If an app is your boss, what, exactly, are you?
If your boss is an app, what, exactly, are you?
For nearly four years, my job has mainly been to ride around in cars with strange men. Sometimes women. More specifically, as a technology ethnographer I’ve taken hundreds of ride-hail trips in more than 25 cities, observing and speaking with drivers at work. Online, I spent countless hours in driver forums where drivers post screenshots and comments about wage incentives, behavioral expectations, passenger ploys, deactivation threats, and communications from their algorithmic managers.What I learned is that Uber brings the culture of Silicon Valley to the world of work, from experimenting with driver pay through up-front pricing to algorithmic herding tools, like surge pricing. Across technology platforms we use as consumers, algorithms are often described as neutral, objective, and benevolent, but anyone who’s had a boss knows that a manager isn’t exactly “neutral,” and neither is technology. How drivers are affected by the practices and rhetoric of Silicon Valley reveals more about how consumers of technology services are treated, too.Uberland, I discovered, is an array of contrasts. Some drivers sign up because they need extra cash on the side; others do it as their full-time job. Many resort to it as a stopgap solution when businesses fail or unemployment strikes; others take up ride-hail work for the fun of it. Some are trying it out to pad their savings; others have little choice, putting in 14-hour days just to feed their families.Some told me that they do it simply to get out of the house and experience a sense of human connection; others are desperate to ﬁnd a way out of Uber. Former taxi drivers, chauffeurs, and truck drivers are part of the Uber workforce, but others have no primary occupational identity as drivers, even as they drive for both Uber and Lyft. Their stories are all too often tales of folks on the margins, of workers in transition, of people who are part of a new wave of social progress that we are still trying to comprehend. Uber drivers frequently make the headlines as part of larger societal discussions about the future of work, and as part of a growing nervousness that technological advancement threatens to automate all of us out of jobs.But beyond this simplistic narrative, after all those rides, I’ve found that drivers are barely treated as workers at all. Given that Uber treats its workers as “consumers” of “algorithmic technology,” and promotes them as self-employed entrepreneurs, a thorny, uncharted, and uncomfortable question must be answered: If you use an app to go to work, should society consider you a consumer, an entrepreneur, or a worker?Because Uber drivers are classiﬁed as independent contractors, not as employees, they do not beneﬁt from most workplace discrimination protections. In this way, the rating system provides one of the clearest signals that Uber has taken on the role of managing drivers as workers. The combination of worker and consumer practices in Uber’s model creates a blurred distinction between these two categories that we think of as separate.The company’s ambiguity on this question challenges regulatory bodies in the countries where Uber operates to manage not only Uber’s claims that it is a technology company, rather than a taxi company, but also its relationship to its drivers. In practice, drivers are hardly “entrepreneurs” or true partners with Uber, even though the company calls them “Uber Driver-Partners”; drivers are not suspended or ﬁred, they are “deactivated.”