Taxis Vs. Uber : Courts, Markets, and Technology in Buenos Aires

Uber's April 2016 launch in Buenos Aires plunged the Argentine capital into a frenzied hysteria that engulfed courts of law, taxi drivers, bureaucrats, the press, the general public, and Argentina's president himself. Economist and anthropologist Juan M. del Nido, who had arrived in the city six months earlier to research the taxi industry, suddenly found himself documenting the unprecedented upheaval in real time. __Taxis vs. Uber__ examines the ensuing conflict from the perspective of the city's globalist, culturally liberal middle class, showing how notions like monopoly, efficiency, innovation, competition, and freedom fueled claims that were often exaggerated, inconsistent, unverifiable, or plainly false, but that shaped the experience of the conflict such that taxi drivers' stakes in it were no longer merely disputed but progressively written off, pathologized, and explained away. This first book-length study of the lead-up to and immediate aftermath of the arrival of a major platform economy to a metropolitan capital considers how the clash between Uber and the traditional taxi industry played out in courtrooms, in the press, and on the street. Looking to court cases, the politics of taxi licenses, social media campaigns, telecommunications infrastructure, public protests, and Uber's own promotional materials, del Nido examines the emergence of "post-political reasoning": an increasingly common way in which societies neutralize disagreement, shaping how we understand what we can even legitimately argue about and how. "In 2015, Juan M. del Nido went on hundreds of taxi rides in Buenos Aires, conducting ethnographic work on the taxi industry. But by mid-April 2016, Uber launched its platform in Buenos Aires, engulfing drivers, passengers, the press, and greater general public into a frenzied hysteria that involved courts of law, political platforms, and threats of violence. This book examines not only how the taxi industry made sense of the sudden and ubiquitous presence of Uber in Argentina, but also how the assumed efficiency and objectivity of Uber's algorithmic methods catalyzed new forms of understanding ethics, responsibility and professional advancement in the Argentinean context. Tightly entwined with the politics of labor, trade, institutions, and economic life, del Nido reveals how Uber came to signify and instantiate the greatest moment of political and economic disruption seen in Argentina since the crisis of 2001. He shows how a multinational company taken to court allowed Buenos Aires's residents to craft particular ideas of what it meant to be political, and what it meant become "post-political"-to subsume, neutralize and pathologize genuine disagreement, shaping how we understand what we can even disagree about and how"-- Provided by publisher Cover Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: A Storm Blowing from Paradise 1 The Terms of Engagement 2 An Intractable Question 3 A Most Perfect Kind of Hustling 4 On Gladiatorial Truths 5 The Stranger That Stays as Such 6 A Copernican Phantasmagoria 7 The Political on Trial 8 The Scarlet P Conclusion Notes References Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V