[Seminar - Cities are back in town] Taxis vs. Uber: knowledge, practices and technological disruption in an urban setting

SEMINAR CITIES ARE BACK IN TOWN (Work IN PROGRESS)

Sciences Po, 1 place Saint-Thomas d'Aquin, 75007 Paris

Registration

Based on an ethnography of Uber’s conflict with Buenos Aires’ taxis drivers, in this presentation I will discuss how technological disruption affects the political, economic and ethical relations that bind us together. By 2016, over a century and a half of rules, value hierarchies and exclusions rendered practices, bodies and relations knowable in the taxi industry, under the premise that in its transactions meet strangers who will never be able to know each other in any meaningful way.

Uber’s arrival that year, and immense popularity, opened up two fronts of dispute with a rhetoric of disruption. First, the effective ability to turn virtually anyone into a driver for money transformed a political problem, understood through institutions (courts, governments) and hierarchies (driving licences, medical check ups) into a moral problem, where at stake was the “right to choose”. Second, the ability to rate drivers made it conceivable that five identical golden stars could suffice to understand ourselves, each other and the relations that bind us, in this case in the flurry of an urban transaction. In both senses, I will ask: what kinds of rhetorics, affects and ethical dispositions sustain the logics of tech disruption? What kinds of subjects – civic, political, economic – inhabit tech disruption and how?

*A note to urban scholars: The RC21 Conference will take place in Santiago de Chile from 24 to 26 July 2024. The call for session proposals is open until 10 October 2023. 
More information at https://rc21conference2024. coes.cl/sessions-abstracts- proposals/ 

Juan del Nido is Research Associate at the University of Cambridge’s Max Cam Centre for Ethics, Economy and Social Change. Originally trained as an economist, he worked as a political consultant in Buenos Aires before turning to social anthropology to study political and economic reasoning and the ethics of new technologies

His work has been awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Sutasoma Award for Research of Outstanding Merit and has been published by Economic Anthropology, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, The Anthropology of Work Review , and Hipertextos. He has produced policy recommendations for the Argentine Congress and the British Parliament and written opinion columns for Argentina’s national daily La Nacion. His book Taxis vs. Uber : Courts, Markets and Technology in Buenos Aires, (Stanford U. Press, 2021) examining the conflict around Uber’s arrival in Argentina was awarded the Carol R. Ember Book Prize by the Society for Anthropological Sciences.