Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Anthropology

Advisor

Ida Susser

Committee Members

David Harvey

Don Robotham

Trebor Scholz

Subject Categories

Social and Cultural Anthropology

Keywords

Capitalism, Technology, Labor, Uber, Platform Economy, Cooperatives

Abstract

In the first decades of the 21st century, the rise of app-based platforms as mediators of economic activity materialized a new reality for millions of people across the world that resulted in the erosion of labor standards and intensified economic inequality. So-called platform capitalism represents the latest turn in a decades-long process of “digital transformation,” defined as the deployment of digital technologies to mediate, automate, and accelerate economic activities. This dissertation examines the impact of digital transformation in the specific context of the New York City rideshare and taxi industry, exemplified by the ascendancy of Uber, seen as paradigmatic for a further evolution of the capitalist economy toward a new configuration defined by some as “technofeudalism” (Durand 2020, Varoufakis 2023). It argues that core elements of this paradigm can be identified in embryonic form in prior epochs. Namely, in the “New Deal Order” (periodized from 1935 to 1975), techniques of power that later became dominant were already evident in the practices for construction and management of infrastructure by public authorities. These practices include privatization of system-level planning, enclosure of public or common assets, socialization of costs to the benefit of private actors, tolling flows as a revenue generation strategy, ringfencing of assets, segmentation of society into groupings with different and lesser rights, opaque concealment of the operations of power, and materialization of new infrastructures compelling new political-economic patterns of life. Additional practices that became paradigmatic in the neoliberal era were prefigured first by innovations in the taxi industry: mass “responsibilization” of workers through the ambiguous freedom of entrepreneurship– evident in the shift to independent contractor status for taxi drivers orchestrated by taxi fleet owners at the end of the 1970s, and asset inflation as a core strategy for accumulation– evident in the commodification and eventual securitization of the taxicab medallion. Rather than representing a natural, value-neutral state of affairs, these practices reflect a specific “metapolitics,” defined as the embedding of a set of power relations and norms in the infrastructures and patterns through which economic activity flows. These practices became core elements of neoliberalism, the dominant political-economic paradigm in the United States from 1975 until present. This dissertation argues that the long wave of economic growth of the past half-century is centered on the rapid and global deployment of digital technologies because these serve as a “killer app” for the materialization of a metapolitically neoliberal way of life in which power and wealth are concentrated, commodification is deepened, circulation of capital is accelerated, and living labor is rendered increasingly precarious and faces credible threat of replacement through automation. In examining the impact of these forces in the New York City rideshare and taxi industry, we see that digital transformation has called forth a counter-movement, manifesting in protests, strikes, litigation, legislation, and regulation intent on re-territorializing the forces of capital run amok. This dissertation chronicles this movement, providing a case study of the launch of a driver-owned rideshare “platform cooperative” as a strategy to materialize a new political-economic reality centered on the interests of labor, embodying a metapolitics of solidarity.

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