Digital utility: Datafication, regulation, labor, and DiDi’s platformization of urban transport in China

Abstract

This article develops the critical concept of digital utility through studying the case of DiDi Chuxing and the platformization of transport services in urban China. By examining DiDi’s business model, its datafication strategies, its relations with the Chinese government, and its labor management systems, the article demonstrates how the platformization of transport is emblematic of a private company becoming a digital utility provider. With technological imagination and practical inconsistency, this process remediates service delivery while reworking infrastructures and redefining the access to public and private services. We argue that platform companies are able to become digital utility suppliers because of their capacity to straddle the public and the private sectors, their aspiration to become “ecosystem builders,” and their heavy reliance on the constant intensive labor of users, particularly drivers, to produce data. However, these factors also make instability a definitive feature of digital utility companies in their present condition. Morphing into the terrain of utilities is a common undertaking by DiDi and similar platform companies. To problematize the logics of digital utility, especially its labor-intensive datafication processes and its complex relations with regulators, provides a conceptual anchor for further debates on the infrastructuralization of platforms and the platformization of society.

Keywords:

• digital utility
• ride-hailing platforms
• informal economy
• digital labor
• algorithms

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors of the special issue – Jeroen de Kloet, Thomas Poell, and Guohua Zeng – for their valuable comments on the manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this study was obtained from the Seed Money for Project on Digital Labor, which is supported by the Faculty of Social Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, and International Development Research Centre (project #108339-007: Deliver on the promise of the platform economy in China).

Notes on contributors

Julie Yujie Chen

Julie Yujie Chen is a lecturer in the School of Media, Communication, and Sociology at the University of Leicester. Chen studies how cultural difference, technologies, and existing economic structure affect the experience and perception of work in the digital age. Her previous work has been published in New Media & Society among other journals, and she is the lead author of Super-sticky WeChat and Chinese Society (2018).

Jack Linchuan Qiu

Jack Linchuan Qiu is a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Working-class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-less in Urban China (2009) and Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition (2016).