Keller Easterling

The name should threaten relentless upbeat sharing. It should suggest an invasion of market share or a modern imperative to kill the father and flatten the incumbent. Like the advent of any new technology, it must extinguish all previous knowledge and all render previous technologies obsolete. To suggest coexistent logics is to stand in the way of the superior successive logics. And the destruction should be treated as a principled stance—something that is “good for everybody.” So the name has to be a universal elementary particle that would combine with anything, neutralize anything or become any part of speech—preposition, prefix, adverb, adjective, noun, and verb. There is no “one and the many.” There is only “the one.” If you quote Ayn Rand and whisper it with an umlaut, “ew-ba” can stand for nearly any preposition—over, above, beyond, across, around, spanning, circumscribing, covering, surrounding, blanketing, or conquering.
The logo should prompt totemic rituals of belief, reverence and loyalty. It should align with everything from the ying-yang logo of the Technocracy movement to the Kryptonite logo of the ethereum blockchain. It should be poised to connect everything into one closed loop if only nonbelievers and other details can be eliminated. If you put your feet on the table, sharpen your elbows and bark it, “OO-ber” means adverbs like super, supra, mega, trans or omni in too many combinations to mention as in uber rich, uber ambitious, uber fast, uber powerful.
The logo should have the upper-left-hand-corner shine of digital stuff on a metallic black and white. The look and feel is a flirt, a transparency, a reflection, a sparkle, a gleam. From the corner of your eye, as you descend into the backseat, you should glimpse the hood ornament of a luxury vehicle and get a whiff of Modern. It’s now a scent, and your handsome driver is wearing it. If you kiss and release all five finger tips of one hand and say it through velvet, ooooo-ber becomes an intensifying adjective meaning transcendent or ultimate—something ranked at the apex of its class as in uber infrastructure, uber app, uber luxury, uber upholstery, uber man.
Middle-management suddenly has a chauffeur. Anyone can snap their fingers and cars begin to float toward them. It only requires a haughty but nonchalant insider jargon. These users are just to busy crushing it to use anything but acronyms and choppy sentences. If you tug at a cuff-linked cuff and say it like it was your own cartel, “ubr” has become a noun as in: “I never take cabs. My PA will get you an uber.”
But economic and political dominance are nothing without the broad conquest of slang. And this is evangelical sharing, so everyone’s user scenario has been written. The elderly have mobility. Parents have a car pool. Party-goers have a date waiting outside. How can you not know about this? If you roll your eyes and saying it holding on the r, “u-berrrrr” has even become a verb as in “Are you going to miss everything or are you going to uber (or “uber it.”)? And the answer must always be Uber. Totally.