Infrastructures for Consumer-Cyborgs

When Nadiem Makarim referred to Gojek consumers as cyborgs, he was answering a question he had posed about the character of the problem that Gojek was trying to solve in the world; it “was simply a problem of mobility, right. How do you get a human, an object, like food, or money, or value, to move in the fastest possible, cheapest, most convenient way, using one tool?”(Wirjawan, 2020). Makarim’s answer is the app. But the app itself does not result in the rapid, cheap, and convenient circulation of people, objects, and value. That circulation is facilitated by the human labour performed by the driver-partners. When Makarim uses language such as

‘cyborg’, or ‘operating system of the world’, he foregrounds technological innovation and reinforces the idea of a seamless automated process by which this circulation takes place almost magically. Here, the driver-partner is positioned in service of the consumer-cyborg, the intended user of the app and beneficiary of its cashless payment system.

In the following section, I take an infrastructural view to understand how the apps mobilise driver-partners in service of the consumer-cyborg and thus the digital economy. By exploring the concept of social infrastructure, I draw attention to the role of human labour in facilitating and maintaining the circulation of value through the apps. The infrastructural lens also allows for an

Screenshot 3: A driver thinks happily about helping customers.

1 March 2019.

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examination of how this labour is rendered invisible through the language of automation and how this can lead to its devaluation. My purpose is to establish an understanding of the figure of the driver-partner as an extension of the app, and thus its digital payment infrastructure. I proceed by discussing the value of taking an infrastructural perspective to the analysis of these payment apps, as it allows us to examine more closely the relational dynamics imposed on exchanging parties by the app infrastructure. Finally, I discuss how companies such as Gojek and Grab have benefitted by inserting themselves as an interpretive interface on an existing infrastructure. In doing so, they create momentary stabilising parameters for the exchanges that happen through their platform, thus controlling the conditions of transaction.

Channels and conjunctions

To explore how these drivers comprise a critical social infrastructure in the context of digital payments, I will first introduce two foundational examinations of the concept through the work of Julia Elyachar (2010, 2005) and AbdouMaliq Simone (2015, 2004). As scholars with diverging backgrounds and in different fields, their conceptualisations differ. Simone conceptualises people and their conjunctions as infrastructure, while Elyachar focuses on the communication channels created by people as interesting objects of study in themselves. By reviewing their work, I aim to explore how driver-partners can be understood as a critical infrastructural element of the Indonesian digital wallets.²¹

Elyachar’s ethnographic research takes place in the workshops and markets of Cairo, Egypt. In her definition infrastructure is not concerned with the production of things, but with their circulation.

She argues that capitalism depends on infrastructure to provide channels that bring goods and services to relevant markets. In her work, Elyachar provides a highly detailed rendering of specific processes of exchange taking place in this context and describes the ways in which common understandings of the informal economy depended on trust between community members, or what Prahalad earlier was referring to as ‘connectivity’ (Elyachar, 2005). She makes the point that these networks are not owned by any individual; they are developed and invested collectively to constitute a community resource. A critical element of this economy is the communication channels that enable this network to exist. From her fieldwork, Elyachar introduces a group of women from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds engaging in ‘phatic communion’: practices

21 Just prior to the submission of this thesis, AM. Simone published a new article re-examining his conceptualisation of ‘people as Infrastructure’ (Simone, 2021). While I have not had the opportunity to engage deeply with this text in the thesis, I believe that my empirical work aligns well with Simone’s call for additional examination of the increasing role of technical devices in the intersections of collective social life that form ‘social infrastructure’.

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of sociality that bring these communication channels into being and ensures that they continue to exist.

Elyachar draws here on a term used by Bronislaw Malinowski (1936) to describe the social practice of communication, where the activity is not just about talking but a form of ‘social action’.

Sometimes dismissed as gossip, phatic communion is a type of communication that establishes connection and builds relationships between individuals as well as the broader community.

During my fieldwork in Indonesia, a neighbour would frequently ask me where I was going as I passed his laundry shop in the morning. The purpose of his question was not purely to seek information about my plans for the day, but to position me and my activities in relation to the community I was now living in. As a neighbourhood hub, the laundry shop also included a hairdresser and an aerobics and dance studio, all managed by his wife. My comings and goings and the theme of my research quickly became public knowledge, and I soon found myself enrolled in various studio activities. Elyachar argues that such phatic communion leads to the creation of communication channels. These are not channels in any physically material sense but are spaces through which information can flow. They are established through repeated interaction and exchange, in public and private spaces such as the coffeehouses in Cairo or snacking together after aerobics in my Jogja neighbourhood.

For Elyachar, conceptualising this ‘connectivity’ as social infrastructure is a way to acknowledge the labour and skill required to make and maintain such complex, subtle, and flexible channels of communication and economic exchange. The women of Elyachar’s research engaging in phatic communion are contributing to the maintenance of these communication channels, and she describes them as maintenance workers of the “essential infrastructure of economic life in Cairo”

(Elyachar, 2010, p. 454). It is easy to dismiss the importance of the work that these women are doing, and according to Elyachar, we lack the language to understand and properly value this type of maintenance work. Elyachar thus introduces the concept of phatic labour, to theorise the link between “communicative practices of sociality, the creation of infrastructure, and the use of that infrastructure in economic projects” (Elyachar, 2010, p. 460). Phatic labour gives power to day- to-day social communication, which beyond sharing information, contributes to the establishment of channels, norms, and practices for how that information flows. The women in Elyachar’s research, form the spaces that allow for both ‘physical proximity’ and ‘psychological contact’

which these channels depend upon. Elyachar argues that the work that the women do here, can be defined as labour, in that it is these social practices that enable other forms of labour to generate ‘surplus value’ as conceptualized under capitalism.

For Elyachar, it is the communication channels that constitute the social infrastructure and the

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people who engage in the social practices that contribute to both its creation and maintenance.

AbdouMaliq Simone takes a slightly different approach to the understanding of social infrastructure. Simone’s research centres on urban life with particular emphasis on the lives of people who might be considered socio-economically marginalised. Across various cities, such as Johannesburg and Jakarta, Simone describes how people navigate challenging conditions of living in fragmented social spaces, with limited or zero support from public institutions. They do so, Simone argues, through activities that intersect across residents with diverging backgrounds, resources, and purposes. Writing about Johannesburg, he argues that these “intersections, particularly in the last two decades, have depended on the ability of residents to engage complex combinations of objects, spaces, persons, and practices. These conjunctions become an infrastructure – a platform providing for and reproducing life in the city” (Simone, 2004, pp. 407–

408). The conjunctions describe simultaneously occurring moments in which the actions of residents momentarily align. This is regardless of their individual motivations or objectives and these moments form critical spaces for transaction. In Jakarta, Simone found that there were prolific and wide-ranging connections between different residents, which these same people would go to great lengths to downplay (Simone, 2014).

In a different essay, Simone describes how infrastructure can be considered something that directs or channels a force, the way that a pipe channels water or a cable channels electricity. Like in Elyachar’s interpretation, it is infrastructure that determines the flow of something along specific channels and thus “what we come to know, feel and be is largely a matter of infrastructure” (Simone, 2015, p. 375). The process and outcomes of these conjunctions depend on who the participants are and their experience with navigating in this type of space. Thus, it is people and their activities themselves that effectively comprise the transactional infrastructure.

According to Simone, these infrastructural relationships can be considered as an effort to stabilize the field of interaction in an unstable environment through the encoding and designations of people and spaces. Especially important as the conjunctions generate novel and complex compositions between residents with diverging means and resources, bringing with them new emergent interdependencies. Hence “People as infrastructure describes a tentative and often precarious process of remaking the inner city now that policies and economies that once moored it to the surrounding city have mostly worn away” (Simone, 2004, p. 411).

The conventional motorcycle taxis in Indonesia, ojek, fill the gaps of formally organised public transport, serving those people who do not have access to private vehicles or drivers (cf. Qadri, 2020a, 2020b). Sometimes you might find them waiting around a hand-painted ‘Ojek’ sign. In some cases, you might even store the phone number of a reliable driver for another time, as

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Makarim often describes doing prior to his invention of Gojek. While going for a walk in her neighbourhood, one interlocutor, an academic at the university, waved at a passing motorcyclist and explained that he was an ojek from the village who she had met and who she now paid to transport her daughter to school every morning. Outside of such arrangements, prices are negotiated before every trip and the familiar customer will know what to expect for certain distances at certain times of the day. These drivers provide critical infrastructure for mobility, especially in contexts where more access to more formalised options or private transport are limited.

Whether through conjunctions or communication channels, these social infrastructures operate as momentarily stabilizing relational parameters. When you encounter an ojek, social norms around the respective roles of driver and passenger inform the premise of your engagement.

These momentary stabilisations of exchange relationships allow information and resources to flow forming critical transactional infrastructure. Drawing on Elyachar and Simone, one could characterise social infrastructure as someone that ensures the circulation of resources, directing, channelling, and maintaining the flow of information, people, objects, and value. A temporary stabilisation and composition of social and economic relations.

Stabilisation and Material Embodiments

I want to look at the concept of infrastructure more broadly to see how it applies to the case of digital wallet apps and online drivers in Indonesia. Tracing the origins of the term infrastructure to its roots in French engineering, Ashley Carse (2017) describes how its meaning continues to change. Originally, the term was used to distinguish the work underlying suprastructures, for instance, the components of a railroad that existed underneath the rails, but which gave it stability and allowed it to function. For Carse, the analytical value in the concept of infrastructure is in “the logics of depth and hierarchy that manifest in design, management, and maintenance” (Carse, 2017, p. 35). Importantly, these infrastructural elements are not immediately visible to those who are unfamiliar with how such a system works, or to those who do not see a connection between various elements in a broader system. Similarly, an outsider to the village in Jogja may not know how to interpret the signs that would allow them to identify an ojek, and even less likely how to navigate the expected terms of the exchange. Describing this characteristic of the relationality of infrastructure, Brian Larkin (2013) outlines what he calls the ‘peculiar ontology of infrastructure’

as being both a thing and simultaneously the relation between things. Susan Leigh Star (1999) also describes this relational characteristic of infrastructure; how a pipe is seen and understood depends on whether you are a plumber, a homeowner, or an urban planner, always in relation to something else: infrastructure emerges when a given technology requires a more complex system

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of support. A car, for instance, loses its meaning as a tool for mobility without the underlying infrastructures such as fuel supply, roads to drive on, and protocols for driving. Each infrastructural element cannot be meaningfully studied when removed from its context but must be understood in relation to the people and things it engages with as a broader socio-technical system (Hughes, 2012).

The materialisation of a certain system, such as that of digital payments in Indonesia as it is now, is not a given outcome. For both Larkin and Star, complex political questions are underlying the design, standardisation, management, and implementation of these socio-technical systems.

Certain conceptualisations and particular politics become engineered into the systems around us by the people who conceive of, design, build, and operate them. Star describes this process as the encoding of ‘master narratives’, which speak “unconsciously from the presumed center of things”

(Star, 1999, p. 384) and thus form specific understandings about the world. For instance, the implicit hierarchical arrangement of ‘male’ and ‘female’ categories in a drop-down menu, which disregards any alphabetical logic, but also reinforces a binary understanding of gender. The outcome is that neither technologies nor infrastructures can be considered neutral entities: they have been created by people who bring with them their own ideas about the world.

Larkin argues that infrastructure makes these more abstract politics, norms, and values tangible in a materialised form, available to study in a way that ideas themselves are not. Larkin points to research about the organisation of infrastructures of water supply in India and South Africa (cf.

Anand, 2011; von Schnitzler, 2008), identifying that what may at first seem like a neutral technological challenge expands to broader questions of morality and citizenship and the ‘techno- politics’ of infrastructure (von Schnitzler, 2016). Similarly, major road developments can be about mobility but also be entangled with alluring narratives of political freedom and economic prosperity even as the physical infrastructure itself crumbles (Harvey and Knox, 2012). Larkin, therefore, argues that infrastructures “form us as subjects not just on an technopolitical level but also through this mobilization of affect and the senses of desire, pride, and frustration, feelings which can be deeply political” (Larkin, 2013, p. 333). As I demonstrated in the first chapter, the narratives around cashless payments in Indonesia are heavily entangled with narratives of a modern, cashless Indonesia, but also with President Jokowi’s legacy of infrastructural development. Importantly, Larkin also addresses how these types of political motivations take place on both the individual and broader societal level, “the way technologies come to represent the possibility of being modern, of having a future, or the foreclosing of that possibility and a resulting experience of abjection” (Larkin, 2013, p. 333). Thus, we can speak of a mutual shaping:

on the one hand, the things we create are imbued with our own ideas about the world, our politics,

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but they also shape us, as we are swayed by the enchantment of infrastructure and the promises that we come to associate with them (Harvey and Knox, 2012).

In her call for an ethnography of infrastructure, Star makes the point that infrastructure is often invisible, rendered visible only during its breakdown. Larkin by contrast draws on Carse among others to make the point that infrastructure is not inherently invisible, rather attention should be paid to how that visibility is mobilized: “The point is not to assert one or another status as an inherent condition of infrastructures but to examine how (in)visibility is mobilized and why”

(Larkin, 2013, p. 336). What is visible, when, and for who may vary greatly depending on your vantage point. Larkin makes the second point regarding what he calls the poetics of infrastructure and how form is loosened from function. He gives the example of a building project where the pipes of a house were not connected to anything. Nevertheless, the pipes existed as numbers in a spreadsheet, serial numbers on an inventory, and perhaps as a ticked box on a to-do list. These are all representations of the thing, all of them “material embodiments of a pipe in differing forms that allow them to move in differing circulatory regimes. Pipes turn out to be documents” (Larkin, 2013, p. 335). For instance, while the Indonesian government may have reached their target of 75 per cent of the population being financially included, I recall the women telling me about their abandoned bank accounts and lacking a relationship to the financial institution itself. The poetics of infrastructure speaks to the hierarchical rearrangements of infrastructure, in this case privileging the aesthetic purpose over its functionality.

Infrastructure is a form of stabilization even if it is only temporary. I would argue that though emphasis is often placed on the distinction between formal and informal economies, and the introduction of the Gojek app could be viewed as a formalization of ojek work, it can be conducive to think of this ‘infrastructuring’ not as formalization, but as a process of stabilisation (Star and Bowker, 2006). Of course, the way in which this stabilisation occurs is determined by those engaging with it, be it government legislators implementing e-money regulation, or the programmers designing digital wallet functions for ojek drivers in an app. An infrastructural perspective also allows us to examine which aspects of this stabilisation are rendered visible to which people. Therefore, it is worth noting that when Makarim asks the question of mobility, how

“do you get a human, an object, like food, or money, or value, to move in the fastest possible, cheapest, most convenient way, using one tool?”, he uses the language of automation. The consumer is a cyborg, and the app is the operating system of the ‘real’ world. The drivers are infrastructured away, their labour rendered invisible. This type of language is also often used to describe AI, in which the veneer of platforms and interfaces conveyed by tech language renders invisible the human labour that goes into training algorithms, into ‘teaching’ machines, or

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moderating and editing content. Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri (2019, 2017) describe this labour as ‘ghost work’ and compare the resulting illusion to that of the Wizard of Oz. Revealed finally as simply a human ‘pulling levers from behind a curtain’, that the “creation of human tasks in the wake of technological advancement has been a part of automation’s history since the invention of the machine lathe” (Gray and Suri, 2017). Gray and Suri call attention to the point that by rendering them invisible, the labour of the workers in the ‘ghost economy’ is easily devalued, both monetarily, socially, and in terms of labour rights and protections.

Drivers themselves are not invisible to app users, though I would argue that ‘the driver’ as configured by the app and defined contractually as driver-partner is more difficult to see. The driver-partner is subject to specific conditions that govern their labour, enforcing forms of behaviour considered desirable by the app, meaning behaviours that optimise the service for the consumer-cyborgs. Alex Rosenblat (2018) has provided detailed insight into the inner workings of the ride-hailing company Uber, contributing to challenging the narrative of the ‘sharing economy’ to what is now more commonly considered to be the ‘gig economy’, in which people undertake labour precariously rather than under stable employment. In their analysis of the

‘ghost economy’, Gray and Suri make the additional observation that current economic predictions show that by “2033, economists predict that tech innovation could convert 30% of today’s full-time occupations into augmented services completed “on demand” through a mix of automation and human labor.” (Gray and Suri, 2017). Although the gig economy is defined by a precarity of labour rather than stable conditions of employment, I would argue that it also implies certain ideas about flexibility and choice regarding accepting work. By contrast, the term ‘on- demand’ labour more accurately conveys Makarim’s figuration of drivers inside his vision for the mobility of people, objects, and value. In answer to his question, quoted above, I would offer a simpler answer: drivers. On-demand and just a swipe away, it is the fast, cheap, and convenient labour of drivers that enables the circulation of value in the service of customers and the companies providing the accessible interface.

Rendering Things Visible (For Extraction)

Simone (2004) argues that urban residents must be in a constant state of preparedness, able to refigure or relocate their perceptions regarding either their own or other’s transactional positions. He describes how this ability to always relocate themselves and others allows for broadened understandings of their social relationships, giving the space to render certain things either invisible or highly visible as needed. This also creates what Simone calls an ‘economy of interpretation’. Here, an array of actors can “insert themselves as middlemen who might provide a fortuitous, even magical, reading of the market “between the lines”” (Simone, 2004, p. 426).