Affective life of financial loss: Detaching from lost investments in the wake of the gig economy

Abstract

How people detach from financial relations is a critical but overlooked dimension of economic life. This paper offers a response by exploring how financial loss is reckoned with in the wake of disruptive digital technological change. It examines the experiences of people who have lost significant financial investments owing to the rise of gig economy rideshare platforms to evaluate how a loss of investment is reckoned with as both a financial and existential challenge. Through fieldwork with owners of taxi licences in Melbourne, Australia, the paper contributes to debates on affective investments within geography and beyond to argue that financial and affective investments are inextricably linked. For these investors, their financial loss precipitates the loss of affective investments expressed in terms of a loss of faith in institutions; a loss of face in terms of public respect; and a loss of conviction in terms of an inability to move forward with their lives. The paper argues that reckoning with these losses involves working on one's active and passive affections—capacities to act and sense. The paper concludes that this work of divestment is difficult and acceptance is not guaranteed.

Introduction

A growing body of geographical research is attending to the everyday life of finance. This work explores how the economic, cultural and material intersect, providing a richer sense of the diverse subjectivities that are bound up with economic change. A major insight has been to appreciate how affect is critical to understanding the socio-spatial dynamics of economic activity through the production of subjectivities. Attention to affect produces a less determinate understanding of financial subjectivities, where a body's variable capacities to affect and be affected are modulated in an ongoing manner by diverse influences. Research on these transitional dimensions of financial subjectivities has stressed developmental aspects, such as through the formation of bodily competencies (Loomis, 2018), attachments (McFall et al., 2017), and entanglements with finance (Anderson et al., 2020). However, less has been said about how financial subjectivities are shaped by dissipative experiences. How people detach and disentangle from financial relations remains an overlooked task that is critical to understanding economic life.

This paper explores how financial loss is reckoned with in the wake of technological change in the context of gig economy rideshare mobility—where consumers can summon a ride through mobile digital devices at an instant which are provided by ‘freelance’ independent workers (Cockayne, 2016a). Productivist accounts of technological change fail to acknowledge the critical politics of who loses out in such mobility transitions and how these losses are reckoned with. Neglecting loss risks imagining mobility transitions as a simple toggling of one mode of operation to another without casualty, leaving insufficient space to consider the gaps, breaks and tears in experience (Harrison, 2008). In response, this paper turns to overlooked experiences of loss in taxi mobilities which have been significantly challenged by on-demand rideshare platforms. I explore experiences of people who invested in taxi licences and who have subsequently lost significant amounts of money. Fieldwork with people in this challenging situation raises vital questions about how financial investments relate to affective investments in terms of how losses are reckoned with, give rise to particular subjectivities, and modulate conditions for politics.

The paper has two aims. The substantive aim is to broaden appreciation of under-documented forms of loss induced by on-demand digital ridesharing platforms and to explore the overlooked experiences of individuals who are invested in taxi mobilities. The conceptual aim is to explore how a loss of investment is reckoned with as both a financial and existential challenge, and to evaluate how such dissipative experiences tell us something significant about the nature of our investments. The paper proceeds in four parts. The first part contextualises the argument in debates on the relationship between financial investments and affective investments. The second part situates the case study in Melbourne, Australia. The third part outlines the methods and explains the presentational approach, which is followed by three impressionistic vignettes. The fourth part provides a speculative response to these vignettes. The paper concludes by explaining the significance of losing investments for geographers.

From investment to divestment

Geographers have expanded our understanding of the economy by foregrounding the formative role of embodied practices for how economies are shaped (Hall, 2012). This has broadened analysis beyond the narrower operation of state structures and financial institutions to consider the everyday life of finance which reveals the ‘intricate ways in which the economic, cultural and material intersect and interact in specific settings’ (Langley and Leyshon, 2012, 370). Attention to the financialisation of everyday life through routine practices and interpersonal relationships helps to understand the production and regulation of financial subjectivities. Rather than imagined as passive subjects at the mercy of institutions, work inspired by theories of governmentality has charted how responsibility for financial security has increasingly moved away from the state to individuals and households (Langley, 2008). This produces a more active figure of the investor or debtor subject who requires embodied skills to manage this work (Loomis, 2018). By devoting attention to everyday practices and the relations that ‘commingle with financial practices’ (Tooker and Clarke, 2018, 61), geographers are producing a more multidimensional understanding of financial subjectivities that are fraught with ‘tensions and contradictions’ (Langley and Leyshon, 2012, 371).

Affective investments

Within these debates, cultural geographers have insisted that the concept of investment, previously understood in a narrow financial sense (Wójcik, 2012), must account for the affective forces that drive and sustain economic activities. This requires a more transitional understanding of the bodies in question that evaluates them in terms of their indeterminate capacities to act and feel, rather than their more determinate identities. Affect can help to appreciate how people become invested in economic activities in the first place, through its role as ‘a driving force in processes of accumulation’ (Cockayne, 2016b, 457). Understanding what makes active ‘investor’ or ‘debtor’ subjects (Langley, 2008) therefore requires accounting for the ‘entanglements, fantasies and desires’ that are involved in driving economic activities (Anderson et al., 2020, 423). Grossberg’s (1992, 86) concept of ‘affective investment’ encapsulates this expanded sense of investment, acknowledging how things come to matter through the energy we invest in that thing, which subsequently can make other investments possible.

An understanding of affective investments is enhanced through thinkers of performativity. First, Zelizer (2005) foregrounds how the intimacies of interpersonal relationships are an overlooked but fundamental aspect of economic activity. Her work demonstrates how the complex affectivities involved in the formation and negotiation of interpersonal relationships are key to understanding investment. Zelizer therefore decentres the individual by stressing the relational dimensions of investment, where ‘people constantly mingle economic activity with intimacy’ (2012, 152). Second, and stretching beyond economic debates, Ahmed (2004) extends this focus on relationships by highlighting the temporal dimension of affective investments. By foregrounding repetition, her work explores how people become invested in particular normative ideals about conduct, and how these investments become shaped over time through encounters with others. This dynamic understanding of investment spotlights situations where ‘failure of return extends one's investment’ (2004, 131), rather than the converse. Third, Berlant’s (2011) work extends this dynamic sense of affective investments even further by exploring how a diverse range of social and political infrastructures are sustained by specific affective investments through the optimistic promises they make for fulfilment. Though Grossberg argues that affective investments are linked with empowerment, allowing people to ‘gain a certain amount of control over their affective life’ (Grossberg, 1992, 65), conversely, Berlant draws out the affective ambivalence and contradictory effects of these investments, where passionate attachments to such promises can, over time, serve to damage and deplete.

In short, understanding financial subjectivities requires an understanding of complex and contradictory affective investments that have real effects through the transitions in acting and feeling they induce. As Hickey-Moody argues, affective investments such as ‘the belief that something is possible, or that something is inherently wrong, changes capacities in ways that are marked by feelings… Faith in social values, choreographs people, societies, and relationalities’ (2019, 929). Affective investments can therefore be considered as ‘anchoring forces that bind subjects to their identities and particular kinds of discourses’ (Solomon, 2014, 729). However, more than simply suggesting that ‘people actively engage in attaching themselves’ to credit and debt (Samec, 2018, 552, emphasis in original), the more distributed understandings of agency drawn out by the thinkers above highlight the ‘tricky, tenuous, playful and often polarising elements of attachment’ (McFall et al., 2017, 9). In geography, this more complex understanding of affective investment has been developed in a variety of contexts. Faier's work on transmigrant women in Manilla echoes Ahmed's concern for the temporality of affective investments, exploring how houses are affective investments shaped as much by ‘hope, frustration, shame, fear, desire and longing’ (2013, 376) as by capitalist strategies and state policies. Cockayne's (2016b, 457) work on Bay Area entrepreneurs develops Berlant's concerns for the contradictory effects of affective investments, exploring how entrepreneurs maintain an attachment to significantly problematic working practices in spite of ‘potentially toxic effects’.

Losing investments

Geographic work on affective investments has prioritised processes of connection and the ‘arts of attachment’ (McFall et al., 2017), reflecting broader concerns in geography for processes of socio-spatial formation. However, less has been said in this emerging body of work about how affective investments are cut, severed or lost. Where Anderson et al. (2020, 431) question how ‘forms of living and their promises and trajectories are held onto, sustained, and reanimated in the wake of economic changes,’ a focus on sustenance and reanimation focuses on the persistence of investments at the expense of their dissipation, omitting the gaps and breaks in experience. Understanding how people come to invest in forms of life requires an interrogation of why and how people detach from specific affective investments. This absence raises significant questions about the forms of bodily evaluation that might be involved in divestment and the work that might be required. Developing a strand of cultural geographic thought that acknowledges that not all relations are relations of attachment (Harrison, 2008), my argument is that constructivist understandings of investment focusing on the development of social worlds needs pairing with an understanding about the loss of investment as both economic and affective.

This pairing of the economic and affective to consider loss is evident in a growing body of work that explores experiences of economic loss through post-global financial crisis austerity politics. Hitchen (2021), for instance, provides an intimate and sobering account of the diverse affective responses of library staff caught in increasingly precarious situations threatened by job losses. Striking in Hitchen's account is Berlant's contention that economic loss does not translate neatly into a loss of affective investment in an idea or belief. Experiences of economic loss might paradoxically serve to intensify attachment to a specific investment, thereby demonstrating ‘a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility’ (Berlant, 2006, 21) which Berlant names cruel optimism. Berlant's insistence on experiential complexity is echoed in Ahmed's work that points to the relationships between ‘destructive attachments and conservation’ (2004, 51). Yet cultural geographers have shown how the reconfiguration of affective investments in the wake of deleterious economic conditions can manifest in diverse responses. Dawney et al.'s (2020) work on the affective contours of indebtedness, for instance, shows how experiences of debt can be lived through a complex series low-level affective states, such as dissociation and anxiety, rather than persisting attachments to specific ideals. Acknowledgement of ambivalent affectivities following economic loss is emphasised in Ngai's (2005) account of liminal non-cathartic affectivities experienced in situations of obstructed agency, such as confusion and envy. Significant for Ngai is that the ambivalence of ‘ugly feelings’ which do not necessarily have a strong object of address prevents people from exerting political agency. Thus ‘capitalism's classic affects of disaffection… are neatly reabsorbed by the wage system and reconfigured into professional ideals’ (2005, 4).

As such, there are investments from which we may need to divest, especially if they are ultimately harmful. Yet this process is difficult. As Ahmed writes, investments ‘cannot simply be willed away. It takes time to move on and to move away; given how investments in norms surface in bodies, then one's bodily relation to the world, and especially to those one loves, is reoriented if ones wishes not to embody a norm in the same way’ (2004, 190, emphasis in original). Divesting affective investments therefore has an unpredictable affective terrain which can recast bodily evaluations of that investment. In this regard, ‘giving up after a lifetime of investment can lead to anger, hatred and despair, which become retrospective readings of the investment itself as the origin of injury’ (Ahmed, 2004, 143). Alternatively, as Konings suggests, ‘when we experience the problematic aspects of our investments, we do not just simply deny the existence of a problem, but engage in externalization, locate its sources in others’ behavior, imagining a fetishistic irrationality to which we can contrast our own practices’ (2014, 45). Such retrospective evaluations can provide clarity about the nature of the former attachment, since ‘if the work of market attachment often goes unnoticed, it is, paradoxically, the process of detachment that sometimes reveals the strength of the tie’ (McFall et al., 2017, 10). Moreover, divestment might be forced on subjects. For instance, the demise of structures, both economic and otherwise, that people are invested in might be felt as ‘a living death’ (Ahmed, 2004, 12). Less dramatically, rather than wholescale divestment, more subtle transformative experiences might provoke questions about our investments, such as experiences of discomfort. As Ahmed describes, ‘one can be invested and open to those investments being challenged through the contact we have with others’ (2004, 188).

Collectively, these literatures indicate that the loss and divestment of affective investments is a complex and unpredictable process that requires a sense of the geographical specificity of situations. Pairing the economic with the affective, the remainder of this paper explores a situation where a loss of financial investment becomes reckoned with in different ways prompting those people to re-evaluate their affective investments.

Taxi investors in Melbourne

The focus for exploring loss in this paper involves investors in taxi mobilities in Melbourne, Australia. Though the paucity of work on taxi worlds (although see Hodges, 2007; Qian, 2015) contrasts from the burgeoning research on rideshare platforms (Rosenblat, 2018), taxis require attention given the livelihood challenges posed by rise of gig economy platforms. Furthermore, taxi investors have been at the centre of debates about regulatory change to enable rideshare. From a political economy perspective, though much has been said about how rideshare platforms shift the risk burden onto drivers who lack basic employment rights (Srnicek, 2017), surveying the history of taxis reveals a longer history of exploitation. Tucker (2018) explains the changes in taxi capitalisms over the course of the twentieth century, identifying five different capitalist relations, each of which differently configured exploitation. He highlights how investment opportunities through rentier capitalism has been a feature of taxi capitalisms for over a century, from the regulated petty commodity production of the 1920s when owner-operators began leasing their cabs, through to ‘medallion capitalism’ that dominated the second half of the twentieth century. Crucially, the licence (or ‘medallion’) system restricted the number of taxis in operation, enabling licence holders to profit from passive income. These licences became income-generating investments that could be sold or leased to taxi operators.

As with other cities around the world, taxis in Melbourne operated through medallion capitalism until recently. In metropolitan Melbourne 4,330 taxi licences were regulated by the state government and this scarcity inflated their price. Promoted by the state government as a safe investment through the 1990s, the value of these taxi licences in Melbourne increased by 7.3% per year in real terms since 1980 (Taxi Services Commission, 2012). In 2011, these licences were worth $500,000 and generated an average annual passive income of $30,000 per licence for holders (ibid). However, a 2011 state government inquiry into perceived shortcomings of the taxi industry concluded that ‘the current structure of the industry protects and benefits a relatively small number of licence holders from the effects of competition at the direct expense of consumers, taxi operators and taxi drivers’ (ibid, 25). The inquiry stressed that there was ‘no strong public interest grounds for continuing to restrict entry to the taxi market’ (ibid, 25).

In 2012, Uber launched in Australia, offering significantly cheaper prices than taxis for riders. Though it initially operated illegally, all states overhauled their taxi regulations to accommodate rideshare vehicles over the following four years. In 2017 hire car registration in Victoria became available for an annual fee of just $55.10 with numbers unrestricted which meant that the value of former taxi and hire car licences was reduced to effectively zero. As a result of this deregulation, between 2017 and 2019, the number of registered vehicles in Victoria grew 691% from 8,460 to 66,894, reflecting the rise of rideshare vehicles (Parliament of Victoria, 2019). Despite demands by licence holders for adequate compensation for having their licences revoked, the state government was not obliged to pay compensation and instead paid ex gratia ‘transition payments’ to 4,139 licence holders of $100,000 per licence for the first licence and $50,000 per each licence for three subsequent licences, funded by a $1 levy on trips (ibid). A 2019 Inquiry into these reforms acknowledged that many investors have substantial debts and have lost what they considered to be their self-funded retirement scheme, resulting in significant emotional distress—a situation that is occurring in many other cities globally, including New York (Rosenthal, 2019). The final report recommends that the state government should provide counselling services for investors and financial advice on managing debt (Parliament of Victoria, 2019).

Scenes of loss

This paper is based on fieldwork undertaken to better understand the transition to rideshare mobility in Melbourne. After gaining ethics clearance I interviewed 20 people involved in the governance of on-demand mobility, including state government workers involved in transport policy and industry trade associations and community groups. An interview with a member of a taxi community group drew my attention to the plight of people that had invested in taxis in Melbourne who were now experiencing significant hardship in the wake of regulatory change. This community, composed mainly of individuals who own taxi licences, seeks to advocate for licence owners against what they perceive as unfair treatment by the state government in the wake of rideshare. The initial contact put me in touch with four people to interview and a further four interviews snowballed from this. I conducted interviews in person at a location of the participants’ choosing, though the majority invited me to their home. All eight interviewees were struggling with personal debt owing to their investment in taxi licences at some point over the past 30 years. Seven of the eight interviewees were women, and the majority were second generation migrants with deep connections to the taxi industry over the second half of the twentieth century in Melbourne. Though only one (man) interviewee drove a taxi, all interviewees had partners or family members who drove taxis. The eight interviewees are not a representative sample of members of this community. However, through their stories I surmised that these eight interviewees were some of the most active and invested members of this community and therefore potentially some of the most interesting from the perspective of everyday financial subjectivities.

The substantive themes of personal debt and unfair treatment by the state government were remarkably consistent across this subset of eight people interviewed. However, what was different was the way that their stories of loss were expressed. The space created by each of these interviews in terms of bodily comportment, what was emphasised, and how this was expressed in speech in different spaces varied significantly. Owing to these differences, I sensed that, though connected through a similar situation, these people were processing their loss differently. Rather than work with all eight interviews, here I choose to work with three that, for me, evidence the greatest diversity from the point of view of expression. Rather than tightly integrating empirics and analysis as is conventional, I present impressionistic vignettes of these three interviews. As opposed to excising quotes that would reduce the contextual complexity of each encounter, these storeyed vignettes aim to present a richer sense of the three interviews as encounters that unfolded in highly singular ways. There are three reasons for this choice of presentation. First, and pragmatically, this technique allows presentation of a double transition both in terms of how the experience of debt has shifted the subjectivities of these people, but also how subjectivities were finely shifting within the interview itself (Bondi, 2014). This technique is thus an attempt to attend ‘closely to the empirics of how exactly debt comes to matter’ (Deville and Seigworth, 2015, 621). Second, and ethically, presenting the interviews as stories followed by analysis allows me to ‘honour the story that allowed a certain trajectory of thought to happen’ (Rose, 2014, 209). As Deville and Seigworth (2015, 617) insist, ‘without careful attention, the turns of theory can twist far too clumsily atop the mere wisp of the moment’. Third, and aesthetically, I hope that these stories might evoke and provoke thought for readers, such that my own analytical responses can be read as singular and situated. In short, this presentational technique permits the empirics and theory to relate but in a way that ‘they are not required to seamlessly and convincingly join, but can speak to each other across a distance’ (Rose, 2014, 210).

Appreciating Rose’s (2014) contention that stories are the starting point for thinking, these three scenes of loss were profoundly affecting. Yet while all three people are affected by the same event of dispossession, their narratives are divergent. Following their presentation, I respond to these stories by developing two arguments. First, and considering the collective dimension of these stories, I explain that from my reading there are three ways that these narratives collectively evidence a loss of affective investment—a loss of faith in institutions; a loss of face in terms of public respect; and a loss of conviction in terms of an inability to move forward with their lives. Second, and considering the differential expressive force of these narratives, I argue that these people, differently consumed by their circumstances, are reckoning with this loss in different ways. In this regard, while these stories themselves respond to the various lost investments of these three people, in their articulation and my sensing of them, their differential articulation also subtly reorients these losses in different ways. As Reid insists, ‘narratives and stories structure the orientation of desire, providing scenarios through which we understand existence, while simultaneously being structured by desire’ (2016, 165).

Selina

This room is the centre of a suburban bungalow. Selina paces around the room gesticulating fiercely, and her friend and I sit at the dining room table. The conversation freewheels, and there are tears.

Selena's husband drives a taxi. He bought three licences thirty years ago, receiving $90,000 a year in income. “You don’t understand how angry we are,” she shouts. Conversation is dominated by how the government have “set out to destroy the industry,” and that “front and centre at the political table was an Uber representative, they’ve been schmoozing them all along.” She says she's received threats from Uber, “the intimidation has been ongoing.” She says “none of us were politically active before this,” and tells me about what they’ve done. “I started to lose my shit. We started an organisation. We held a rally! We’ve stormed Parliament!” But, she says, “they were telling us that we’re selfish! Greedy licence owners!” A friend who swings by describes being represented by the media as “a hysterical woman, instead of the arguments that I’d posed.” Selina says, “the media was never going to be on our side,” but “we were paying for our own retirement. We didn’t want any handouts from any government. How would you feel if you lost everything you worked for? There's no faith in our government. Their arrogance is beyond belief. They’ve destroyed families.” She says, “We don’t exist. But I’ve done nothing wrong. Where's the justice for us?”

“We’ve been fighting for eight years. It's destroyed us,” Selina says. “We are mentally and physically drained. People have committed suicide. About three months after we lost the taxi licences,” she says, her husband “just went off the deep end.” She says, “we’ve gone from shopping at Myer and Country Road to shopping at Target.” Her friend describes having to work long hours and shows me her current account balance on her phone. It's $2.80. Describing how they can’t provide for their families, Selina says, “We’re both embarrassed. I had envisaged life where I could take my granddaughter out for a cupcake, I can’t do it.” Her friend says, “I think I’ve lost the plot. I don’t know what's happened to me. I want to go to jail,” she fantasises. “We’d get three meals a day. We’d get Foxtel.” She adds, “I think I’m a nasty woman now. But, see, this is not who we were, we’ve just become such bitches.”

Selina says, “we all really lean on each other because nobody understands what we’ve been through.” She describes people ringing her in the night, “having an absolute breakdown because she doesn’t know how she's going to pay her loan. We can’t plan… How do I move forward?” Of the men, she says “most of them are still in denial. They haven’t processed it. They won’t accept it.” She says, “We’ve resigned ourselves.” But she corrects herself, stating emphatically “I’m sorry, no, we’re not giving up. The men may have just sat back and said ‘it's done’. But we went through years of depression, I got sick, so how do you let go?” Her friend says, “my kids actually said ‘mum, get over it. That's the past, forget it, move on, it's time’. They know that we are hurting.” Of her children, she says, “it used to make me want to forget. You know, they actually make me happy.” But referring to their parents who migrated, Selina says, “It's not just about our money, it's about the dignity of our parents. Because they worked hard. I owe my mum and dad.” She says, “God will look after us too, because we’re good people, we’ve done nothing wrong.”

After four hours of witnessing such pain, I leave feeling shaken and my head is spinning. These women have confided in me. “We need someone to stand up for us,” they told me. I’m unsure how I can measure up to this.

Brad

This room is windowless. A small office with a computer and filing cabinets attached to a warehouse at the city edge, wind gusts under the door and rattles the walls. The roof booms as the sun heats and the clouds cool, but it's cold in here, strip-lit. Brad slumps in his seat, and he looks exhausted.

Brad drives a taxi and owned three licences. He used to own a small gym but after it was torched by a gang, “the banks took everything” in fighting his insurance case. Taxi driving a hundred hours a week kept him afloat and, with the eventual payout, he bought land and borrowed against this to buy three licences. He says, “No one would’ve thought that any government would cancel a legitimate asset.” Uber have just “forced their way in,” he says. The government has “been paid off massively, they think we’re a bunch of illegitimate drivers who can’t speak an ounce of English, and we’ll just push them around.” They’ve struck deals with the airport and shopping centres to “ambush” people, to “force them to change their ways,” and now taxis are relegated. He says once the government “cancelled our physical assets,” the bank “forcibly took my house and sold it,” leaving him almost half a million dollars in debt. He, his wife and two small children ended up moving into the warehouse and they lived for 18 months in this room.

Brad works eighty to a hundred hours each week. Taxi companies put on fatigue management courses. He says they’re “advocating people to kill themselves to make a living. They know that you’ve got to work 80 or 90 hours to even get up to half of what you used to get.” He has a handful of loyal older clients. But “I’ve got to put on a fake face and be happy all the time, and be super happy for the customers,” he says. “My younger customers, I take them through McDonalds, and I buy them hamburgers. I’m buying them drinks. I’m buying the customers,” he says. “So I’m actually losing ten percent off my bottom line, or they’ll get another taxi.” He says, “we’ve got to create our own work.” His driver colleagues have “put together WhatsApp groups to share jobs. We try and hold each other up. But people are still desperate.”

I ask how bad things are and Brad says, “We’ve had probably six or seven drivers at least suicide.” For him, “Holidays have gone. I never see my kid. My relationship has collapsed completely with my wife. She has nothing to do with me. I can’t really blame her, it's my fault. I’ve failed.” He says, “I feel angry a lot of the time, so sometimes I sleep in the factory still because I get overwhelmed.” He says, “I hate playing the victim, but I don’t know which way to go.” He says, “I can’t quit everything and go into another career because I need money to pay for now. So I’m enslaved to the cab.” He's started selling finance as a side job, but he doesn’t feel he can invest more time in this since bankruptcy would remove this option. He's always “second-guessing” himself. As for the ongoing court cases, he admits there are times when “You just walk away, and you almost feel suicidal.” There are times he has to step away, because he says, “I can’t physically do this”.

I offer Brad a fare to the train station, he's going that way to play guitar at an open mic night. We pause at traffic lights and he passes me a YouTube video of him to watch. After our conversation, this country and western ballad feels more melancholic, intensified by the oversaturated hues of the late evening sun. “It just helps me unwind,” he says.

Mary

This room seems to transcend its boundaries. Outside it is drizzling and from the radio, operatic voices quietly infuse. Sometimes the clouds get brighter and my eyes hurt as I squint at Mary's silhouette. There is an elegance in way she moves her hands mirroring her measured expression.

Mary's late husband drove taxis and they owned six licences. “My whole aim was to keep them and pass them on as he’d wanted to,” she says. “He's the one that did the work.” She used the funds to support disadvantaged children from migrant backgrounds. “That was my way of paying back for a good run,” she says. “That's just soul-destroying for me, I’ve let him down.” She accepts she made a bad business decision and accepts that investments can decrease, but she didn’t get an opportunity to sell. “We are not looking for sympathy. Understanding, yes. I want payment for something I own.” She says, “for a government to come along and just snap them off you, I can’t get my head around that.” Her assessment of the government is more withering when we talk about Uber. “Multinationals bleed us dry and pay a little or no tax. Corruption is alive and well whomever is in government.”

“I don’t know where we’ll go with this. I did see optimism,” Mary says. “But I also think there is such a thing as false hope.” She speaks of others affected. Of one, she says “She has this hope, and I can’t see where it’ll be rewarded. I dread the day when she has no hope.” For others, it is their anger that worries her. She says, “it concerns me how are they going to act out, with all that anger, it’ll destroy [them].” She pauses. “My biggest concern really is, some of the ones that ring up, sometimes at night, because they’re panicking. It worries myself what I say to them. Am I giving them false hope? I do sometimes get off the phone feeling guilty because I find myself now saying, ‘I don’t know’. They don’t want to hear that either.” She says, “you just feel so useless.” She tells me that I gave them hope. I nod and feel a sinking feeling in my stomach.

“Do I feel that way myself?” she asks, rhetorically. “No, not now. I did, further down the track.” She concedes, “I’m just not a person that gets angry. I’m disappointed that I can’t do what I wanted to do in these twilight years for underprivileged people, no noise, no publicity, nothing.” She tells me about the money spent on court cases: “So $800,000 has gone down the drain, but I’ll never say that to anyone that's trying to hang in there.” She turns away from me as if lost in thought. “If I was totally and brutally honest, I think it's been done and dusted.” “I’m blessed with healthy children, reasonably healthy myself, and – you know, I’ve come to terms with all that mire. My biggest heartache is the feeling that I’ve let [my husband] down.” She asks me, “So if you were in our position, what would you do?”

Troubled, I stay a while. We discover a mutual affection for Richard Strauss, as well as the importance of meaningful relationships. I feel touched witnessing her reflections on life and what she's learned. Most of all, she says “we really don’t have much control about anything we do.” As I walk back to the train station, it is her words “life's wonderful” that stay with me.

Losing investments

Narrating lost investments

The first lost affective investment that these narratives collectively express relates to the institutional withdrawal they have experienced. Selina's narrative emphasises what she perceives as government corruption, recounting stories about how Uber had been “schmoozing” the government, as suggested by Srnicek (2017), leading her to surmise that “there's no faith in our government.” While Brad's narrative similarly emphasises how the government has “been paid off massively,” he also highlights the diminution of taxi investors in the eyes of the government. Echoing van Doorn’s (2017) emphasis on the racialized dimensions of rideshare drivers, Brad describes how taxi drivers, too, are perceived as “illegitimate.” Though Mary's narrative also incorporates the accusation that corruption is “alive and well,” for her, this accusation is combined with incredulity that a government could just “snap off” something she owned. Palpable for me witnessing the expression of these narratives were affects of anger, cynicism and disbelief. Rather than being connective, I suggest that these affects have given rise to a loss of faith in the institutions that, until now, had been enabling in their lives. Where Hickey-Moody (2019, 929) argues that belief ‘choreographs people, societies, and relationalities,’ so too does disbelief through the way that this loss of faith becomes a catalyst for their actions. “I started to lose my shit,” as Selina says, recalling the protest action that their community initiated, and stating that “none of us were politically active before this.” Though Ngai (2005) argues that a lack of a strong object of address can prevent people in constrained situations from exerting political agency, in contrast here there is a strong object of address where disaffection can be directed. Indeed, striking about this aspect of these narratives was the strength of conviction through which they were expressed.

The second lost affective investment that these narratives collectively express relates to the public withdrawal that they have experienced. In this regard, witness how Selina describes the accusations of selfishness levelled against them as “greedy licence owners,” and how her friend talks about her gendered misportrayal by the media as “a hysterical woman,” a historical trope that serves to other and diminish (Domosh, 1998). Moving from media representations to day-to-day emotional labour, and reinforcing Zelizer’s (2005) foregrounding of interpersonal relationships for understanding economic activity, Brad alludes to humiliation felt through the increased demands from his younger riders who are aware he has to buy their custom if he is to retain their patronage. Mary articulates this disconnect in terms of her unfulfilled desire to be respected and understood. Palpable for me witnessing the expression of these narratives were affects of shame from being ostracised from publics that were previously (tacitly) supportive of their cause. Indeed, beyond mere misunderstanding, for Selina in particular, there is discernible public delight in their suffering, a sense of schadenfreude in that their suffering is perceived as retribution for greed. As such, rather than being connective, I suggest that these affects evidence a situation of retreating publics who are not invested in their loss. This felt disconnect became underscored by Selina's insistent refrain that “You don’t understand.” This loss of face catalyses activities to reconcile such ostracization, such as reaching out to others to sustain a supportive community. Konings’s (2014) assertion that people locate the problematic aspects of their investments in others can be discerned in the narratives that work to remove the disgust of self-entitlement, such as Selina's repeated insistence that this investment was the result of hard work which also served to remove the burden of retirement from the state. Moreover, such an assertion is also evidence of the individualisation that Lorey (2015) describes in terms of how responsibility for financial security is being recast through contemporary governance.

The third lost affective investment that these narratives collectively express relates to the withdrawal of vitality that they have experienced. Aligning with Dawney et al.'s (2020) instance on the significance of flat affects for better apprehending situations of economic loss, Selina's narrative expresses a depleted sense of vitality through feeling “mentally and physically drained” from years of fighting their cause. Associated with this lack of energy, and aligning with Southwood’s (2011) depiction of the torsion of franticness and inertia in situations of precarity, is a sense of being suspended in the present, alluded to through Selina's uncertainty about how to “move forward.” This impasse is also discernible in her friend's allusion to unravelling through “losing the plot” and jail fantasies. Brad's narrative, punctured by relationship breakdown, testifies to a similar sense of exhaustion and overwhelm, exacerbated by intensified work hours. Like Selina, Brad describes a suspended situation of being unable to invest in alternative futures. Mary narrates suspension differently, through her expressions of feeling “useless” to others, coupled with hesitations about how to support others and the potentially damaging consequences of offering “false hope.” Where Ahmed (2004, 12) describes how the demise of investments can be felt as a ‘living death,’ such an impasse was palpable for me in these narratives through affects of hopelessness and confusion about what to do. Rather than being connective, I suggest that these affects have given rise to a loss of conviction in the sense of believing in a future—a situation where practical competencies to deal with their financial situation have hit a wall (cf. Loomis, 2018). This loss of conviction gives rise to an impasse for each of these people, in that they are each unsure about how to proceed. Yet even amidst this loss of conviction, echoing Ahmed’s (2004) plea to take the durational folds of investment seriously, each person seems to be tentatively holding on to a belief that their situation might still change, reconciled through their continued engagement with media channels, and even their spending time with me.

Reconciling lost investments

Lost investments are expressed by these people in terms of a loss of faith, a loss of face, and a loss of conviction related to institutions, publics, and life, respectively. Yet in spite of these experiences, each of these people, to different extents, remain invested in their loss. Witness, for instance, how the dramatic felt intensities of anger indicate how these experiences of loss continue to consume Selina and Brad especially. Yet, and crucially, there is an acknowledgement that this attachment is devastating them, as Selina's friend comments “See, this is not who we were, we’ve just become such bitches.” This deleterious aspect is bolstered by Mary's concern for others in this regard, suggesting that “with all that anger, it’ll destroy [them].” In contrast to Berlant's (2011) logic of cruel optimism, there is minimal optimism in this attachment. Rather than a logic of optimism, these attachments seem sustained by material and symbolic debt. For instance, where Selina and Brad's financial hardship and Mary's disappointment at not being able to continue her philanthropy indicate a sense of material debt, Selina's invocation of respecting the dignity of her parents, and Mary's fear of letting down her late husband, suggest a symbolic debt that sustains this attachment.

Part of reconciling with lost investments for these three people involves the passivity of giving way. Where passivity is conventionally associated with a lack of effort (Harrison, 2008), passivity can also be an extremely difficult accomplishment. These narrations are replete with varied expressions of non-acceptance. Selina, for instance, bluntly describes of other taxi families how “most of them are still in denial” and that many others “won’t accept it.” And yet, despite the obligations that sustain attachments to their loss, each person more quietly admits the value of giving in and detaching from this loss. Mary is perhaps least tentative about this when she says, “If I was totally and brutally honest, I think it's been done and dusted,” though she says she's careful not to admit this to others. Palpable is the transition in feeling she describes as her anger has waned, ceding to disappointment. Brad describes the times that he knows he must step away, “because [he] can’t physically do this,” indicating a bodily state of being pushed to a threshold of bearability. Selina describes how her children see how much hurt this loss is causing them, telling her to “get over it. That's the past, forget it, move on, it's time.” At one point, even Selina admits that “We’ve resigned ourselves,” but in saying this, she quickly corrects herself: “I’m sorry, no, we’re not giving up,” contrasting her disposition from “the men” who “just sat back and said, ‘it's done’.” This is a moment where recognition of detachment seems to reveal the strength of the tie (McFall et al., 2017).

Where the previous section emphasised the activities or ‘active affections’ that loss has given rise to for these three people, here I reflect on how reckoning with loss involves working on passive affections, or capacities to be affected. In rethinking bodies as the locus of non-sovereign agency, theorists have emphasised how new modes of receptivity are formed through the passively affecting forces of our milieus. Bennett (2020) spotlights the importance of appreciating how bodily sensibilities are formed through being impressed upon by outside agencies, such that this outside effectively becomes part of us. Politics from this perspective is as much about passivity, about cultivating the sensitivities that matter, by ‘making oneself vulnerable to inception’ (2020, 87), as the outward activities that traditionally count as politics. Yet while affirming the porosity of subjects’ postures of openness and the affecting power of influences, Bennett has less to say about how people evaluate and filter damaging forms of non-recuperable influence. Discernible from these three people's narrations are the deleterious dimensions of being consumed by their situations of loss. These three people have, to different extents, a capacity to be affected by a situation that clearly continues to cause pain. The challenge of acceptance seems less about enhancing receptivity, but rather about reducing their capacity to be affected by a loss that continues to have a hold over them. Working on one's passive affections is, then, about altering one's capacity to be affected (see also Bissell, 2022). Such passivity is ‘neither the opposite of power nor its simple abdication but rather its necessary modulation’ (Connor, 2019, 32).

Though Bennett says little about how we evaluate and filter damaging influences, her preoccupation with affirming our sensitivities to the influences of our environments, our enlivening passive affections, seems key to how these three people attempt to reconcile their lost investments. Striking about my encounter with all three people was how, in spite of continuing to be affected by loss, other more enlivening experiences of being affected were discernible. Selina's friend talks about her children with real warmth in the present tense, that “you know, they actually make me happy.” Brad's relaxed demeanour in the taxi ride showing me his YouTube video contrasted from his resigned posture in his warehouse room, as well as his reflections on how music helps him to unwind. For Mary, I felt a real sense of uplift during our conversation after the formal interview that opened onto love and life. Part of reconciling lost investments here is about remaining susceptible to other passive affections, other influences. Hannah’s (2018) argument that what consumes our attention has a directional specificity is useful in this regard. He argues that in turning our attention towards something, we simultaneously turn away from other things. His contention is that, though we are fundamentally exposed to all manner of influences, all manner of passive affections, ‘we need to differentiate between those appeals we don’t control to which we want to be open and available, and those to which we do not want to be available’ (2018, 204). Though his argument emphasises the ethical significance of evaluating between enabling and constraining passive affections, this also presumes a strong capacity to make the decision and to not return to a constraining influence. Yet underscoring Ahmed’s (2004) insistence that it takes time to move on and move away, this is not what is happening for these people. For Selina's friend, though she says of her children, “it used to make me want to forget,” it is the memory of her parents that returns her back to her loss. Similarly, though Mary admits that she has “come to terms with all that mire,” she returns to this scene out of loyalty to her friends. In short, this process of reconciling with lost investments is difficult because it is a more fraught process than a simple turning away.

Conclusion

Geographers have always been interested in the concept of investment in terms of what is meaningful to people. Yet such concerns have been less prominent as cultural geographers have become more preoccupied with exploring bodily competencies than questions of what becomes meaningful and why (Rose, 2020). Responding to this charge, this paper has built on debates on affective investments within geography and beyond to argue that financial and affective investments are inextricably linked. However, in contrast to work that has considered how investments endure, this paper has considered how investments, both financial and affective, can be lost to explore how lost investments are reckoned with. Substantively, the paper has explored lost investments through the example of disruptive rideshare mobilities. Though important work has addressed the losses that rideshare drivers sustain in this work (Richardson, 2020), there are a hinterland of other losses that have occurred in the wake of the gig economy. This paper has focused on taxi investors as a significant group who are having to deal with the loss of financial investments owing to the ascendency of rideshare.

These stories of divestment pose questions for geographers in terms of how we should respond to these losses, and, more broadly, which losses we should respond to. Certainly, there were times that I felt uncomfortable about doing this research, not least because I felt that my presence was offering the “false hope” that troubled Mary, in an irresolvable situation that I could not affect. Yet, perhaps more significantly, these taxi investors spotlight a vexed moral economy of loss at the heart of this argument that is reminiscent of Butler’s (2009) discussion of how certain lives are framed as being more or less grievable than others. As these three people themselves imply, part of their vulnerability is because their loss is not framed as grievable by others. A difficulty for us too might be how the political economy of their subject position as financial investors renders them as beneficiaries of the passive income of rentier capitalist opportunities that geographers have long critiqued (Harvey, 2010). Though the rise of gig economy platforms means that the beneficiary of rentier capitalist relations has just been displaced to Silicon Valley start-ups (Sadowski, 2020), for critical geographers who flag the ethical imperative of wealth redistribution, if these losses were the result of dismantling of rentier capitalist exchange, they could represent precisely the kind of justice that such scholars are calling for. Yet the losses here are far from a dispassionate corporate casualty. They are intimate wounds that bear witness to vulnerabilities that demand our critical attention.

In focusing on the experiences of three people who had invested in taxi licences in Melbourne to explore reflections on life in the wake of rideshare, what becomes apparent is how a loss of financial investment in the licences precipitates a change in their sense of self through a loss of affective investments. These lost affective investments are expressed in terms of a loss of faith in government and institutions that were previously viewed as enabling in their lives; a loss of face in terms of respect from the public; and a loss of conviction in terms of an inability to move forward with their lives. In short, rather than a strengthening of affective investments, we witness three people trying to make sense of their situation where the supports that are provided by institutions, by publics, and by a sense of onward motion seem to dissipate, leaving them exposed and vulnerable to the outside (Rose et al., 2021). These are three people who feel abandoned in the wake of the gig economy, and this abandonment was expressed during the interview encounters through a range of affects—particularly anger, shame and confusion. Appreciating these situations of abandonment, especially a loss of investment in state institutions, matters in part because they help us to understand the conditions that can potentially give rise to new allegiances.

One response to such vulnerability is the activity of working on one's active affections. As these encounters with taxi investors demonstrate, such outward-facing activities are multiple, spanning from protests to creating communities of support. Yet, and crucially, reconciling with loss also involves working on one's passive affections, one's capacity to be affected. What I have emphasised is how divestment is difficult and without guarantee. There is no simple solution to just choosing to feel these losses differently. As each of these encounters indicate, these three people remain invested, albeit in different ways, in their situations of loss that remain stubbornly obdurate. Yielding and turning away are two ways that these people attempt to work on their passive affections, to divest these losses. Yet the damaging influence of these losses are difficult to filter, influences that cannot easily be turned away from, influences that continue to consume to different extents. It is these different extents that indicate a politics to this divestment. Perhaps most notably, considering the more precarious economic situation that Selina and Brad are in relative to Mary, there is a politics in who can afford to divest, to turn away. Relatedly, as Brad's reflections on his thresholds of bodily bearability, there is also a temporal politics at play, in terms of when one must to turn away. Ultimately, where Grossberg (1992) argues that affective investments are empowering, I close by speculating that in some situations—such as the experiences of irredeemable financial loss explored in this paper—relinquishing depleting affective investments through giving way might be a necessary but overlooked dimension of empowerment, creating new capacities to feel differently, to finally move on.