Taxis vs. Uber: Courts, Markets, and Technology in Buenos Aires by Juan M. del Nido (review)

Abstract

I April 2016, within hours of the first Uber ride in Buenos Aires, the city’s taxi driver associations initiated legal action, and the following day, a city judge issued a ban against Uber effective immediately. So begins Juan M. del Nido’s Taxis vs. Uber, a study of the melee that accompanied Uber’s arrival to Buenos Aires when Uber, supported by the middle class, found itself in confrontation with both the city’s taxi industry and its juridico-political order. The conflict, however, as del Nido writes in the conclusion, was not even about Uber: it was about an emergent moment in the Argentine political and public sphere. Exploring this political and public sphere and, in particular, how the urban middle class’s engagement of post-political reasoning shaped the conversation around and understandings of this conflict form the basis of del Nido’s study. While drawing on fieldwork with taxi drivers and other middle-class porteños like himself, del Nido’s aim to “unravel the logics, rhetoric, and affects of post-political reasoning” (206) and economic tropes about freedom, empowerment, and competition leans heavily on an analysis of court documents and the news and social media. del Nido argues that this post-political reasoning marshalled by Buenos Aires’ middle class is not just a specific conjuncture but rather, a late-capitalist orientation about disagreement that has increasingly proliferated around the world. The book proceeds in two parts. The first three chapters provide crucial background knowledge for the reader about Peronism as well as an examination of the taxi industry before Uber arrived. These first chapters also endeavor to lay the theoretical groundwork for the book’s argument about