Topic: Sidecar

General Motors launches "Maven," a new ride-sharing and car-sharing service, following a $500 million investment in Lyft. The hosts discuss the decline of personal car ownership among young urban Americans. They compare the modern ride-sharing trend to the hitchhiking culture of the 1970s, characterizing it as a "depression motif" driven by economic necessity.

The ride-sharing app Sidecar is discussed as a modern, technology-mediated version of 1970s hitchhiking. The hosts lament that instead of using open protocols for peer-to-peer organization, society relies on corporate middlemen who extract profit from basic human interactions. They argue for a "self-radicalized" approach to community organization.

The Sidecar app allows private citizens to act as drivers for others, essentially digitizing the 1970s practice of hitchhiking. The hosts argue that the introduction of a corporate middleman to facilitate these interactions complicates a simple peer-to-peer concept. They express frustration with the modern economic system's insistence on inserting profit-seeking entities into basic human cooperation.