A simple plan goes sideways

I should have just phoned the local taxi company.

But no. I listened to my son — who, to be fair, meant well — and took a modern, app-based approach. “Use Bolt,” he said. “It’s just like Uber. I use it all the time.” And that, it turns out, was the problem.

We’re on holiday in Andalucía, trying to get to a nearby village for dinner. I booked the ride through Bolt, selecting a pickup slot between 17:00 and 17:10. The app stressed the importance of punctuality: we had to be outside on time, or the driver might only wait five minutes before cancelling. Fair enough. So at 16:57 we were all standing by the road, ready to go.

By 17:10, nothing had happened.

Then the app admitted defeat. “No drivers available.” Ride cancelled. “WTF? I booked that hours ago”, thought I.

Platform to nowhere

OK, so Bolt has no drivers and our evening plans are in disarray. So I tried Uber. First, it quotes a price. Then it suggests paying extra to “increase the chance of getting a ride”. You know, because surge pricing and nudging people into premium options is apparently what counts as innovation now. Unsurprisingly, that didn’t work either. After taking my money and several minutes of repeatedly trying to get a driver to take the ride, feasting on my iPhone battery and drinking my mobile data allowance, it finally gave up on the cutesey “sorry about the wait” and admitted that there we no drivers available.

So here we are. No car. No ride. No confidence that we’d even get back if we somehow found our own way there.

I did everything right. I booked in advance. I turned up early. I trusted the system.

And the system is broken.

The slow death of a good idea

This is the very definition of enshittification — the gradual degradation of a service as it prioritises growth, then revenue, then cost-cutting. What starts out as a great user experience slowly turns to dust as the platform corners the market and lets quality slide. First they undercut local businesses, drawing customers in. Then they ration supply, push up prices, and shrug when things go wrong.

Talking with my son about his experience back home, and it seems the traditional minicab firms are fewer and fussier — because they’ve been undercut too. Just like high street shops were when Amazon trained us to expect fast, cheap delivery with no human interaction. And what happens when the competition’s gone? Well, you can guess what happens to the prices and service levels.

App-based everything

It’s not just transport or retail. It’s food delivery, hotel bookings, eBooks, music, even how we consume the news. Everything’s an app. Everything’s global. Everything’s slick — until it isn’t.

And I’m clearly not alone in thinking this. I recently reshared a post on LinkedIn that echoed a lot of my frustrations. From self-checkouts to smart homes, booking travel to banking queries, we’ve been sold the idea that technology makes everything easier. But the pattern seems to be this: companies use technology to reduce their own costs — while shifting the work onto us.

We scan our own groceries. We manage our own bookings. We dig through online portals to find PDFs that digitise our paper records. We chat to bots that often can’t help, and fill in digital forms just to get the most basic of services.

Grumpy Old Man

So yes, I may joke about my Grumpy Old Man Syndrome, but the underlying point stands: just because we can do something digitally, doesn’t mean we should. Especially when the “innovation” really just amounts to taking humans out of the loop and putting consumers to work.

Of course, some people prefer the new ways. Not everyone wants to chat with a travel agent or ring up a cab office. For many, the ability to access data and services 24/7 is empowering.

Progress means keeping options open

But what matters most — and what so often gets forgotten — is that there should still be a choice. Because if everything goes digital with no fallback, we risk excluding those who can’t (or don’t want to) play the app economy game.

Maybe I am just an old man yelling at the cloud (service). But the app-based, gig-driven, digitally transformed economy isn’t always a step forwards. The frictionless experience often hides a lot of pain behind the scenes — for drivers, small businesses, and occasionally, for frustrated tourists standing by a road in southern Europe, hoping the app will work this time.

The world is increasingly run by tech bros in California. And we’re all a little poorer — culturally and economically — for it.

Featured image: created by ChatGPT

Post Script

[14/7/25] Yesterday morning, I walked to the local tourist office. I know, really old school! There, I spoke to a really helpful lady, who advised me on local buses and taxis. We called a central number for taxis in the town — no advanced bookings can be made but the first off the rank came to collect us. And we had our evening in the next village. It was lovely.