Production, consumers' convenience, and cynical economies: The case of Uber in Buenos Aires

Abstract

Based on twelve months of fieldwork into Uber's conflict in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this article examines convenience's role in the emergence of what I call cynical economies: a method and logic of production expressly organized on the awareness of a distance the very rhetoric of convenience exacerbates. For the city's middle class, convenience defined a democratizing, empowering arena of private relations away from the hierarchies and exclusions proper to the private sphere. As Uber's ratings translated consumers' experiences into a political economy for the trade, drivers organized the production of the ride knowing that whatever exceeded the immediate intelligibility of the experience could not matter in that political economy. In the process, cynical economies delegitimize complex and inherently social categories like risk, responsibility, and liability, as well as the social sphere that frames them, without offering an alternative order in return