https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4647-1898
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ABSTRACT
This article discusses how Brazilian ubertubers – Uber drivers that manage YouTube channels focused on their riding experience – systematise and make public different ways of knowing surge pricing (SP), an algorithmic-oriented system that uses price adjustments to redistribute drivers across urban space. Taken by the Uber as an instrument to measure and regulate market conditions, SP mediates drivers’ pragmatic and affective daily practices, materialising a asymmetrical power relation embedded into a neoliberal governmentality. The study explores 25 videos produced and shared by five consolidated Brazilian ubertubers, focusing on how this specific kind of digital influencer systematises and perform collective knowledge on how to increase earnings with surge pricing. The metaphors, hypotheses, and theories, the ubertuber’s tactics to deal with SP’s instability and with the risks of working on peripheral areas, and the efforts to investigate the logics of a ‘new surge’ are the main issues approached in the case study. In the conclusions, we discuss how ubertubers’ ambivalent relations with surge pricing reveal their wider attempts to navigate neoliberal governmentality and precarious conditions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 These and all the following excerpts cited in this article were freely translated from Portuguese by the authors.
2 Like many ride-hailing drivers in Brazil, ubertubers also work with other platforms such as 99 and InDriver. Our study focuses solely in what ubertubers say about Uber’s features.
3 Brazil is Uber’s largest market outside the United States (Rochabrun, Citation2019).
4 Among the five selected channels, the one with the lowest subscriber counts (‘O Motorista Oficial’) had nearly 64,000 subscribers – approximately the same amount as the most subscribed channel identified by Chan (Citation2019).
5 Since the time of collection, three channels’ titles were changed; ‘Escola para Uber’ became ‘Thomas de Castro’; O Motorista Oficial was renamed to ‘O Tiago Lima’ and ‘Fernando Uber Floripa’, to ‘Fernando Floripa Motorista Uber’. This ‘rebranding’is partially discussed in the final section of the article.
6 This hypothesis was later confirmed by the authors in an article published by Uber researchers (Yan et al., Citation2020).
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Abel Guerra
Abel Guerra is a Media and Communications PhD Student at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a member of the research group R-EST (estudos redes sociotécnicas). He holds a master’s degree in Media and Communication from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil, where he defended his master’s thesis entitled ‘Infrastructures, narratives and algorithmic imaginaries: technographing Uber’s surge pricing’. Current research interests include platforms, datafication, infrastructures and knowledge production [email: [email protected]].
Carlos d’Andréa
Carlos d’Andréa is a professor at Graduate Programme in Communication Studies at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), in Brazil, and coordinator of the research group R-EST (estudos redes sociotécnicas). Researcher of CNPq (‘Bolsa Produtividade’ grant). In 2017/2018, worked as a visiting scholar at the Media Studies department at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Platforms, social media, algorithms, science, and controversies are some of his research topics. His current research project is named ‘Measuring uncertainties, sharing controversies: contemporary dynamics of the platformisation of science’ (2020-2023) [email: [email protected]].