Gaps in Dis/embedding Platforms: How Ride-Hailing Actors Experience Slowing Down Digitality
Topics: Digital Geographies
, Urban Geography
, Social Geography
Keywords: Uber, Ola, Ride-hailing Platforms, Digital Spaces, Urban Spaces, Delhi, India
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 60
Authors:
Anurag Mazumdar, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign
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Abstract
“Platforms are not run on the air, someone should come and see how they are on the ground” -- an Uber driver in Delhi told me during our hour-long drive-along ethnography. His reference to the inversely proportional relationship between fares/incentives on Uber and ever-rising price of Compressed Natural Gas sheds light on the way/s in which platforms practice a spatial disembedding of their processes from the infrastructural interfaces and imaginations of urban space (Graham 2020). This disembedded articulation is not by default, but by design; Sadowski (2020: 3) shows that platforms’ maximization of logistical flows through “optimization, rationalization and coordination” purposely obfuscate spatial conflicts and breakdowns. This focus on logistics undoubtedly increases “privatized isolation” (Attoh et al 2019) and intensifies data/capital accumulation in cities but the “fissure” between the spatially disembedded/smooth platform and the spatially embedded/piecemeal platform requires deeper scholarly and activist intervention. Based on original interviews and ethnographies with Uber and Ola drivers and union/collective members in Delhi, India, I explore this “gap” between the simultaneous embedding and disembedding of platforms. In particular, I examine spatial processes that slow down platforms, some of which are pre-digital and others part of platform capital, but all part of what Roy (2009) calls an informal “idiom of urbanization.” Examining these processes that slow down platform capital accumulation, even momentarily, not only helps us document rarely acknowledged agents and infrastructures that constitute digital platforms but also helps us imagine counter-narratives to the subsumption of urban spaces by platforms.
Gaps in Dis/embedding Platforms: How Ride-Hailing Actors Experience Slowing Down Digitality
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Virtual Paper Abstract
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