The technology of a tech company

Uber has long framed itself as a technology company rather than a transport company. This claim has been central to the various legal challenges that Uber has faced concerning (among other issues) the independent contractor status of its drivers, where Uber's argument that it is a tech company has aimed to convince the courts that drivers are not at the core of the business (e.g. Time, 2019). Indeed, to call one's business a technology company is not a meaningless claim, nor is it a simple one, paraphrasing Tarleton Gillespie on platforms (2010: 349). The infamous story of the rise and fall of the office space provider WeWork is an example of the discursive complexity of the ‘technology company’ descriptor. WeWork sought to position itself as a technology company prior to and during its initial public offering to entice higher valuations, despite primarily functioning as a real estate company that purchased long-term leases from landlords and rented them out as short-term leases to tenants. If WeWork used the descriptor of a technology company in order to increase its valuation, what is it specifically about this claim that encourages investment? The answer lies in the intricacies of performativity in which the use of the term creates a semantic connection to the (historical) performance of other companies associated with new digital and usually internet-based technologies, which have a particular combination of economic and technical characteristics. These included according to Govindarajan and Srivastava (2019): low variable costs, low capital investments, high volumes of customer data, and network effects (cf. Nowak, 2023). This combination of characteristics has meant – for a minority of companies – rapid expansion and market dominance.

So, in other words, WeWork recognised that calling oneself a technology company was part of the dramatic performance that was the prerequisite for their economic performance (Tsing, 2000: 117). The claim was a culturally specific motif that dramatised WeWork as an attraction for investment, rather than a description of a particular product (i.e., a technology), or even a business model. It is this complex performative work of the term that is the reason why it is necessary to approach Uber's claim to be a technology company with caution at the same time as taking that claim seriously. Much of Disrupting D.C. is dedicated to showing how Uber's actions create a particular and problematic way of imagining the city, but also how these actions and their associated ‘common sense’ are permitted by the way the company positions itself as an urban actor, that is, as just a technology company. In part, the claim to be a technology company allows Uber to build upon existing discourses concerning entrepreneurial urbanism. The ‘just let Uber do it’ (136) solution to urban problems echoes the recommendation by Stephen Goldsmith (Deputy Mayor of New York) and Neil Kleiman (Director of the New York University/Wagner Innovations Labs) that cities should be run like Amazon, a proposal which far from being metaphorical implied a condition in which a city is ‘run like a business’ – thus shifting the focus from the common good to the interests of individual consumers (and presumably shareholders) – and ‘run by business’ – so that services and infrastructure are transferred from public to private delivery (Graham et al., 2019: 2). Not only is Uber a private company that provides a service at a competitive price, but specifically because it is a technology company, it ‘allows the city to be smarter’ (70), working better for consumers.

In addition to this entrepreneurial imaginary of the city and ‘vision of the future’ (98) associated with technology, Disrupting D.C. demonstrates how the claim to be a technology company impacts the realm of urban political action. The authors show how Uber can pose itself as a solution to urban questions in no small part because it offers a ‘technical’ and thus severely constrained problematisation of urban issues. Some key examples include a conception of racial injustice that narrowly focuses on the rights of consumers (64), and a framing of transit deserts as a problem of inadequate data (86). It is this impoverished problematisation that allows Uber to present technology – and particularly its sui generis – as the solution, a solution that supposedly allows an ‘escape from politics’ (108) insofar as this pertains to addressing ‘structural inequality’ (112). Yet, far from being apolitical, Uber in fact exists within and contributes to a technocratic political realm which comprises at its core ‘a politically motivated valorization of the technical as a supposedly nonpolitical and neutral tool of governance’ (Geoghegan, 2023: 15). Through this ‘political rhetoric of the technical’ Uber can function as a quasi-political actor in the city at the same time as it ‘obfuscates the political through appeals to technology, techniques, […] and so forth as tools of neutral governance’ (Geoghegan, 2023: 15). In this sense, the technology company claim justifies Uber's action in the city according to a particular ideology of government as a technical act, that also assumes a shift from public to private delivery of urban infrastructure and services.

As is indicated by Geoghegan's (2023) monograph, the issue of exactly how the political rhetoric of the technical becomes acceptable is historically and geographically beyond the scope of the immediate focus on Uber in D.C. However, the authors do note that Uber as a technical solution appears as ‘a new common sense’ (136) concerning what cities can and should be, altering people's ideas of ‘where public transit goes, what constitutes a good job, how cities use data, and the nature of racial justice’ (10). In making this observation Wells et al. gesture towards an unfilled outline for a process akin to what Chiapello (2015: 15) calls ‘colonisation’ to describe the emergence of financialised valuation processes, in which there is an ‘ingraining of financialised metrics and reasonings in spaces and situations where they were previously non-existent or less common’. Not only do apparently ‘technical’ practices incorporate and produce certain values and rationalities that create new mentalities, incentives, and perceptions of significance, but these also tend to reduce the importance of prior practices, thus ‘changing the ecology of the holds available for action and maybe even the modes of subjectification’ (Chiapello, 2015: 15). In this understanding, colonisation ties technical processes to the appropriation or control of ways of thinking and of forms of subjectivity, in a similar manner to the ‘common sense’ produced by Uber in D.C. It is for this reason that whilst being attuned to the obfuscatory nature of the claim to be ‘just’ a technology company, it is simultaneously vital to unpack what is meant by technology in order to better understand the social structures and the politics of urban change.

As a complement to the specifics of the discussion of urban policy and politics, two core approaches can be identified in the conceptualisation of technology and society. From one perspective is the argument that technology shapes society. This perspective includes variants of technological determinism, some of which view technology as positive – for example, innovative technologies will solve societal problems – whereas others view technology as negative – for example, technology enshrines capitalist ideologies, including removing control of the means of production from workers. Certain meanings intended by ‘Uber-isation’ – loosely referring to the process whereby platforms operate in a particular sector or activity – are suggestive of such a technologically deterministic approach insofar as they assume a universalising course of action for digital platforms regardless of socio-spatial differences. For example, in her study of platform-based domestic workers in Delhi and its surrounding National Capital Region, Dattani (2021) argues that for Uber-isation to occur as a smooth process, it would require that women domestic workers have: independent access to or ownership of technology; digital literacy as understood according to universal standards and the possibility to engage in urban spatial mobility. From another perspective though, technology and society are seen as co-constituted in a myriad of ways. This socio-technical co-constitution can be understood through the moment of technology design (e.g., how are social norms enshrined in the design of given device or practice); at the moment of use (e.g., how are technologies taken up in different ways by different groups) or in the broader social effects of technologies (e.g., how technologies co-constitute certain social structures like networks). It is this approach that is perhaps more akin to that taken in Disrupting D.C. insofar as the book aims to demonstrate how the specific urban context of D.C. shaped – and was shaped by – the logistical technologies of Uber's operations.

However, it is possible to go further in this analysis of the socio-technical dimensions of Uber to consider how the technology cannot be reduced to the company. As Nowak (2023) argues through his study of the ‘auto-constructed driver network in Greater Jakarta’ (478), platforms create network effects that are a ‘socio-technical phenomenon’ (477, emphasis in original) that allow ‘new relationships between people’ that are ‘not fully captured within [platform] architectures’ (478). This is one reason why discussion of Uber-isation is misleading as it risks reducing certain agencies and capacities to the company rather than focusing more broadly on the social uses of the technology. Such a more expansive understanding of technology in which platform intermediation is often repurposed implies at once a broader and a more specific understanding of politics than that which appears in Disrupting D.C. It is broader because it allows a range of different actors and actions to become part of political processes rather than only public authorities and private companies who are the protagonists in the book. It is more specific, meanwhile, because it provides a way of interrogating the particular socio-technical processes – associated with but not reducible to platforms – that constitute modes of conflict, resistance, and getting by which compose not only the everyday wranglings of urban life, but also more formal political spaces. Focusing on technology does not necessarily mean emphasising the companies and institutional actors owning or producing such technology, but rather – returning to Chiapello (2015) – on the rationales, logics, and material practices that are invited through technology use, which may in turn alter and reshape the boundaries of institutional actors and action.