>So there’s the issue of opacity, not necessarily transparency but what’s happening across the system because drivers have their own experiences, compared to the God view that Uber has to see what’s happening with the whole system.
This makes me think of Foucault's panopticon. Uber is at the center always looking in, but your view is restricted.
>To any queries that didn’t have a ready-set template response, drivers would just be hitting their head against a wall trying to remedy missing wages or trying not to get matched with a harassing passenger again, and so it’s not bad that you have an electronic system for responding to driver inquiries and managing your workforce. The problem is can they be confident that they will be treated fairly when they do face challenges?
I see a connection here to Hirschman's Exit, Voice and Loyalty. Modern corporations find Voice to be quite annoying so they're attempting to completely cut it. Is a world where your only options are Exit and Loyalty actually going to be better? It doesn't seem so to me.
>There’s no actual reason for that. But … is freedom and flexibility real? It implies a certain kind of partnership, it’s attached to rhetoric about drivers being entrepreneurs, and at the end of the day Uber has the power to unilaterally control the rates at which they earn and could cut them sometimes or even raise them. Drivers can only negotiate for a lower fare, not a higher one. Uber constantly experiments with their pay with different features, and they can’t build a client list and build a business. There are limits on the kinds of freedom that is implied when it is paired with rhetoric about entrepreneurship.
And this makes me think of Byung Chul-Han:
Neoliberalism forms a free entrepreneur out of the oppressed worker, an entrepreneur of himself. Everyone is a self-exploited worker of his own enterprise. Everyone is master and servant in one person. The class struggle is also changed into an inner struggle with oneself. Whoever falls today accuses himself and is ashamed. One problematicizes oneself instead of society.
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Uber is so interesting because it represents one of the starkest representations of the society we actually live in. Uber's employees are 'free' in the ways we have been taught that being 'free' matters. But it becomes harder and harder to actually say they are free. Our language is failing our conception of what actually matters and it becomes obvious that Uber drivers live in a system which is exerting massive amounts of coercion on them all the time. Apologies for the disconnectedness of my comment.