Has convenience turned you into a monster? | John Paul Brammer

Like me, you might be a liberal who loves Uber and Airbnb. But the darker side of the new economy isn't something we can simply ignore

As I write this, I'm about to travel to beautiful, sunny Puerto Rico for a brief vacation. If all goes according to plan, there will be keys waiting for me in a mailbox outside an apartment in San Juan, which will hopefully look like the pictures I saw on the Airbnb website.

To get to the airport, I'm probably going to take an Uber, partly because I just moved to New York and still feel like a fool trying to wave down a cab, but mostly because calling an Uber is really, truly, ridiculously easy to do.

Trading ethics for comfort is par for the course in America