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Introduction
This paper engages with the social issues emerging from the increasing reliance upon app-driven services as they pertain to precarious labor and ethical standpoints in a digital era. Popular ride services such as Uber have been lauded for bringing much needed transportation services that are superior to expensive taxis or unpleasant or inaccessible public transit:
In five years, the app economy will be worth $6.3 trillion, up from $1.3 trillion last year, according to a report released today by app measurement company App Annie.
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Mobile commerce’s huge footprint includes purchases through retail behemoths like Amazon and Alibaba, as well as paying for services such as Uber rides or travel booked through a travel app – basically any monetary transaction through an app that holds your credit information. The assumption also relies on the continued transition from in-person purchases to ones done through apps (Molla, 2017).
While these companies are indeed immensely popular, questions remain as to just how much of a problem-solving panacea the apps they produce actually herald and to what extent their “disruption” breaks more than it fixes. Unlike taxicabs, Uber ride prices are artificially low for the moment because rides are subsidized by investors during the initially funded stages of a startup (Smith, 2016).
A lack of labor regulation and initial subsidization from investors may present a significant savings to the user, but one may ask if these practices are sustainable as a “gig economy” (Sundarajaran, 2015). Adding to the temporary nature of this work are plans to switch to driverless vehicles. So, structuring one’s life around stringing together multiple gigs (that have little protection and no benefits) all to assist in the obsolescence of one’s trade, may prove devastating to labor forces. At present, a handful of organizations largely unfettered by regulations now broker the labor of an increasingly contingent workforce. Simultaneously, these same companies fight for control in a new frontier of information and communication technologies (McAlister, 2016). In this context, how are we to consider and act upon the issue of a digitally mediated wealth divide, or, as Greenfield (2015) puts it, a “socially corrosive mobility”?
The popularity of rideshare services like Uber has created an inaccurate sense that public transit has become superfluous (Millsap, 2016). However,...