Tuesday, November 22, 2022 - 12:40 p.m. to 2 p.m.
The Departments of Communication and Geography invites you to their Fall Colloquium Series with guest speaker Dr. Juan del Nido who will present, Uber, taxis, and the moral legitimacy of “What the People Want”.
April 12th, 2016, Uber arrived to Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, a 13 million-strong metropolis no ride-sharing platform had tapped into until then. As a legal and political conflict unfolded, a certain middle class protested that it, as “A People”, wanted Uber and that therefore they should have it. This presentation will examine how in contemporary capitalism the moral imperative of “choice” emerges as the site of a raw, unmediated legitimacy, a “gladiatorial truth”, leveled against the political. I will show how the “near-fanatical obsession” (Chhotray 2011) with unmediated popular politics hinges on a stylised notion of citizens as individuals, rational and informed, who know what they want and need better than anyone else – including, and especially, institutional authorities. Immensely depoliticising rhetorical devices, gladiatorial truths have a toxic effect on democratic and representative legitimacy, as well as on public policy premised on institutions. Similarly, gladiatorial truths’ narrow yet affectively powerful emphasis on the sovereign consumers’ bottom line destroys the subtle relations of accountability, responsibility, and ethical duties that make certain problems social to begin with.
Bio - Juan del Nido originally trained as an economist and worked in the private sector as a political consultant in Buenos Aires. He completed his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Based on his doctoral fieldwork, his recently published book Taxis vs Uber (Stanford University Press, 2021) examines the logics, rhetoric and affect of what he calls post-political reasoning - the ways of knowing where certain kinds of disagreement come to be written off, pathologised, or disavowed. He is currently Research Associate at the Max Planck Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy and Social Change, at the University of Cambridge, researching ethics and economic knowledge in the work of behavioural economists.
Zoom link is https://unh.zoom.us/j/92999354553