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Accepted Paper:
Cosmopolitan Consumers and Stranger Kings: Uber in Buenos Aires
Juan del Nido
(University of Cambridge)
This presentation examines how a certain Argentine middle class – culturally globalist, anxious for “modernity”, superficially ecumenic - experienced Uber in Buenos Aires as an economic stranger king enabling them to partake in a transnational, unmarked, cosmopolitan community of consumers with a “right to choose” how to move around.
Paper long abstract:
April 12th, 2016, Uber arrived in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, by then one of the few large metropolises in the world left without any ride-sharing platform. A protracted conflict ensued, involving the city’s highly unionised taxi industry, lawyers, bureaucrats and the city’s population. Based on a year of fieldwork, I argue here that a segment of the latter – a culturally globalist, anxious for “modernity”, superficially ecumenic middle class – experienced Uber as an economic stranger king (Sahlins 2008): regardless of the company’s own reasons to launch its business in the city, these residents understood Uber as a line of flight from the allegedly indolent and corrupt taxi trade and towards a transnational, boundless, moral and moralised condition of consumers who choose how to move around. Analysing media debates and the company’s PR strategy, I show how this middle class leveraged Uber’s presence in “400 cities all over the world”, relentless news of Uber downloads in the city and a social media frenzy to provincialise and pathologise both resistance to the company and concerns with the production of movement, celebrating passengers, drivers and residents in general through an exalted focus on consumption, a shift all the more persuasive given the vagueness of what “consumption” means when purely understood as “choice”.