There’s more to being a chauffeur for the popular ride-sharing service Lyft than fastening a pink mustache to the front grill of your car.

Drivers are told that they’re not employees, that they’re ineligible for worker benefits and that they merely belong to a “peer-to-peer transportation platform,” not a taxi or limousine company. But it’s the new kind of wink-wink peer-to-peer platform where you’re basically a nonemployee-employee, and you had better follow the company rules.

Lyft’s online guidelines instruct drivers to develop their cars as “inherently social spaces, with great conversation guaranteed.” Cars should be vacuumed weekly. Music should be playing when passengers enter. Drivers can swap phone numbers with passengers, but can’t initiate: “We’re a rideshare community, not a dating service.”

Lyft, like many attention-grabbing firms today, is a company somewhat in denial about being, well, a company. It calls itself a community, a platform. It is one of a raft of businesses that cast themselves as glorified phone directories, simply helping people to locate and contract with one another to drive (Uber), do odd jobs (TaskRabbit) or rent space (Airbnb).