

But most of all fuck me for falling for it despite what I think I know. Despite 25 years of Zen meditation and reading Spinoza, Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, despite a dozen years of therapy, I still clamber onto the wheel with the torpid enthusiasm of an overweight rodent and make it spin. 

In the Uberverse, there are some stupid people. I see them when surfing the web, searching for the secrets of the Uberverse. I judge them. Also, I am one of them.

You know who is not stupid? That would be Mr. Uber, who thought of all this, plugged in a computer, and now just lets it hum along while he wipes his ass with billion-dollar bills in a glass house that, though perched tenuously on a cliff overlooking the Pacific, will magically never fall into the ocean despite earthquakes, wildfires, and mudslides. 

I imagine him as that B-school kid I used to teach in a required literature class. Ruddy face, stiff, gelled hair, slightly spiked, outfit stripped right off the manikin at Hollister or Abercrombie or American Eagle. He’s smarter than I expected but not as smart as he thinks. On the other hand, Mr. Uber’s not the one driving strangers around in his own beat-up car, paying for his own expenses, all to get to have a little virtual coat of arms that says blue or gold or plaid or whatever the fuck. 

My only consolation is that there may be a lower level of stupidity to which I have not yet descended. I mean the stupidity that finds enchanting motivation in the bullshit names they give to these tiers. Why can’t we call them L0, L1, L2, L3 like the sectors of a subterranean bunker in some dystopian science fiction novel?

I must confess, though, that I am excited to see if using one of my exclusive Diamond tier privileges on Uber next month works. I plan to use it to preserve my Diamond tier privileges for another three months despite having accumulated only a measly 147 points in the last three months—well short of the 1,000 I’m supposed to accrue for Diamond. That would be so great! It’s like getting something for nothing. 

See what I mean? There I go again. Would it be so great? Something for nothing? Really? Why not strap on my Lyft pink mustache, slip into 7-11, flash my diamond-studded Uber bow tie, and claim my 37-cent discount on a Big Gulp? Might as well take advantage of the free tuition for online classes at Arizona State University? It can’t make me stupider, right? With these tiers, everything’s a synergistic, orgiastic tie-in. 

Meanwhile, I willingly attach this meshwork of knots and strings to myself so that Mr. Uber can make me dance for something I do not even want to want. 

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