Drivers of Disruption: How Jakarta's Mobility Platform Drivers Understand, Transform and Resist the Algorithms that Manage Them

Abstract

Leveraging embedded fieldwork with mobility platform drivers in Jakarta this dissertation shows how dreams of technologically-enabled disruption fall apart on the streets of Global South cities. Through the case of platform companies Grab and Gojek, the three essays narrate the domestication of the digital as it is implicated in the local. In doing so, I bring focus to the varied infrastructures---human, physical, relational, social---that underlie technological interventions. Paper 1 sketches out how the introduction of mobility platforms in Jakarta gave rise to unique architectures of ‘distributed worker solidarity’, showcasing the resilience of informal institutions through moments of technological change. Paper 2 examines the role played by these informal mutual aid networks in mediating precarity for platform workers in Jakarta during COVID-19, underscoring the importance of worker relationships as scaffolding for platformization. Paper 3 interrogates the encounter between abstracted, data-driven algorithmic assumptions underpinning mobility platforms with the drivers' contextual, embodied, situated knowledge practices to empirically demonstrate the limitations of algorithmic solutions in a city like Jakarta. Through this work I hope to re-articulate what technological disruption means by shifting the vantage point from the boardroom to the streets, the apps, the motorbikes, in other words, to the places where ‘disruption’ is lived.