Uber mobilities, algorithms, and consumption: Politicizing ethical reflection

Abstract

Based on an ethnography of Uber’s arrival in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this article uses a political economy approach to think politically about ethical reflections concerned with what good mobilities are, how they should be governed and what kinds of relations they entail. I found that particular understandings of what algorithms were and did, and how, however spurious, superficial or derivative, triangulated the differential salience and (re)production of juridical technicalities, political philosophy, naturalized mobilities and ideas of moral and political freedoms to modulate an ethical orientation to mobility in the grammar of facts, realpolitik, a kind of freedom and an attunement to ‘the bottom line’. Ultimately, my goal is to understand through this particular kind of mobility how certain problems become ethical in certain forms to certain people, and how particular dispositions prevail over others.