#REX PARKER GIGECONOMY FULL#

#REX PARKER GIGECONOMY FULL#

Scholarly literature on the expanding economy of platforms, has so far lacked a full appreciation of how profoundly the phenomenon has been shaped by urban conditions (Davidson et al., 2018). This dissertation is an intervention into the burgeoning genre of platform studies, exploring the roots and impacts of a novel form of urban infrastructure that is now ubiquitous in Indonesia. The research embeds academic scholarship of socioeconomical history, news reports on developments regarding digital platforms and the first-hand life stories of the contemporary Indonesian digital precariat obtained through qualitative fieldwork data to form a socioeconomic narrative in the field of Southeast Asian Studies. The intimate study of these cases expose how the contemporary trends in the Indonesian labour market signal an inverse direction to the trajectory of the North American and European digital precariat, where companies such as Uber move to informalise the once formal labour markets, versus Go-Jek and Grab, although unintentionally, formalising informal labour relationships within Southeast Asia. This research sets out the contemporary context of the digital gig economy era across Southeast Asia through exploring the conditions of possibility that allowed the Southeast Asian “super-apps”, Grab and Go-Jek, to be established and rapidly become ubiquitous across urban Indonesia.

Focusing on the lifestyle, vision, labour patterns and the culture of the perantau, whom practice the chain migration ritual merantau that hails from Padang, West Sumatra, the research reveals vivid stories of workers that perpetually strives within the gig economy. This research exposes the genealogy of this precariat class in Indonesia, demonstrating how the notion of the gig economy has long been embedded within the socioeconomic composition of the archipelago. The advent of Uber, and its numerous derivatives around the world such as Grab and Go-Jek in Southeast Asia, has both catalysed the expansion of and benefited from a seemingly new class of workers, the digital precariat. The discourse on the “gig economy” has been gaining significant traction in the West (Global North), most vividly since the 2008 Global Economic Crisis, which caused the loss of many formal jobs that only came back as informal ones, or now in common parlance, “gigs”. This study draws its methodology and theoretical approach from the disciplines of Anthropology and Political Economy and bridges the scholarship in the fields of Science and Technology Studies and Southeast Asian Studies, targeting to capture the socioeconomic flux and technological innovation underway in Singapore and Indonesia. I seek to follow and demonstrate the methodologies of mutual adaptation and constant negotiation of these digital platforms with the ‘street economy’ of Indonesia, proposing that Grab and GoJek’s contemporary pervasiveness in Southeast Asia is due to their ability to consolidate smartphone technology and the street economy into a unique business model. In Singapore, smartphone based platforms such as Grab and GoJek tend to catalyse the informalisation of labour practices through creating a mainstream precarious alternative to the formal economy, whereas in Indonesia, these platforms tend to formalise various aspects of an already prevalent and highly precarious ‘street economy’.

This widely emerging form of industry circulates capital and labour in the open streets of urban metropolises, and manifests an inverse trend in the labour markets of developed and developing economies. Probing into their rearrangements of safety, temporality and mobility in everyday urban life, I argue that these digital ride hailing firms insert themselves into micro-frictions within metropolitan contexts and catalyse a new form of Taylorist industry. In order to delineate this novel form of technology, the study will develop a genealogical case study of two of its archetypes: ‘Grab’ and ‘GoJek’. Set in a context of ubiquitous digitality, this thesis proposes to examine and conceptualise what is put forward as ‘street smart technology’, a novel assemblage of smartphone based technologies and the street economy in Southeast Asia.

Rex parker gigeconomy