I wrote about Uber's strange 5th birthday party.
The only rational response to #UberTurns5, as the event was hashtagged, is to review it as theater. The effect of hiring a former political operative to run your communications operation, as Uber did, is to improve your stagecraft at the expense of authenticity. #UberTurns5 was a roughly hour-long ensemble drama designed to make you feel good about ride-hailing — and to consider, with disgust, the trafficky, polluted, dependent-on-balky-public-transit world that would exist without it.