Abstract

April 12th, 2016, Uber arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A spectacular conflict with the taxi industry followed, dragging in courts, taxis, influencers, bureaucrats, the press, and Argentina’s president himself. As notions like freedom, efficiency, innovation, and competition shaped the experience of the conflict, economist and anthropologist Juan M. del Nido noticed that taxi drivers’ stakes in it were no longer merely disputed: they were progressively written off, pathologized, and explained away.

Looking beyond precariousness, labour relations and resistance, 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 examines through this conflict 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.