Praveen Neppalli Naga, Uber’s chief technology officer, revealed the plan in an interview at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in San Francisco on Thursday night, describing it as a natural extension of a nascent program the company announced in late January called AV Labs.
With Uplift, every subscription will contribute to neighborhood-level network expansion, while local hosts that are known as “AirNode operators” will earn a portion of network revenue by providing community coverage.
“The dead internet theory is real,” Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian told Digg founder Kevin Rose, referring to the idea that much of the internet isn’t human — it’s mostly bots. The two entrepreneurs have since teamed up to re-envision how to build a social community in this world where, very soon, it will be hard […]