Platforms as if people mattered

Abstract

In his 1973 book Small Is Beautiful, economist E. F. Schumacher observed that an ascendant ideology of “bigger is better” industrialism was driving humans to become the servants of machines. “If technology is felt to be becoming more and more inhuman,” he reflected, “we might do well to consider whether it is possible to have something better—a technology with a human face.” Taking up Schumacher's call, this article considers the possibility of “small” digital platforms in the context of China's contemporary ride‐hailing industry. Through an ethnographic study of V Taxi, a grassroots community of taxi drivers, it explores how a human‐centric platform for transportation services emerged, developed, and survived in a rapidly shifting economic and political landscape. The beauty and resilience of this platform lie in its ability to harness local social networks, enabling individual actors to share economic opportunities, skills, and knowledge. Through these practices of sharing, V Taxi members produce relational value, which strengthens community bonds. Drawing upon analytic frameworks from economic anthropology in conjunction with insights from science and technology studies, this article argues that “small” digital platforms can empower economic actors by enabling the production of relational value, thus protecting human agency and expanding human capabilities.

THE LIMITS OF INFRASTRUCTURE: Public Transport in a Post‐colonial City

“…When away from the cafés, they communicate through end‐to‐end encrypted platforms like WhatsApp to circulate instructions on how to manipulate smartphones to misrepresent GPS locations, use fake identities or cancel ride‐hailing orders without being penalized. These now widely reported tactics evidence a worldwide trend of taxi drivers asserting a right to manipulate ride‐hailing software and claw back advantage from the ride‐hailing companies that make it available to them and regulate how they must use it (Chen, 2018; Frost, 2019; Rosenblat, 2019; Frey, 2020; Peters, 2020; Sadowski, 2020; Van Doon and Badger, 2020; Mustika, and Savirani, 2021). This manipulation of ride‐hailing software is the same as the repurposing of factory parts and labour and the siphoning of subsidized fuel.…”

Care and Scale: Decorrelative Ethics in Algorithmic Recommendation

“…Following Fortun and Fortun (2005), I start from the position that ethics can be found in the way people negotiate among apparently competing values. But where they claim that double binds cannot be resolved, I suggest that this does not always hold true: one way to loosen a double bind is to redefine its terms, working not just within its constraints, but on those constraints, rearranging the space of ethical decision-making.…”

Dreaming like a market: The hidden script of financial inclusion in China's P2P lending platforms

“…The platforms did not forget about social relationships in reality—they were surely well equipped to leverage offline networks to produce “relational values” (Frost 2020). But to turn relationality into value, the market created alienated imaginations of the social through exploiting the social relationships and moral distancing.…”