<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div>Dear Colleagues,</div><div>This week on the CaMP anthropology blog Juan Manuel del Nido discusses his book, <em>Taxi vs. Uber: Courts, Markets, and Technology in Buenos Aires, </em>responding to Diego Valdivieso's questions.</div><div><br></div><div>You can read the interview here:</div><div><a href="https://campanthropology.org" target="_blank">https://campanthropology.org</a><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Best,</div><div>Ilana</div><div><br></div><div>Press blurb:<br></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"> Uber's April 2016 launch in Buenos Aires plunged the
Argentine capital into a frenzied hysteria that engulfed courts of law, taxi
drivers, bureaucrats, the press, the general public, and Argentina's president
himself. Economist and anthropologist Juan M. del Nido, who had arrived in the
city six months earlier to research the taxi industry, suddenly found himself
documenting the unprecedented upheaval in real time. Taxis vs. Uber examines
the ensuing conflict from the perspective of the city's globalist, culturally
liberal middle class, showing how notions like monopoly, efficiency,
innovation, competition, and freedom fueled claims that were often exaggerated,
inconsistent, unverifiable, or plainly false, but that shaped the experience of
the conflict such that taxi drivers' stakes in it were no longer merely
disputed but progressively written off, pathologized, and explained away.<span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This first book-length study of the lead-up to and immediate
aftermath of the arrival of a major platform economy to a metropolitan capital
considers how the clash between Uber and the traditional taxi industry played
out in courtrooms, in the press, and on the street. Looking to court cases, the
politics of taxi licenses, social media campaigns, telecommunications
infrastructure, public protests, and Uber's own promotional materials, del Nido
examines the emergence of "post-political reasoning": an increasingly
common way in which societies neutralize disagreement, shaping how we
understand what we can even legitimately argue about and how.<span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></p></div></div></div></div></div>