[Linganth] Taxis vs Uber interview

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
This week on the CaMP anthropology blog Juan Manuel del Nido discusses his
book, *Taxi vs. Uber: Courts, Markets, and Technology in Buenos Aires,
*responding
to Diego Valdivieso's questions.

You can read the interview here:
https://campanthropology.org


Best,
Ilana

Press blurb:

 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.


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.
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