Digital Payments in Yogyakarta
The idea for this research first emerged in early 2017, as conversations about cryptocurrency and blockchain grew to increased public awareness. One of the dominating narratives of the time was how this technology could be used to present an alternative to digital money, specifically in contexts where people were considered to be ‘underserved’ or excluded from formal financial services. Constituting a form of ‘quasi-bank account’ advocates suggested that cryptocurrencies could help provide ‘financial inclusion’ to the ‘unbanked’ (Scott, 2016). While cryptocurrencies theoretically constituted a more public alternative to other forms of mobile money, it seemed that many of these projects lacked serious reflection about the socio-economic and infrastructural contexts that such technology would operate in. In practice, they potentially disregarded both how people might access or make use of such technology, but also that structural problems such as economic inequality are not necessarily solved technologically (Morozov, 2014). Indeed, introducing such technology might exacerbate existing inequalities, or result in new dependencies turning technology companies into arbiters of access to the digital economy.
Hence, this project began with an interest in understanding how such blockchain technology might intersect with existing financial infrastructures, and I pursued it with a wish to complicate these existing narratives about the use of cryptocurrency as an alternative to commercial financial services. The research was funded in collaboration between the IT-University of Copenhagen and Southeast Asia based financial technology company, OmiseGO, which contributed a portion of the funding for the first two years of the project. OmiseGO expressed an interest in contributing to the project as a way of developing knowledge about the challenges and risks posed in the implementation of blockchain technology. This would involve developing a better understanding of how people engaged with and experienced existing commercial financial services. Their
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involvement in the project primarily included input in setting the initial scope of the research, for instance, the decision to locate the research in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and to focus largely on an urban population who were more likely to have existing experience with some form of digital payments. For the remaining duration of the collaboration, they were not involved in defining the research but were presented with findings from the research in the form of progress reports and presentations to their team. At no point in this research have they had access to any of the data that I have collected, been involved in any decisions regarding the continued development of the project or its analytical threads, nor have they in any way been involved in the production of this thesis.
Beginning this research, I initially experimented with how studying the use of existing digital payment infrastructures in Indonesia might provide a parallel way of studying cryptocurrency wallets. There is some ethnographic precedence for researching ‘partially existing’, or
‘hybridizing’ technologies (cf. Jensen, 2010; Pink et al., 2018). In the early period of this research, this approach seemed to provide a meaningful way of thinking about the use of what was still non- existent digital wallets for cryptocurrencies. Examining how people made sense of and formed technological hybrids with the existing infrastructure to meet their needs. To me, it emphasised the need to understand new technologies within an existing context, reiterating that any new digital payment system would not exist within a technological vacuum. Thus, I thought that this project would be about studying how people engaged with existing digital money technologies and the social infrastructures that enabled these systems to function.
My understanding of the research grew following an initial visit to Indonesia in March 2018. I was invited to visit the Anthropology Department of Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) in Yogyakarta, to establish a formal project collaboration as a part of their expanding research into e-commerce in Indonesia. This collaboration became an important component of the research. Especially interactions with my PhD colleague Agus Indiyanto helped provide critical reflection points for my findings, thus enriching my growing understanding of the case, but also helped to provide access to some interviews and conversations that I would not have been able to reach myself. As part of the collaboration, three of Indiyanto’s bachelor students contributed as research assistants for select parts of the fieldwork. During this initial visit, I had the opportunity to conduct a preliminary mapping of the field, which came to inform the development of the research design.
While in Yogyakarta, it became clear that while there were already several implementations of conventional digital payments, including technologies for peer-to-peer (P2P) transaction, the most dominant examples of digital wallets were GoPay and OVO. Integrated as the payment system of the popular ride-hailing apps Gojek and Grab, these technologies were some of the most
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Two early realisations made me decide to focus on these two iterations of a digital wallet. Firstly, for customers of the service, ‘online transport’ proved to be an easier starting point for conversation than talking about digital money. Not only did talking about money carry certain taboos, but I found that many people I spoke to felt that ‘digital money’ was itself an intimidating, technical category, and they would often express that they ‘didn’t know much about it’. Asking questions about their use of online transport, and then leading into questions about the integrated payment system was a much more successful strategy. Secondly, I realised that though customers might use a digital wallet only occasionally, perhaps without even reflecting on this use, the drivers who worked for these apps were forced to use them regularly as they depended on them to receive payments. As I learned more about their experiences, I became increasingly curious about how this digital system depended on the parallel circulation of digital and cash money, and about how much influence the companies providing these digital solutions were exerting influence over the conditions of the transaction. Thus, this became the premise for a case study on GoPay and Grab: to explore how the dynamics of these digital infrastructures were affecting the circulation of value, and how this digital system was experienced by its users.
A common criticism levelled at case studies is that one cannot make broad generalizations from a single case (Flyvbjerg, 2006; Yin, 2012). Indeed, one might ask what a study of drivers and digital wallets in Yogyakarta can tell us about the broader phenomena of digital payments in Indonesia.
I would draw on Robert Stake (Stake, 2005, 1995) here, to argue that the value of a case study is not to make broad generalizations, but to refine them by illuminating particular problems or particular uses. Rather than defending the typicality of a case, Stake suggests that “The real business of a case study is particularization, not generalization” (Stake, 1995, p. 8). Throughout my fieldwork, it became increasingly clear that the so-called ‘driver-partners’ of these ride-hailing apps in Yogyakarta could be defined as an instrumental case for understanding the particular details of digital payments as implemented by GoPay and OVO. My reasoning for centring the experiences of drivers was based on a variety of specific characteristics that they shared as users of these digital payment systems:
- The digital wallet is a central tool. Unlike consumers for whom payments were a passing and occasional activity, drivers make use of their digital wallets every day in their work lives.
- Point of contact for digital wallets. As transport is a central activity for many people, the driver became the first point of contact with these novel digital wallets.
- Bridge to digital money. Drivers operate as agents of digital money and are financially incentivized to sell their digital credits to passengers in exchange for cash. Thus, they
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present an important bridge to digital money for passengers by operating as ‘human ATMs’ (Maurer et al., 2013a).
- Heterogeneous group. Drivers are not a homogenous entity, representing a wide range of backgrounds, as well as varying degrees of control and ownership over their digital accounts, given mechanisms deployed by the platform, third party account vendors, and the trading and sharing of accounts. So, rather than convey a generalizable story, I seek to ensure variety in the experiences of drivers whose stories I convey.
- Community and identity. Where the individual user of a digital wallet may not identify strongly as being such, drivers have formed communities and culture around their function and identity as an online driver, in which digital payments has a central impact (cf. Qadri, 2020a).
Particularly, understanding the driver experience involves understanding how the apps affect people’s lives: how algorithms affect livelihoods, how they affect the circulation and ownership of value, access to resources, and how their lived experience compares to broader theoretical conversations about peer-to-peer payments.
The study of drivers provides a central starting point to describe and interpret the particularities of the case, what Stake calls the ‘artifacts of the functioning’ of a case (Stake, 2005, p. 452). To do so, the researcher must seek out what is common and uncommon about a case, by drawing on its specific activities and ‘functioning’: its historical background, physical setting, economic, political, legal setting, and of course the interlocutors who can convey their knowledge about the case (Stake, 2005, p. 447). In other words, interpreting the various activities involved in the work of online drivers to explore the edges and intersections within the Indonesian digital payment ecosystem: interactions with customers, with various intermediaries, the platform companies, banking infrastructure, the regulatory framework, as well as the infrastructural, political, and socio-economic context. Each time new intersections emerged I would explore these too:
gradually delineating the case and refining my focus to examine how the algorithmic management of labour mobilised drivers in service of the digital economy as manifested by the Indonesian platform companies. As Stake points out, while a quantitative survey may reveal broad impressions of the digital payments ecosystem, it is the particularistic study of a case that can bring attention to this interactivity of actors, activities and setting (Stake, 2005, p. 453).
I am not as such interested in Indonesia as a site of research or as a unit of analysis in any geographically bounded sense. It is worth remembering that this boundary is itself a remnant from the Dutch colonial era, and remains in flux, with violent repression of peoples in regions that seek independence. Any particular location will not be representative of many other potential sites of research. The interest I have in digital payments – the ways this technology travels and translates, how value circulates through the resulting infrastructures, and how that impacts upon existing socio-economic relationships – are all components “within a wider system of global
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capitalism” (Hjorth and Khoo, 2016, p. 4): increased access to cheap smartphones in Indonesia is in part due to Chinese manufacturing, the technological premise of Gojek is modelled on apps such as Uber, originating in Silicon Valley. Thus, rather than try to capture something representatively
‘Indonesian’ across various field sites, I decided to select one location to conduct an in-depth study of the phenomena of digital payments within a specific context. After exploring several possible sites in Indonesia, I decided on the province Special Region of Yogyakarta (Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta) and specifically the city of Yogyakarta, commonly referred to as Jogja. Jogja is characterized by a high level of infrastructural development, and a relatively diverse socio- cultural population, given the many universities in the city, which attract students from the entire country, many of whom eventually settle there. Yogyakarta has a population of over 3.8 million, and approximately 436,000 live in the city of Jogja itself (BPS, 2021). Though the case study is conducted in the city of Jogja, its immediate proximity to rural sites and its diverse socio-economic demography make it possible to encounter people with very different levels of access to financial and technological infrastructures.
Fieldwork
To study how the dynamics of ride-hailing apps affect the circulation of money, I employed an ethnographic approach. Thus, the empirical material that this thesis draws on is largely in the form of interviews as well as fieldnotes recording encounters with drivers, app customers, as well as between myself and the app. Empirical data collection took place during two rounds of fieldwork, each lasting about 3 months. The first took place between June-August 2018, and the second between February-May 2019. Drawing on a preliminary literature review, and the initial mapping of the field in March 2018, I identified the following list of potentially relevant interlocutors:2
- Service providers: drivers/payment recipients
- Service users: customers/passengers/and indirect users of conventional digital payment systems
- Digital money/digital wallet companies
- Indonesian blockchain community members/companies
Though I had developed the case beyond the use of cryptocurrency and blockchain, I had decided that it would still be relevant to examine how this technology was being approached by local actors, and so attended various local blockchain events, and even interviewed people who either had or were actively working to develop blockchain-based digital payments. To contextualise
2 A full overview of all interlocutors can be found in appendix 1.
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findings from my case study with drivers, I also reached out to various local experts and government institutions. Specifically, I was interested in getting a better understanding of the regulatory framework that these technologies operated under, and what the broader political agendas were for this field. Interviews with experts and government agencies helped me to identify relevant policies and pieces of legislation that were important to ground the case within its broader setting.
During my time in Jogja, I stayed in a kost close to the northern part of the ring road which encircles the city.3 Initially, I would spend my days walking around a lot, experimenting with any opportunities for using digital payments, and booking trips with drivers as a way to begin developing an understanding of the case through more informal conversation. The timing of my first visit coincided with the beginning of the public holidays for Ramadan, which meant for the first week or so many people had left the city to visit their families, and many shops were closed.
I used this time to familiarise myself with my surroundings, to make observations about things like public advertisements for digital payments, and to prepare interview questions based on early conversations with drivers. The bulk of the data collection took the form of in-depth interviews with key interlocutors as well as focus group discussions, as well as fieldnotes collected from many shorter conversations particularly with drivers. Interviews were semi-structured and conducted in Bahasa Indonesia. Most of these were recorded digitally, following consent from the interlocutors, and others were recorded using written notes during the interview. Recorded interviews were later transcribed and translated into English to facilitate easier analysis. This was done both through the services of a professional transcription and translation company, and later one of the UGM research assistants who I contracted following the completion of her anthropology degree. In both cases, audio recordings were edited to remove any instances where the speakers mentioned their name, and these were subsequently shared using an encrypted email server, with an explicit agreement that the files be deleted upon completion.
For the first round of fieldwork in 2018, the bulk of interviews conducted was with drivers, as per the research design. In practice, I would meet drivers simply by booking trips using the online platforms. During the trip, I would introduce myself and my research, and depending on the responsiveness of the driver, ask some broad basic questions about their experience as an online driver using the digital payment system. It was important to me to exercise a great deal of sensitivity in these situations. I was essentially intruding upon drivers in their work environment and given my knowledge about how drivers depend on good customer ratings it was important to
3 A kost is a room for rent, typically targeting students.
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be attentive to, and respectful of their boundaries. For the most part, it was my experience that drivers would be quite enthusiastic about sharing their experiences, and to have someone external listen to and try to understand the issues they were facing. If during a trip, I felt that I had developed a good rapport with a driver, I would invite them to participate in an extended interview at a time and location of their convenience. The nature of this recruitment method meant that I engaged with a broad spread of interlocutors: speaking with drivers originating from Sumatra to Sumba, drivers who were retired bank employees now driving to support their grandchildren, and drivers borrowing accounts who slept at gas stations to make ends meet.
While many of their experiences reflected a shared understanding of the governing mechanisms of the platform they were working under, it quickly became clear that how the effects of these mechanisms were experienced in practice varied greatly depending on the specific circumstances of each driver. For some driving was a hobby, an opportunity to meet new people and earn some extra money, and for others, it was a precarious full-time job. As I would later understand, not only were these experiences a reflection of existing socio-economic circumstances, but also a reflection of the way a driver was accessing the app, and the condition of their account based on the long-term effects of algorithmic management. In this thesis, I draw mainly on the experiences of car drivers, in part due to the initial ease of accessing interviews, but also because there are events and infrastructural designs that make the car drivers a particularly interesting case for the circulation of money, as I will detail in the rest of the thesis.
In 2019, having now developed a better understanding of the case, I decided to focus more specifically on interviews with services users. Determining what customers to speak with, or even what might constitute a ‘regular user’ proved more challenging. When asking drivers about their regular customers, many often pointed to Jogja’s large student population, and thus as a starting point, and in coordination with my colleagues at UGM, we disseminated an announcement about focus group discussions regarding digital payments through various student WhatsApp groups.
There were many reasons for choosing first the format of a focus group discussion, one of which was that it would be a way to recruit interlocutors for individual follow-up interviews. By starting with focus groups, rather than individual interviews, I hoped to get a better understanding of how various groups talked about and understood digital payments, to minimize the imposition of my own language and understanding. Throughout the discussions, participants would supplement one another, contextualising or reflecting on one another’s experiences as they “co-construct messages and meanings” (Marková et al., 2007, p. 202). In this way, the focus groups allowed participants to draw out specific complexities and contradictions that might otherwise be invisible (Kamberelis and Dimitriadis, 2013). Reviewing these discussions later, these interviews