Wheels in the Head: Ridesharing as Monitored Performance

Abstract

For-profit "ridesharing" services (or soft cabs) offer on-demand rides much like taxicabs, but are distinguished by an affective framing which emphasizes that drivers are "friends with cars, on demand" rather than "cabdrivers." This reframing is achieved through the insertion of smartphones as social interfaces between drivers and passengers, restructuring social interaction through an allegorithm (the productive co-deployment of a socially relevant allegorical script and a software-mediated algorithm). Much of the affective labor of ridesharing drivers consists in maintaining this affective framing and internalizing the logic by which their performances are monitored through the work platform. In this article the writings and videos of three ridesharing drivers will be drawn on to illustrate the ways drivers develop and evaluate their own performances as ridesharing drivers.

The Rating Game: The Discipline of Uber’s User-Generated Ratings

“…These two reactive practices may be Uber's intended outcomes of implementing the rating system. Drivers learn to engage in such monitored performance (Anderson 2016) as they realize that passengers are responsible for rating their behavior. The allocation of resources entails drivers' considerations of the tangible things that are offered to their passengers.…”

“…While technologically mediated surveillance has long existed in the workplace (Ajunwa, Crawford, and Schultz 2017;Ball 2010), rating systems facilitate the surveillance of drivers' performance by rendering consumers "middle managers" whose evaluations can determine drivers' employability (Gandini 2018;Rosenblat 2018). As the sketch "Five Stars" shows, Uber's rating system not only prompts drivers and passengers to rate one another's performance but it also incites drivers' reactive practices, or what Anderson (2016) calls "monitored performance" for maintaining a high rating. Ratings become "engines of anxiety" as drivers' practices are motivated by the consciousness of being monitored and "the fear of falling in rank that dominates the consciousness of those subject to them" (Espeland and Sauder 2016: 4).…”

“…Similarly, Uber drivers are continuously under pressure to score well while playing the rating game. What distinguishes Burawoy's game from the rating game is that the latter's rules are imposed and policed by the platform through algorithms and information asymmetries (Anderson 2016;Rosenblat 2018). Put simply, the rules of the rating game vary across different labor platforms, based on platform-specific policies and affordances.…”

Digital Platforms, Porosity, and Panorama

“…The urban taxicab, as a moving, liminal site in which strangers interact and are afforded access to the space of the city, has long been a target of suspicion and surveillance (Anderson 2012), and the relative independence (and subsequent reputation for "rudeness" and unreliability) of cabdrivers finds expression both in their romanticization as "the last cowboys" (Berry 1995) and their denigration as unruly outsiders, often exacerbated by ethnic stereotypes (Facey 1999). The reformation and rebranding of the cab have been the particular targets of so-called ridesharing platforms, here referred to as soft cab platforms (Anderson 2016(Anderson , 2017 because they are a reaction to, and an affective reframing of, the older site of the urban taxicab. A long list of surveillance technologies has been deployed to police this polytropic site (Anderson 2012(Anderson , 2017.…”

“…Soft cab platforms re-intermediate almost all of these older technologies, in part because they enable digital labor platforms to make use of data that had been left unused or uncollected by previous technologies. Several studies have documented how soft cab platforms exert new extents of surveillance and control over drivers, further precarizing an already precarious workforce (e.g., Anderson 2016;Geesey 2017;Rosenblat and Stark 2015); drivers respond with a monitored performance (Hall, Monahan, and Reeves 2016) meant to assure passengers that, unlike the traditional taxicab, the soft cab is a space rendered safe and knowable by platform surveillance.…”