It’s been a busy summer for Uber. In San Francisco, the app-based transportation service and world’s richest startup is testing on-demand mass transit with its Smart Routes offering – essentially carpools running bus-like routes. Elsewhere, Uber is expanding into China, raising $1.2bn to back a push into 100 Chinese cities over the next year.

To build its Eastern empire, Uber is maintaining its infamously aggressive tactics by hiring an “elite team of launchers”. The job advertisement sounds like Uber is looking for CIA operatives, not brand ambassadors: “At base, this job entails being dropped into a city or country where Uber has zero brand and physical presence, quickly figuring out who and what make that city run, and then building a new business from scratch – in a matter of weeks – which sets Uber up for long-term success”.



With a well-financed combination of rapid roll-out and local infiltration, Uber hopes to overcome rival services and strict regulation.



This continual growth – new services, new regions, new markets – has many wondering about Uber’s ultimate goals. Uber is flush with cash, explicitly expansionist across the globe, and engages in strong-arm politics. Its goals, and its methods for achieving them, will make an impact.

Governance by app and the end of politics

Some commentators argue that Uber’s endgame is to be the death knell for current modes of public mass transit. Graduating from service provision to infrastructure operation on public roads, the company would become like a utility, not just a competitor with cabs. And as it privatises an increasing proportion of transport infrastructure, public services will be abandoned to decay, with Uber providing marginally more optimised transit options (Smart Routes, UberX, UberBLACK, etc) for a profit.

While this vision of privatisation is partly correct and rather grim, it misses a key point: Uber wants in on public infrastructure. But it is considerably less clear that the company actually wants to become a utility, which would mean taking on long-term responsibility for a huge fleet of vehicles and employees.

A more apt understanding of Uber’s ambitions is that the company wants to be involved in city governance – fashioning the new administrative capacities of urban environments. Rather than follow government rules, like any other utility, Uber wants a visible hand in creating urban policy, determining how cities develop and grow, eventually making the city itself a platform for the proliferation of “smart”, data-based systems.

While Uber is currently fighting for deregulation, it is misleading to understand this as simply attempting to remove legal barriers to market forces. Rather, it is a process of disrupting political power. And Uber has already established itself as a power player.



Power in urban space

To date, Uber has successfully lobbied for (or forced) changes in regulation, pushed back against the mayor of New York in a high-profile battle, and is currently fighting to avoid a major class-action lawsuit that threatens to reclassify some Uber drivers as employees. That’s right: Uber really doesn’t want to manage employees and vehicles.

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Uber is more interested in urban governance than in becoming a utility. That’s not to say Uber intends to run for public office or even that it intends to participate in a democratic process - its power is better exercised outside of those limited positions and procedural rules. What we are witnessing instead is Uber’s participation in the early days of retrofitting the “smart city”.



Such retrofitting means not only implementing on-demand private services for an increasing number of urban dwellers, but paving the way for deep integration of data-driven systems in every facet of city life.



Uber’s ambitious power grabs are underwritten by a vast data capture and analysis infrastructure, making it the lead inspiration for “disruptive” services (just think of the plethora of Uber for X startups). Even if Uber the company were to disappear tomorrow, its model of service – the platform economy sold to us with promises of cheap convenience and “sharing” at the cost of ubiquitous data capture – would remain.



Data, driven



What these platforms offer is an invaluable infrastructure of real-time data analytics for governance. The more dependent we are on them for services, the more entangled we get in the politics of their designers, purveyors, and owners.

Philosopher of technology Langdon Winner throws this into stark relief in his book The Whale and the Reactor, arguing: “The things we call ‘technologies’ are ways of building order in our world”. They influence and structure how we travel, communicate, work, and so much more. He continues: “In that sense technological innovations are similar to legislative acts or political foundings that establish a framework for public order that will endure over many generations”.

Uber and other major “sharing economy” players are not merely gracing us with the innovations they tout. They are playing technological politics to lay the groundwork for new forms of governance.



While Uber may enjoy positioning itself as apolitical, it is more illuminating to see the company as a harbinger of networked urbanism – where cities are driven by big data analytics and networks controlled in part by machines – which will force us to ask the question: what does it mean to govern?

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