I drive for a ride-sharing service, and sometimes I complain about my company to passengers. Should I stop?
Daniel Heimbinder is an artist who creates singularly enthralling, extremely busy, bizarre drawings. I’m hesitant to describe them, since even professional art critics seem incapable of doing so gracefully. Here’s The New York Times: “A hefty blonde sits on the shoulder of a party host in a pink smoking jacket, who poses triumphantly on a sprawled animal skin fronted by a pig with an apple in its mouth. A tiny nude holds up one of the man’s legs … Several donkeys in the background await the pinning-on of tails by guests.”
I first encountered Heimbinder’s work 20 years ago, when I saw an early, comparatively simple painting of his on a friend’s wall. It showed Spider-Man slinging webs over a tangle of freeways and skyscrapers. Its title was The Übermensch vs. Houston.
In a civilization that’s shrugged off God, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, an Übermensch (literally: superman) operates within his own morality, striving for greatness no matter how it might be misunderstood or reviled by the masses. Heimbinder recently explained to me that he’d always seen Houston, his home city, as a kind of civic Übermensch: a municipality without zoning ordinances, expanding only in accordance with its own whims. He remembers wanting to see these two rogues—the web-slinging superhero and the sprawl-slinging city—pitted against each other.
The secret of Heimbinder’s work is that it often consists of sardonic allusions to familiar stories, mashed up to undermine or frustrate each other. While we talked, for example, he texted me a picture of a large work in progress. In one tiny section, a frog is crossing a river with a scorpion on its back, while a fox is crossing in the other direction with a gingerbread man on its nose.
These are references to two different fables. In the first, the scorpion promises not to hurt the frog during the crossing, then stings him anyway. In the other, the gingerbread man trusts the fox to carry it across, only to be eaten. “In one scenario,” Heimbinder says, “the passenger is untrustworthy. In the other, it’s what’s conveying the passenger that’s untrustworthy.” And so it is with ride sharing.
I thought of Heimbinder after reading, earlier this year, about a disagreement: Uber versus Houston. The city, in an un-Houstonly move, had enacted a host of ride-sharing regulations in 2014, and Uber was threatening to pull out rather than have its drivers comply. Only when Houston was about to host the Super Bowl—a potential bonanza for ride-sharing apps—did Uber agree to a truce.
It’s a familiar story. We’re accustomed to seeing startups behave as if they are beyond all petty constraints. Even basic decorum seems, at times, optional. No doubt you’ve seen the now-famous video of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick telling off his Uber driver?
To be clear, I don’t know your complaints or which company you drive for. But I wonder if you don’t feel supported or valued by it. If that’s the case, then I believe you may speak freely. I’m all for collegiality and loyalty, but it’s hard not to feel like a sucker when you’re the only one abiding by such ideals. The trouble with Übermensches is the chaos they spawn. Elevate your own value system above any sense of communality and others will do the same. Rules fray when they become optional; so does trust. You wind up with the kind of congested, omnidirectional madness that Heimbinder loves to draw.
“We use stories to understand the world, to organize our minds,” Heimbinder told me. “But I’m showing that when they’re put together on the same plane, they don’t mesh. The end result is confused, ugly, awkward.”
You are one tiny figure who has stepped into just such a large, complicated mess. You’re entitled to your own story—to say it out loud—even if it makes the mess a tiny bit messier.
