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CLARIN

Uber And Friends: Old Math Of The New Economy

The digital economy promised to create markets that were fluid by definition. But even in the so-called "sharing" economy of mobile applications, there are bound to be winners and losers.

The new smartphone economy
The new smartphone economy
Pablo Maas

BUENOS AIRES — The new digital economy had among its many claims the promise of removing the middleman on the way to building more efficient societies.

In practice, a new class of middlemen and intermediate agents is busy emerging to take their share of the pie. Two months ago in response to complaints by the hotel industry, the city of New York imposed restrictions on renting out flats and rooms through the website Airbnb, an online accomodation agency.

Last week, taxi drivers protested around Europe against Uber, an Internet car rental service between private individuals, operating in 130 cities including several in Latin America such as Rio de Janiero, Bogota and Santiago.

The new firms of the "sharing economy" share several traits.

All were created no more than five years ago when the use of applications on smartphones began to multiply.

They break into regulated markets like hotels or passenger transport without paying the costs (taxes, municipal fees, insurance) that raise the price of their established competitors' services.

They have emerged from Sillicon Valley, where a concentration of investment funds gives them enormous financial leverage. Even before being floated on the capital markets, such firms can attain colossal pricetags, $10 billion in the case of Airbnb and $18 billion for Uber.

But the most important shared trait is that they exploit what economists call the web's externalities, also called Metcalfe's Law, which link the returns and utility of a service to its number of users.

The more people use Windows for example, the more software is developed for it, which will lead to even more people using it.

Google constantly improves its search algorithms to locate information every time it is used by millions of viewers, which attracts more users who are all "working" to improve Google's worth (latest figure, $375 billion).

The problem is that Metcalfe's Law often leads to de facto monopolies. In 1996, the United States broke AT&T's monopoly of the telephone network, dividing it among several firms; and in 2001, Washington accused Microsoft of violating antitrust laws by abusing its dominant market position.

Google has recently been sliding toward a similar fate as Microsoft for dominating the Android operating system for smartphones and facing monopoly-related suits in the United States and Europe, where it constrols 90% of the online search market.

But in some ways, the taxi war erupting in Europe and beyond is a new type of conflict between technology and society. Two dimensions are moving at different speeds and fighting a battle to determine which will change the other.

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Society

Brazil's Evangelical Surge Threatens Survival Of Native Afro-Brazilian Faith

Followers of the Afro-Brazilian Umbanda religion in four traditional communities in the country’s northeast are resisting pressure to convert to evangelical Christianity.

image of Abel José, an Umbanda priest

Abel José, an Umbanda priest

Agencia Publica
Géssica Amorim

Among a host of images of saints and Afro-Brazilian divinities known as orixás, Abel José, 42, an Umbanda priest, lights some candles, picks up his protective beads and adjusts the straw hat that sits atop his head. He is preparing to treat four people from neighboring villages who have come to his house in search of spiritual help and treatment for health ailments.

The meeting takes place discreetly, in a small room that has been built in the back of the garage of his house. Abel lives in the quilombo of Sítio Bredos, home to 135 families. The community, located in the municipality of Betânia of Brazil’s northeastern state of Pernambuco, is one of the municipality’s four remaining communities that have been certified as quilombos, the word used to refer to communities formed in the colonial era by enslaved Africans and/or their descendents.

In these villages there are almost no residents who still follow traditional Afro-Brazilian religions. Abel, Seu Joaquim Firmo and Dona Maura Maria da Silva are the sole remaining followers of Umbanda in the communities in which they live. A wave of evangelical missionary activity has taken hold of Betânia’s quilombos ever since the first evangelical church belonging to the Assembleia de Deus group was built in the quilombo of Bredos around 20 years ago. Since then, other evangelical, pentecostal, and neo-pentecostal churches and congregations have established themselves in the area. Today there are now nine temples spread among the four communities, home to roughly 900 families.

The temples belong to the Assembleia de Deus, the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and the World Church of God's Power, the latter of which has over 6,000 temples spread across Brazil and was founded by the apostle and televangelist Valdemiro Santiago, who became infamous during the pandemic for trying to sell beans that he had blessed as a Covid-19 cure. Assembleia de Deus alone, who are the largest pentecostal denomination in the world, have built five churches in Betânia’s quilombos.


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