Street Smart Technology: Grab and GoJek (Updated Version)

Street Smart Technology: Grab and GoJek PhD Proposal: Onat Kibaroğlu Supervisor: Dr Itty Abraham Thesis Committee: Dr Douglas Kammen, Dr Muhammad Arafat Department of Southeast Asian Studies National University of Singapore April 2019 1 of 55 Street Smart Technology: Grab and GoJek Abstract 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. 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’. Probing into their rearrangements of safety, temporality and mobility in everyday urban life, I argue that these digital ride hailing firms insert themselves into microfrictions within metropolitan contexts and catalyse a new form of Taylorist industry. 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. 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’. 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. 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. 2 of 55 Contents Introduction • Focus & Case Selection • Key Research Questions I. Grab: Platform of Southeast Asia • State Ventured Enterprise • Grab as Region II. GoJek: Urban Subculture of Indonesia • Industrial Revolutions of Indonesia • The Technopolitical Jacket • GoJek as City III. Safety • Safety Application • Safety Net IV. Temporality • On-Demand Social Infrastructure • Perpetual Precarity V. Mobility • Emancipatory Technology • Digitisation of Bali Fieldwork Methodology Bibliography 3 of 55 Focus & Case Selection An observation of the digitalisation of the everyday experience of life in Southeast Asia inspires a quest for rethought and elaborated descriptions, indicators and in some cases neologisms, in an attempt to draw genealogical patterns that expose the present. 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. Studying certain high profile archetypes is a convenient way to demarcate certain new models, phases and genealogical shifts. Therefore in order to delineate what I refer to as ‘street smart technology’, the study will develop a genealogical case study of two of its archetypes in Southeast Asia: ‘Grab’ and ‘GoJek’. Probing into their rearrangements of safety, temporality and mobility in everyday urban life, I argue that these digital ride hailing firms insert themselves into certain generative microfrictions within metropolitan contexts. Offering a safer option than an independent ojek1 and faster ride compared to a taxicab in congested traffic, plus a plethora of other mobility or delivery services, the mobile platforms Grab and GoJek are widely referred to as the two major ‘super-apps’ of Southeast Asia. As much as the ‘super-app’ is a new term coined by GoJek2, such mobile applications are indeed a digital translation of an already robust network of local relationships between motorcycle drivers and their clients in Southeast Asian metropolises such as Bangkok or Jakarta (Sopranzetti, 2018). By fixing everyday frictions round the clock, these platforms catalyse a revamped and digitalised Taylorist industry. Grab and GoJek platforms showcase an ultimate form of scientific management, where workers’ efficiency (both in relation to their specific spatial position within a city and their speed of service delivery, measured in seconds) are optimised through digital algorithms, often run by artificial intelligence software. Such remarkable level of labour productivity fits into the analogy of capitalism as “…a battery that continues to accumulate energy without a pause — the energy of labour” (Boutang, 2012). This contemporary form of capitalism 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. In Singapore, smartphone based platforms such as Grab and GoJek tend to catalyse the informalisation of labour practices through creating a mainstream and precarious alternative to the formal economy. Many Grab drivers in the service-sector oriented city state tend to be ex-white collar workers who were either recently laid-off, went in an early retirement due to exhaustion or had serious problems with their bosses3. In all cases, the conditions of such workers in terms of insurance, job stability, career prospects and available leave days tend to deteriorate drastically, in comparison to their previous employment in the formal sector. 1 A motorcycle taxi in Indonesia. Chandler, Clay.”Grab vs. Go-Jek: Inside Asia’s Battle of the 'Super Apps’: The rival ride-hailing services are now duelling to deliver everything from groceries to mortgages to Southeast Asia’s middle class”. Fortune Magazine, March 20, 2019. http://fortune.com/ longform/grab-gojek-super-apps/ 2 3 As observed by myself in previous fieldwork in Singapore during early 2018. 4 of 55 In Indonesia, however, such internet based platforms tend to formalise various aspects of an already prevalent and highly precarious ‘street economy’. Shifting from being an independent ojek driver to a GoJek driver (which is typically the case), enables their such users certain (albeit still limited) political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities, lessened everyday uncertainty and protective securities (Sen, 1999). It is not often that trends in developing economies shed light on trends in the developed ones, often the temptation is to assume ‘anything new’ will trickle down from the latter to the former. This study aims to reverse such historic privilege of more developed countries to set the terms of understanding the less developed ones (Rafael, 2019) — an approach especially observable in the field of Science and Technology Studies. Informalisation of labour conditions is often discussed as a ‘new’ phenomenon in Western-oriented debates due to popular discussions of highly profile archetypes such as Uber (Stone 2017; Rosenblat, 2018) and the emergence of ‘gig’ economy (Stephany 2015; Kessler, 2018), a term which was coined at the height of the financial crisis during late 20084, referring to working several parttime jobs or ‘gigs’, often related to internet based platforms. Debates regarding the ‘informal economy’ in the Global South however, date much earlier on, as the term itself can be traced back to the International Labour Organisation’s post-World War II agenda to create a globally accepted and operational concept of under-employment in the Third World (Benanav, 2019). 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. Anthropologists such as Erik Harms (2013), Claudio Sopranzetti (2018) and Jose Rafael Martinez (2018) have produced remarkable ethnographic accounts of the street economy in metropolitan Southeast Asia, along with Michele Ford (2009), Abidin Kusno (2010) and Abdoumaliq Simone (2014), who have published extensively on the vivid inventiveness, resilience and self-governance of the urban precarious class in the Global South. My aim with this research is to insert the concept and everyday practice of technology into such debates, bringing their literature into dialogue with Science and Technology Studies. Key Research Questions • How do mobile platforms Grab and GoJek insert themselves into everyday frictions regarding safety, temporality and mobility in Singapore and Indonesia? • What implications does the growing prevalence of the mobile platforms Grab and GoJek have in regards to the concepts of safety, temporality and mobility in the socioeconomical context of Indonesia? How do these implications contrast with trends in Singapore’s labour market, in regards to the degrees of informality, precarity and emancipation that these platforms facilitate? • How can a typology be created for the term “street smart technology? What are its key components, contextual features and limitations? 4 Dr. Lawrence Lessig popularised the term during 2008 in the West, which until then was more associated with the jazz industry. 5 of 55 Grab: Southeast Asian Everyday Technology “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” - Audre Lorde State Ventured Enterprise Grab is a Singapore-based on-demand urban mobility platform, founded in 2012. The mobile application was initially established as a Southeast Asian version of Uber, which at the time, held a virtual monopoly over the emerging global ride-hailing market. Yet, by 2018, Grab had put its California-based rival out of business in Southeast Asia5. The key reason of this event was hypothetically, not Grab’s superior technological capabilities or fundamental features, which were arguably no different than Uber. The critical edge Grab’s founders had was their intricate knowledge of their own region. Grab capitalized on this subtle strength to create a robust home-court advantage over the seemingly more ‘powerful’ Uber, which had much deeper financial coffers but a critical lack of knowledge regarding the regional social and physical infrastructure and also bureaucratic networks. Vivid representations of such specific knowledge can be observed in many occasions of Grab’s biography, as in the instance of their launch of delivery services in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia during 2012. While the American company Uber offered ice-creams for users to sign up to its platform as it did back in its home market, Grab pounced on the occasion through offering durians at a single ringgit6. The durians, which appealed to Malaysians dearly, sold out immediately, while Grab took the pole position in a key market in Southeast Asia, a position they have not given up since. The importance of such subtle knowledge of local nuances is due to the paramount ‘first-mover-advantage’ in such an inelastic industry. Mobile platforms’ user base resemble new born crocodiles, whom designate the first face they see as their parent; as smartphone users tend to be notably resistant to switch between such applications once they get used to one. Noticing such a phenomenon early on, Grab rapidly expanded into the region since 2013 and has so far been the first ride-hailing, delivery and mobile payment for most of Southeast Asian mobile users; appealing to each specific market with a specific, localised strategy — in contrast to Uber’s usual ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. Another aspect of home court advantage for Grab was their much stronger local networks in Southeast Asia compared to their foreign (non-regional) rivals. During 2017 for example, at the height of their contest with Uber, Grab appointed the former National Police chief of Indonesia as their chief commissioner, tapping into his “experience in dealing with various stakeholders in the government”7. Closer relations to local taxi unions, motorcycle and cab rental firms, regulators and ultimately the customer base constantly soothed Grab’s rapid expansion throughout Southeast Asia. 5 Grab, March 26, 2018. https://www.grab.com/sg/press/business/grab-merges-with-uber-in-southeast-asia/ “No foreigner would have thought to do that,” chortles Tan. Uber, he says, “couldn’t fully appreciate how local you needed to go” to win in Southeast Asia”. — Chandler, Clay.”Grab vs. Go-Jek: Inside Asia’s Battle of the 'Super Apps’: The rival ride-hailing services are now duelling to deliver everything from groceries to mortgages to Southeast Asia’s middle class”. Fortune Magazine, March 20, 2019. http://fortune.com/longform/grab-gojek-super-apps/ 6 The Jakarta Post News Desk, January 31 2017. Grab appoints former National Police chief as chief commissioner: https:// www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/01/31/grab-appoints-former-national-police-chief-as-chief-commissioner.html 7 6 of 55 Grab has been able to expand across Southeast Asia so rapidly thanks to large sums of obtained investments, which stack up to almost $9 billion USD at the time of writing8 . These investments, which were majorly sourced from venture capital firms and sovereign wealth funds such as the Singaporean government’s investment branch Temasek, ramped up exponentially in the last couple of years and made Grab Southeast Asia’s most valuable technology company9. Offering drivers attractive sign-up incentives using such significant amounts of cash, Grab put expansion before profitability in its grand growth strategy. Due to its perceived success, the aspirations surrounding Grab became collectively shared as a source of national pride in Singapore. Purposefully promoting local technology champions in various forms since decades (Chng, 2017), the Singaporean government has been remarkably supportive of Grab10 both in terms of allowing regulatory comfort for an otherwise controversial business-model and financing11. The concept of ‘State Ventured Enterprise’ (SVE) is offered as a neologism in order to conceptualise a neoliberal model of national technology development in Singapore. An alternative to the age-old ‘state-owned enterprise’ (SOE) model, the concept of ‘SVE’ is a term to categorise technology companies that are subsidised by governmental institutions (as in the case of Temasek) through critical early-stage investments and also various forms of regulatory relief — which was a contrast to the much more stringent approach to the local bike-sharing industry in Singapore. As much as there are many forms of sovereign wealth funds globally varying from pension reserve funds to national commodity reserve corporations, the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund Temasek represents a true ‘development fund’, unlike many others which are typically cash reservoirs of oil-rich countries12 (Loh, 2010). As a development fund, Temasek has a certain political agenda, in which, beyond simply speculating on any given business around the world that will bring high returns, it targets socioeconomically relevant projects and hence aims to promote fundamental societal and industrial policies of Singapore. Grab, as an archetype of a state-ventured enterprise in Singapore, has been accordingly put to the forefront of local technology champions in the city-state and is often claimed to be an inspirational model for up and coming startup companies. Such aspirations of the state as a key economic transformer and a provider of sustained welfare and growth through promoting local champions have been often described with terminology such as ‘midwifery’, ‘demiurge’ or ‘husbandry’ — in the context of providing preferential trade advantages through selective tariffs, import substitution policies etc. (Evans, 1995). The neologism ‘state-ventured enterprise’ updates this set of terminology, enabling a conceptual tool to describe the contemporary trend of governmental economic policies that aim to not only take big risks in developing certain industries but also be able to bear the upsides of such investments (Mazzucato, 2011). 8 Crunchbase estimates as of March 2019: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/grabtaxi#section-funding-rounds Pham, Sherisse. “Grab is valued at $14 billion after getting a big cash boost from SoftBank”. March 6, 2019. https:// edition.cnn.com/2019/03/06/tech/grab-softbank-singapore/index.html 9 Ng, Hong Siang. “5 Things PM Lee Said In His May Day Rally, From The Grab-Uber Deal To Next-Gen Leaders”. May 2, 2018. https://mustsharenews.com/may-day-rally/ 10 Huang, Elaine. “GrabTaxi announces 8-figure sum funding from Singapore's Vertex Venture Holdings”. 08 Apr, 2014. https:// e27.co/grabtaxi-announces-8-figure-sum-funding-singapores-vertex-venture-holdings/ 11 12 Indeed, Temasek is the first non-commodity sovereign wealth fund in the world (incorporated 1974). 7 of 55 Grab as Region How to demarcate and clearly draw a line around what ‘Southeast Asia’ is, has long been an intellectually contentious topic, long before since the term ‘Southeast Asia’ was invented by the American army during World War II to refer to a certain theatre of war against the Japanese. Referred to as ‘Further India’ during the 1930s or ‘Asia of the Monsoons’ before that, the region what we call Southeast Asia today has always been addressed using a certain everyday phenomenon or familiar geographic term (Osborne, 2004). Similarities in rituals, family structures, urban development, climate or even forms of martial arts have been often employed to provide a certain standard to who and what is Southeast Asian (Emmerson, 1984). In contemporary times, the most convenient way of drawing a mental map of Southeast Asia is to imagine the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Formed gradually to its current stock of ten countries since the late 1960s (which was originally intended to be an anti-communist bloc within the zeitgeist of the Vietnam War), ASEAN is now commonly used interchangeably with the term ‘Southeast Asia’ in news articles, political rhetoric and academic literature. ASEAN, however, has arguably very little to do with the everyday life of its member countries’ citizens. Characteristically a consensusbased, hands-off and cautiously threading multilateral institution, ASEAN’s main objective has long been to keep high-level dialogues going between its religiously, politically, ethnically and linguistically diverse member states. Therefore infiltrating the common practices of law, technology development, commerce or education, as for example the European Union does within its own region, has never really been the role of ASEAN. In line with such a strategy of non-interventionism, the awareness of ASEAN has been constantly quite low within its member countries’ citizens13 . ASEAN, as much as it is a quite useful acronym to refer to Southeast Asia in political and economic discussions, is simply not a concept, entity or discourse most Southeast Asians encounter and engage within their day-today experiences. Upon this background, I offer to use the super-app Grab as a tool to describe, imagine and demarcate what contemporary Southeast Asia is as a region. Spanning through all of eight major ‘Southeast Asian’ countries (by economic size), Grab can be perceived as the ‘Platform of Southeast Asian Nations’14 . Similar to how mass media organs, through newspapers, radio or television, create certain imagined communities (Anderson, 1983), Grab is an everyday technology that unites a vast number of Southeast Asians around one particular platform15. The everyday practice of using Grab to commute and earn a living within urban contexts is a notable, and indeed rare, similarity between a regular Cambodian and a Singaporean. As a vivid common denominator of these eight countries’ citizens’ contemporary everyday lives, demarcating ‘Southeast Asia’ as ‘where Grab operates’ is therefore a viable construct, especially in discourses regarding technology, urban theory and labour16. “Awareness and Attitudes towards ASEAN”, ASEAN Foundation, 2007. — https://aseanfoundation.org/documents/FANew_%20Asean_Convert_lowres.pdf 13 14 Appendix A, a map screenshot from a Bloomberg news channel during March 2019. Used by almost 150 million people across more than 350 cities in the region, as claimed by the most recent (Februrary 2019) Corporate Profile report published by the company itself. 15 16 Albeit rough and imperfect, although, just like any other method of delineating Southeast Asia. 8 of 55 GoJek: Indonesian Urban Subculture “I have some figures which compare the cost of one kilo of airplane compared to one kilo of rice. One kilo of airplane costs thirty thousand US dollars and one kilo of rice is seven cents. And if you want to pay for your high-tech products with rice, I don’t think we have enough.” — BJ Habibie Industrial Revolutions of Indonesia The developmental patterns and disjunctures of East Asian nations throughout the 20th Century has consistently drawn significant, well deserved intellectual interest and curiosity. Their alluring methods to fix grand problems and rapid shifts in and out of prosperity serve as rich storylines to probe into. Northeast Asian countries’ modern economic histories tend to be organised around certain ‘leaps’ and ‘reform’ periods (albeit often with misleading appellation), such as the ‘Great Leap Forward’ (which on the ground, proved to be an unprecedented human tragedy) of China, or the post-WWII ‘reformation’ (rather, the demilitarisation and Westernisation) of Japan. Contemporary Indonesian economic history, however, is dominated by two severe and ‘regime-changing’ financial crises — where, the 1965 crisis is coupled, inevitably, with the vibrant legacy of Sukarno, and the 1998 Asian Financial Crisis is often referred to as ‘the key cause’ to the end of Suharto’s 30 year rule over the archipelago. Although the two crises’ principal actors, ideological zeitgeist and global context are seemingly disparate, it can be argued that both crises were precipitated from the same particular ‘lacks’: the Indonesian state’s failure to sustainably exercise control over the financial system and inability to incentivise high value added ‘export-discipline’ across its agricultural, industrial and service oriented sectors. Therefore, Indonesia’s both socialist (coupled with Sukarno’s ultra-nationalist approach to economics) and capitalist (propagated by Suharto’s militaristic New Order) catastrophes were indeed ostensible variations of the same underlying deficiencies (Studwell, 2014). Fresh off an independence struggle against the centuries-old Dutch rule, the 1950s started with rather rational and much needed reforms for the Indonesian national banking system under Sukarno. The revolutionary president created a central bank along with three other state-owned development-oriented banks, which, if directed well, would have both fuelled and disciplined an export-oriented development story for Indonesia. Sukarno, however, had apparently no such plans, as he actually ended up actively discouraging building an export base by creating easy, unfettered access to domestic credit for the already land-wealthy (typically non-innovative and non-trader) ‘pribumi’ (indigenous) families, sidelining the traditional commercial power of the Chinese Indonesians. In hopes of creating a local and national bourgeois class, Sukarno’s policies rendered the country internationally incompetent and closed-off to global capital and innovation flows. The pribumi families, in turn, ended up parking their new found cash in overseas accounts and often selling their trading licences and preferential rights to Chinese Indonesians or still prevalent Dutch firms. Concurrently, the Sukarno regime let the financial scene loose, licensing the foundation of many private banks which were unconstrained as to how they lent credit or borrowed money from the Central Bank (Studwell, 2014). 9 of 55 Such a chain of irrational economic policies sparked an economic crisis from 1957 onwards, which was only put out after the 1965 coup that brought in Suharto, an ally of the West and its liberal economic policies. In his initial years, Suharto’s capitalist policies threw away the ‘dead soil’ that rested over the long closed-off Indonesian economy (Thee, 2012). Taming inflation and interest rates and bringing in relative macro-economic stability, Suharto brought in a group of Indonesian economists from the University of California, Berkeley to take the driving seat of nation’s economy — the group who is commonly referred to as the “Berkeley Mafia” (Studwell, 2014). The Berkeley Mafia tended for orthodox, one-size-fits-all liberal economic policies, and had little interest in focusing on garnering domestic entrepreneurs in value added sectors. Bringing in foreign multinational companies to operate across critical sectors, the Berkeley Mafia disabled local firms to grow within a protected environment and take off onto the competitive export stage. In a sense, opening up the economy to foreign competition prematurely, the Suharto regime ended up not being able to teach its nascent domestic industries to run at pace with their already grown global counterparts. Arguably diligent in their choices regarding public spending and in terms of tuning certain macro-economic indicators, the economists of the Berkeley Mafia, however, was very cautious in investing heavily in export industries and state-led technology projects (Nitisastro, 2011). Later on in his regime during the early 1970s, Suharto became close with the German-trained engineer BJ Habibie. In admiration of his vision for making Indonesia a high-tech industry country, Suharto appointed Habibie as the Minister for Science and Technology, with unprecedented access to state budgets to toy around with (Amir, 2017). Once again, the Indonesian state went too far, too soon. Skipping the necessary phases of industrialisation which any large developed nation went through, regardless of era or region, BJ Habibie wanted to ‘leapfrog’ into the developed economy league with high profile projects like building a national airplane (IPTN) that would demonstrate the prowess of ‘Indonesian technology’17. In such a context, the autocratic leader Suharto fluctuated between favouring ‘the engineers’ (the BJ Habibie camp) or ‘the economists’ (the Berkeley Mafia), inducing a competition between the two groups of autocrats throughout the last two decades of the New Order era (Amir, 2008). The rivalry resulted in haphazard policy making, where no single state project was patiently institutionalised, nurtured (with the right set of funds and manpower) or protected (from foreign competition for the right amount of time). Given developmental failure is essentially the representation of institutional failure and not just particular policy mistakes (Doner et al.2005), the disunity and improvised nature of economic approaches towards development stalled the growth of Indonesia’s manufacturing base. In an era where its direct competitors across the region (China, South Korea, Taiwan and to a certain extent even Malaysia, with its modestly successful automobile venture18) were building solid foundations for their local industries to thrive within, the archipelago was 17 In 1976, Habibie was made Chief Executive Officer of the state-owned enterprise Industri Pesawat Terbang Nusantara (IPTN). Binte Ali, Nur Arafah. “An Analysis of Malaysia's Automobile Industry: Case of Proton.” National University of Singapore, Department of Southeast Asian Studies, 2003. 18 10 of 55 outpaced in both export competitiveness and creative capabilities that would impel innovation. The key reasons why Indonesia lacked a high value added export industry all throughout the 20th Century could be traced to the absence of entrepreneurial and economic incentives to innovate and compete globally. Many rich ‘industrialists’ in Indonesia, unlike their counterparts in South Korea, Japan and more recently China, were often granted concessions to own banks and domestic monopolies of staple goods (such as cigarettes, noodles and cement) without being obligated to contribute to the technological development of the country (Studwell, 2014). Where Koreans and Japanese raced their ‘chaebol’ and ‘keiretsu’19 first against each other, and then the world, the Indonesian state, practically all throughout the authoritarian rule of Suharto, simply dispensed favours to its local conglomerates without exposing them to global contestation. Such habits not only brought about the chronic incompetence of local industries in comparison to their East Asian counterparts (especially in heavy industry, which never really took off in Indonesia at large scale), but also rendered the overall financial system severely precarious. The incessant dispensing of favours and giving control of ‘economic sectors’ to certain businessmen by the regime was an across-the-board phenomenon, and it included the banking industry as well. This resulted in a ‘neat-circle’ of cronyism that connected the country’s largest credit sources to its largest (and at the time ever-expanding) set of domestic monopolies (Studwell, 2014). In a frenzy of unchecked de-regulation of the financial system from the 1980s onwards, Indonesian banks were used by the regime and its close allies’ as a ‘piggy bank’. Increasing amounts of speculative investments and credit sourcing to risky projects (such as Suharto’s son’s local car initiative IndoMobil), exposed the Asian Tiger’s20 seemingly ‘growth-oriented’ economy to any potential external shock. That external shock did indeed come around, with dire consequences. A seemingly domestic crisis of the (also over-exposed) Thai banking industry during 1997 rapidly kindled a regionwide wildfire of economic destruction across much of Southeast Asia. The region’s growth and prosperity stalled, only to be recovered to its pre-crisis rates a whole generation later. The crisis was so severe in Indonesia that it caused massive public upheavals all across its islands, which immediately translated into political instability and violence — and soon enough, the fall of the political system all together (Sidel, 1998). Unlike Sukarno, which throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, closed off the nation to imports and had no real interest in developing an export base that would communicate and interact with the rest of the world, Suharto did indeed open up the Indonesian economy to global circulations throughout much of his rule — this time though, to the extreme extent. Suharto’s inconsistent, credit-fuelled and often impatient policies (which tended to be determined by personal relations rather than economic sense), rendered the Indonesian state unable to pick and choose certain winner export industries (and then, the winner companies within those industries), to protect them, grow them and let them compete later on at global scale. However corrupt, for example, the junta regime of General Park Chung Hee in South Korea 19 Local terms for ‘big conglomerates’ in Korea and Japan, respectively. 20 A common term in the West during the early 1990s to refer high-growth inducing economies of East Asia. 11 of 55 was able to do so, laying the foundations of the contemporary high-income country that, during the 1950s, matched Sub-Saharan African economic standards (Studwell, 2014). The macro-economic indicators of the Krismon 21 were dealt with quite rapidly in regards to overall ‘unemployment’ and ‘growth’ figures in a matter of a year or so, at least nominally. GDP growth, which crashed severely to -13%, jumped back to +1% levels just next year, mostly due to the induction of the IMF bail out funds into the economy (Thee, 2012). On the employment front, the informal street economy absorbed the bulk of unemployment in urban contexts due to its low entry barriers — serving as a de-facto and imperfect fix (safety valve) to keep matters from getting worse. This resulted in the prevalence of ‘sticky’ low-quality jobs to this day, where the jobs lost to the 1998 crisis never really came back in the same fashion. Blue-collar factory jobs that were unionised and had certain insurance and leave benefits gave way to precarious street hawking or ojek driving jobs, which at the time, most presumably, perceived by many as a temporary solution to bring food to the table (Ford, 2011). The ‘temporary’ jobs stuck on, becoming widespread ‘professions’ ever since. 21 Short for “Krisis Moneter”, common reference to the 1998 crisis in Indonesian. 12 of 55 The Technopolitical Jacket The term “Industry 4.0” finds its origins in a high-technology development project by the German government in 2011, which promoted “the computerisation of manufacturing”22 during the Hannover Fair of that year. Ever since, the term has widened in both global scope and its connotations, moving beyond the industrial context of computerisation of manufacturing to the convergence of digital technologies in everyday life (Schwab, 2016). In accord with Schwab’s chronology of ‘industrial revolutions’, Indonesia had its first experience of ‘industrialisation’ in 1864, when the colonial Governor General Baron Sloet van den Beele initiated the first railway line in the archipelago in Kemijen village, Semarang, Central Java23. The second wave came in with the proliferation of mass production (factories) across the nation during the late 1970s onwards, especially in the Riau Islands and Java (Smith, 1996). That fairly steady trend of increasing productivity of Indonesian manufacturing (albeit often interrupted by multiple oil crises) was severely disrupted with the triple blow effect of 1998 Asian Financial Crisis, the political chaos which ensued it and China’s almost sudden emergence as a global industrial power as of 200124. Losing its lustre and global competitiveness, industrial production in Indonesia gave way to a burgeoning street economy (as many blue collar workers became low-income pengojek25, street hawkers and ad hoc construction workers). Due to the second industrial revolution’s ‘late arrival’26, it coincided with the ‘third industrial revolution’ that brought in computers and digital technologies into manufacturing processes from the 1970s onwards. Contemporarily, in line with the growing popularity of ‘keeping up with Industry 4.0’ or the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, the Indonesian government devised an index to measure the digitisation, productivity and competitiveness levels of domestic manufacturers27. On a broader scale, such efforts towards digitisation of manufacturing can be seen as part of the larger trend, arguably since the early 1970s, to render all hardware, forms of media and physical assets, ‘digital software’ (Negroponte, 1995). ‘Technology’ and ‘digitality’ are therefore much more pronounced within this particular industrial revolution’s parlance than ‘manufacturing’ per se, propelling a quest for churning out ‘local’ and ‘innovative’ companies that demonstrate not only export competitiveness, but creativity, excellence and ideally a high-tech demeanour. 22 BMBF-Internetredaktion. ”Zukunftsprojekt Industrie 4.0 - BMBF". bmbf.de. 30 November 2016 23 "142 Tahun Stasiun Ambarawa - Wisata Sejarah Kereta Api Indonesia". heritage.kereta-api.co.id, Kompas. 23 May 2015. Referring to when China joined the World Trade Organisation. Even though China had clear indications of development before this particular date, the rate of industry-induced growth following this date was unprecedented, arguably, in human history. 24 25 Motorcycle taxi driver in Bahasa Indonesia Large factories and export industries that captured a significant share of the GDP in Indonesia were mostly founded throughout the 1980s in Indonesia, around 70 years later than ‘leading’ regions such as Japan, the United States and Western Europe. 26 “According to a 2018 study by global consulting firm McKinsey, 78 percent of Indonesian companies are aware of the Industry 4.0 concept. The figure was beaten only by Vietnam at 79 percent, while countries like Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia saw lower awareness rates. If properly done, Industry 4.0 could contribute nearly $121 billion to Indonesia's gross domestic product by 2025, McKinsey calculated. An Industry 4.0-ready manufacturing sector is expected to provide more than a quarter of the GDP increase at $34 billion, followed by retail at $25 billion, transportation at $16 billion, mining at $15 billion, agriculture at $11 billion, telecommunications at $8 billion, health care at $7 billion, public sector and utilities at $5 billion and financial services at $2 billion”. — Aisyah, Rachmadea. “Indonesia rolls out index to assess progress on Industry 4.0”, 18 January 2019 — https:// www.thejakartapost.com/news/2019/01/18/indonesia-rolls-out-index-to-assess-progress-on-industry-4-0.html 27 13 of 55 Since its independence up until the post-1998 democratisation period, it can be argued that national technology champions of Indonesia were primarily spawned in the upper echelons of the technocratic Suharto government. A salient case of such an approach to technology development is one of Indonesia’s most historically prominent undertakings: the IPTN (Industri Pesawat Terbang Nusantara). The brainchild of the prominent Minister of Research and Technology, BJ Habibie, IPTN was an ambitious national, large-body commercial airplane project that captured the headlines and public imagination in Indonesia during the 1990s (Sulfikar, 2007). An archetype of its era, the IPTN was a patently paternalistic, technocratic and top-down engineered state-owned enterprise that depended on large sums of public funds to operate. The aircraft was proudly showcased on August 10th 1995, the 50th anniversary of the nation’s independence, putting on a dazzling exhibition of Indonesian technological prowess and execution. The key motivation for the Suharto camp to put on such a show was nothing short than a desperate attempt at regime sustenance. The junta-originated New Order regime represented a technocratic government that was ‘propped up’ by military power (Amir, 2013) — in dire search for any source of legitimacy. ‘Technology’, or rather the public exhibition of it, had an intrinsic power of unification: secular modernists, religious conservatives and even many political dissidents tended to gather around this seemingly ‘neutral’ form of state apparatus; seeing no particular problem in supporting and appreciating such developments. Economic growth, which (at least theoretically) put money in the pocket of the commoner had no such effect of ‘dazzlement’, hence, was not a reliable source of state legitimacy per se, especially in the long run. Creation of indigenous high-technology was meant to epitomise a ‘new Indonesia’ that reached a level which is comparable to developed countries — therefore legitimising the heavy hand of the New Order. The project’s development, however, was abrupted and cancelled at the height of Asian financial crisis of 1998, in which Indonesia was one of two regional countries, along with Thailand, that was battered the most — so much so that the crisis led to a regime change after three decades. Indeed it was ‘the economists’ from the Berkeley Mafia who, in an almost vengeful manner, immediately shut down the IPTN project (which they simply saw as a white-elephant project that was a huge drain on public finances), when they were returned to power in the aftermath of the financial crisis within the context of the IMF bail-out (Nitisastro, 2011). The aspiration to build an Indonesian aircraft was revived in a much more low-profile fashion during 2003, as Indonesia resurfaced from the immense economic contraction, with a new and relatively decentralised regime that was held up by a set of arguably more ‘modest’ (or rather, less technocratically ambitious) politicians that sourced legitimacy from elsewhere — such as political kinship and dynasties, grassroots patronage et cetera (Tapsell, 2017). In such a political context, the national airplane project was planned to be manageable in its size, both in terms of its financial cost and actual physical dimensions28. The national aircraft company was renamed to ‘Dirgantara Indonesia (Indonesian Aerospace)’ and built its first "IAe reveals five-year survival plan". Flight International. 28 Oct 2003. —https://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/ 2003/2003%20-%202446.html 28 14 of 55 prototype that successfully flew in a test-flight on August 201729. The new form of the airplane is much smaller than its parent project the IPTN-N250, and is meant to appeal to countries with small, often incomplete airstrips and many disconnected islands that draw lesser amounts of passengers per flight (in accord with the geography of the vast Indonesian archipelago). Such a shift echoes the general rationale of ‘focusing on small scale’ of agricultural development in the late-colonial era, which was also motivated by the general perception of previous failures at large-scale ventures. Indeed, the history of state-led technology development in Indonesia can be traced back to the country’s late colonial period, where it has been most vividly depicted in Suzanne Moon’s seminal research on the instigation of agricultural technology in the Dutch East Indies (Moon, 2007). Moon’s study situates technology in the everyday rural life of colonial Indonesia between 1900 and 1942, where the story of how the colonial administration used various strategies to emphasise small-scale technologies over a vast amount of terrain (strategies which were often localised through constant negotiations on the ground). Moon’s narrative has an opposite (albeit not necessarily holistically disaccorded) approach to James C Scott’s “Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed” (1998), who essentially claims that a high-modernist state (typically a colonial or authoritarian state), is often not concerned with local realities, hence prone to produce ‘spectacular failures’ (similar to the fate of IPTN-N250). Approaching agriculture as the main site of scientific innovation in late-colonial Indonesia, Moon depicts the ways in which approaches and aspirations regarding technological development within the governmental bodies is a crucial platform of ideological and practical contestation — a very familiar phenomenon to the engineers versus economists competition over policy influence throughout Suharto’s regime (Sulfikar, 2008). The contemporary rejuvenation of the national aircraft project in the post-Suharto era was however quite low-profile, especially compared to its previous flamboyant launch that captured headlines in the nation for a significant amount of time. The long-prevalent technocratic approach to ‘creating’ local champions within the higher echelons of the Indonesian government has shifted noticeably to a more decentralised, hands-off and hence arguably neo-liberal approach to ‘assisting’ local technology champions — in line with the general form of the political regime itself (Barker, 2017). The manifestation of such a shift is the rise of national champions such as GoJek, and the bi-partisan support for them within the governmental spheres30. As a comparable platform industry archetype to Grab, GoJek is an Indonesian ride hailing, logistics and mobile payments platform founded in 2014. GoJek is the first ever Indonesian private technology company to be classified as a ‘unicorn’ startup (a Silicon Valley originated appellation for fast growing, billion-dollar-worth technology companies). As of the time of Rahmat, Ridzwan. 16 August 2017. "Indonesia's Dirgantara N219 completes maiden flight". IHS Jane's Defence Weekly. — https://web.archive.org/web/20170816234006/http://www.janes.com/article/73140/indonesia-s-dirgantara-n219-completesmaiden-flight 29 Sandiaga Uno, the vice-president candidate for the 2019 elections claimed, echoing Jokowi (his incumbent rival), that although GoJek is on paper an illegal service, it must be supported because it solves a critical problem; during his speech 30 15 of 55 writing GoJek’s driver fleet currently exceeds one million ‘pengojek’ who ride an array of motorcycles, cars and rickshaws across urban Indonesia; and a mainstream user base equivalent to a quarter of the Indonesian population31 . In contrast to the form of SOE-led technology development (like the IPTN), GoJek, a private enterprise, is the current forerunner of translating foreign-origin innovation into Indonesian imaginary using a clearly nationalist tone in its communications; as with uplifting political slogans such as #AnakBangsaBisa!32, which was most prominently employed throughout its expansion phases into Vietnam and Thailand during 2018.33 Mutually, the Indonesian government has been vocally enthusiastic about GoJek’s globally renowned achievements, assisting them to tap into global investment channels by inviting them in presidential visits abroad (as with Jokowi’s high profile visit during 2015 to the United States34) and positioning the company in political rhetoric as a local champion that demonstrates the prowess of innovation in contemporary Indonesia. As a significant occasion in its history, Go-Jek was banned on December 18, 2015 by the Transport Ministry of Indonesia — but only for a single day, as President of the Republic of Indonesia, Jokowi immediately lifted the ban35 , in order “not to prohibit local innovation”. This is indeed a telling incident that exposes how highly Go-Jek is regarded by the Jokowi administration in Indonesia, as a widespread and perpetual exhibition of ‘technological success’ and ‘innovation’ across the country. So much so that, Go-Jek’s well publicised launch into Vietnam, the company’s first market outside of Indonesia, was accompanied by President Jokowi himself, as he perceived the expansion as a moment of national pride 36. Building on such political potencies, Go-Jek has grown to become a household name in any international debate concerning contemporary technological developments in Indonesia and hence, an indirect source of legitimacy for a government that aims to illustrate Indonesia as a resurgent technological powerhouse (Shastry, 2018) — echoing the ambitions of BJ Habibie and Suharto in the 1990s with the IPTN project. Beyond its ability to become a source of political legitimacy through demonstrating ‘local technological’ prowess, an often overlooked ‘feature’ of GoJek in relation to the regulatory framework in Indonesia is its rather subtle ‘reformatting’ or ‘rebranding’ of foreign direct Venkatesan, Adithya. "How GOJEK Manages 1 Million Drivers With 12 Engineers (Part 2)”. July 1 2018. — https:// blog.gojekengineering.com/how-go-jek-manages-1-million-drivers-with-12-engineers-part-2-35f6a27a0faf 31 32 Children of the nation can! in Bahasa Indonesia 33:“Can you mention the things that could make our people feel proud of being Indonesians? …what usually makes us unite is when our products have been claimed by other countries or when someone could reach a great success abroad… [the] team came up with the idea of making the #AnakBangsaBisa which is an appreciation campaign for the people or brands that were making some achievements abroad. So, the keyword for this campaign is the pride of being Indonesians which was aligned with the objective; to bring up the national spirit in Indonesia. — Noormega, Rayi. GoJek, 2018. https://medium.com/life-at-go-jek/thestory-behind-go-jek-advertising-campaigns-201884296d6e Asia Sentinel. “Who Is the 31-Year-Old Entrepreneur Part of Jokowi's US Entourage” Rappler, 28 Oct. 2015, www.rappler.com/ world/regions/asia-pacific/indonesia/bahasa/englishedition/110962-nadiem-makarim-entourage-gojek-jokowi. 34 “‘Gojek Should Not Be Banned," Presiden Joko Widodo Says.” Sekretariat Kabinet Republik Indonesia, setkab.go.id/en/gojekshould-not-be-banned-presiden-joko-widodo-says/. 35 36 Deutsche Welle. Jokowi Antar Go-Jek Rebut Pasar Vietnam | DW.COM, 12 Sept. 2018, www.dw.com/id/jokowi-antar-go-jekrebut-pasar-vietnam/a-45460666. 16 of 55 investment (FDI) within the realm of road transport and infrastructure. Investments into road transportation projects and companies have traditionally been highly regulated in Indonesia, as Law 22/2009 on ‘Traffic and Road Transport’ declares that solely the government is responsible for infrastructure development and its maintenance. Foreign capital can only own up to 49% of road transport related projects, albeit with severe (and often discouraging) restrictions on the type of businesses that are open to investment37. Most forms of logistics services and taxi businesses, two of GoJek’s main operational units, are practically closed off to foreign ownership and investment. GoJek, however, as an ardent recipient of ‘venture capital’ and ‘sovereign wealth funds’ from foreign entities such as Tencent (China), Google (the United States) and Temasek (Singapore)38, has bypassed such FDI equity limitations of foreign investment for road transport related businesses (Tham, 2018) by officially registering and communicating itself as an ‘mobile internet platform’ — implying little to no relation in regards to infrastructural development or ‘road transport’ as its core business. Bringing in approximately $10 billion USD of investment that has been primarily deployed to metropolitan Indonesia within the last 5 years (a number that matches Indonesia’s current yearly FDI inflows39 ), Gojek has been able to indirectly ‘fund’ the development and modernisation of Indonesian road infrastructure through improving the country’s urban logistics and mobility capabilities. As much as it may not initially strike the mind as a form of ‘infrastructure’, the mainstream prevalence and perceived success of GoJek indeed stems from its ability to redefine and ‘fix’ the lack of urban infrastructure that is prevalent all across Indonesia and the pain points arising from such physical contexts into business opportunities. Approaching metropolitan Indonesia’s notoriously congested urban traffic as a chronic technopolitical problem of failed infrastructure and weak top-down governance (Lee, 2014), irregular and ad hoc urban mobility solutions such as ‘ojek’ can be observed as to taking up responsibility and governing the daily lives, circulations and desires of city dwellers. An ojek, in this context, is the most efficient type of vehicle to leak through the infamous metropolitan macet (traffic jams): Grab and GoJek take macet as a given habitat — not an inconvenience — as they insert themselves to thrive within this apparent chaos. Intricate mobile platforms such as GoJek do not merely connect people within a software, but also reformat the everyday usage and meaning of relevant hardware. GoJek branded helmets are an example of subtly reformatted everyday tools to incite connotations of ‘safety’ and motorist jackets boast the Indonesian flag that resemble national troops’ outfits. The phenomenon of reformatting offline tools (hardware) to fit an online realm (software) tends to be naturally revealing of companies’ general positioning. Grab, for example, intendedly communicates itself as a regional company ‘that drives Southeast Asia forward’ with a rather neutral visuality in their gear (no use of flags or country specific overtures in their corporate BPKM, “Daftar Negatif Investasi di Indonesia”, 2017. — https://www5.investindonesia.go.id/id/artikel-investasi/detail/daftarnegatif-investasi-di-indonesia, 37 Russell, Jon. “Go-Jek makes first close of $2 billion round at $9.5 billion valuation”, TechCrunch, January 25, 2019. — https:// techcrunch.com/2019/01/24/go-jek-valuation-9-5-billion/ 38 39 Reuters. ”Indonesia's 2018 FDI seen falling to $11 billion-$13 billion: investment board”. December 13, 2018 — https:// www.reuters.com/article/us-indonesia-economy/indonesias-2018-fdi-seen-falling-to-11-billion-13-billion-investment-boardidUSKBN1OC0DI 17 of 55 communications/street banners), whereas GoJek is loud and clear with their nationalist tone in all their visual presence across the Indonesian archipelago. Regarding the jacket visuality in particular, it can be observed that GoJek chooses the ‘national’ colours of each market it operates: Halal-oriented/Islamic colours of green and black in Indonesia, red in the communist state of Vietnam (where their operations where expanded as Go-Viet in 2018) and the royal yellow in Thailand (where their mobile application is named GET! since 2019). Creating a simple, user-friendly and ‘human-sounding’ 40 smartphone application, GoJek in a sense legitimised, modernised and rationalised existing habits of travel and transaction which were often deemed ‘illicit’ and ‘lower-class’. Offering its riders more affordable, safer and fixed-rate rides (which avoided them from daily nuisance of price-haggling), the application harnessed the desirable aspects of motorbike based mobility with the convenience of cashless and traceable digital transactions. The company built the majority of its worker pool from traditional ojek drivers, outfitting the nondescript ‘man on the street’ with a celebrated corporate identity, and a vivid new look (Lee, 2018). The significance of the tangible components and visuality that make up a physical ‘GoJek’ demonstrates how the internet platform economy is materialised on the ground. GoJek is normatively a “super-app”, a digital application that unites “…disparate technological forces into a power greater than the sum of its parts” (Rothstein, 2015) as it links together the technologies of a motor vehicle, a smartphone and the relevant gear (helmets, jackets, mouth masks) that is involved in the performativity of the services demanded by its users. Echoing Abdoumaliq Simone’s mantra “…one thing is not one thing, in the everyday life of metropolitan Indonesia”41; the common practice of reassembling seemingly mundane tools and gear to allow the maximisation of the economic value they can create beyond their sole personal usage. Essentially, GoJek’s highly visual form of innovation emerges as an improvised regulatory force that appeals to the consumer-based values of an emerging Indonesian middle class and ‘corrects’ the unruliness of the otherwise chaotic city, while it attractes the precarious class to join its ranks with its technologized charisma (Lee, 2018). GoJek often employs symbolism and corporate rhetoric of ‘unity’ and ‘belonging’ both in its territorial settings such as GoJek bases (pangkalan) and virtual settings such as WhatsApp or Telegram group chats. Indeed, there are credible local accounts of street food workers in Jakarta, who were not riding for GoJek, commonly observed to be wearing GoJek jackets as a rather eccentric symbol of status and affiliation. It is also not uncommon to observe many young Indonesians tinkering with the GoJek helmet design, creating some of their own styles and selling them on e-commerce channels42. As an even more substantial case, a child born on February 2019 in the in the Lampung province, was named after Go-Pay, the e-payment platform by ride An expression in user-experience parlance, where an application employs everyday language instead of a ‘machine-like’ vocabulary within its frontend user interface. 40 “Urban Age Shaping Cities: AbdouMaliq Simone - Feral urbanism”. Published on Jul 21, 2016 by UrbanAge. —https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=--aMk1XEy7s 41 Appendix C, a GoJek helmet bought from a local e-commerce site in Indonesia — not officially made or endorsed by the company itself, such ‘artisanship’ is not uncommon across the country. 42 18 of 55 hailing unicorn GoJek 43. Resembling an urban subculture, GoJek is contemporarily beyond a ride-hailing and delivery platform, as it rapidly became an unescapable facet of Indonesian urban texture. Close analysis of hardware, visuality, everyday rhetoric and usage of gear therefore, exposes how these often overlooked tools are inseparable and revealing components of online platforms’ ability to create robust virtual communities. This section thus explores the answer to the question, ‘what makes an ojek a GoJek?’ and how this shift manifests an emerging urban subculture in Indonesia. “Parents name newborn son ‘Gopay’ after Go-Jek’s e-payment service, get Go-Pay credit as gift”, Coconuts Jakarta, 21 March 2019. https://coconuts.co/jakarta/news/parents-name-newborn-son-gopay-go-jeks-e-payment-service-get-go-pay-credit-gift/ amp/ 43 19 of 55 GoJek as City The concept and understanding of the ‘city’ have been noticeably under-theorised within anthropology, as the construction of meta-level urban theory has been left to urban planners, geographers and sociologists. Such a phenomenon is quite counter-intuitive. Anthropology’s greatest potency is its methodological proneness to delve deeper into a seemingly mundane phenomenon and render it intellectually compelling. To such a discipline that specialises in attending to social relations, symbols and political economies, the setting of a ‘city’ must manifest a host of opportunities (Low, 1999). As a vibrant and contested site of ‘everyday’ practice, the ‘city’ provides a fertile ground to study the linkages of human experience with modernisation, industrialisation and most recently digitisation. Therefore ethnography, as the lifeblood of anthropology (Smart et al. 1999), can be put to work to decipher “…how meanings, representations and material effects are felt and embodied in the rough and smooth of people’s everyday lives” (Low, 2017). The question of ‘what exactly constitutes a city’ has been long been grappled with by many scholars from a variety of disciplines and methodological approaches. A pioneer of urban theory, the sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1970) has kindled his own field to move beyond a descriptive approach towards theoretical conceptualisation, embarking on a quest to express metropolitan societies and phenomena using theoretical concepts. Inspired from Foucault’s discussions of various heterotopia (prisons, cemeteries, schools et cetera), Lefebvre constructed, and inspired many other scholars to construct, sociological archetypes of urban heterotopia; such as locations of renegade commercial exchange, bus stations, fairgrounds, busy sidewalks, eccentric suburbs or any other vibrant context which enable rigorous discussions of spatiality and temporality. Through his discussions on such heterotopia, Lefebvre claimed that rapid urbanisation was the new force of historic change in the world, after a long era of industrialisation in modern history: “…the urban fabric grows, extends its borders, corrodes the residue of agrarian life”44. In response to this ‘urbanist’ school of thought, Manuel Castells (1996) contests the notion of ‘urban’ with a more positivist approach, claiming that the ‘urban’ does not represent any kind of coherent scientific object available for study. In his seminal work ‘The Rise of the Network Society’, Castells theorises ‘the city’ as a communication infrastructure, formed to congregate flows and circuits of capital, labour and information, instead of conceptualising it as a physically built site or a certain type of sprawl. Anthropologists, however, are able to produce an even more adaptable, fluid and contextdependent concept of the ‘urban’, one which is grounded on social relations through the use of ethnography as its foundational methodology. Such ‘grounded’ theory emerge from the dialogue of field data and dominant conceptual frameworks (Low, 2017), and is useful to read ‘the city’ through humanistic flows and ‘everyday’ circulations rather than neatly drawn boundaries or abstract circulations such as capital and information45. Through the lens of anthropology, I contend that ‘the city’ is best understood as the intricately diverse 44 Lefebvre, Henri. “The Urban Revolution”. University of Minnesota Press, 2003. This is crucial, given that without consistent linkages to empirical and qualitative data, urban theory discourse is vulnerable to getting lost within aloof discussions regarding what vocabulary to use to refer to what type of urban/non-urban sites or which form of ‘capital accumulation’ determines a city etc. 45 20 of 55 concentration of ‘modern’ human interactions within a shared setting for the exchange of goods, services, ideologies, ambitions and providence. Contemporary to such developments in urban theory, scholars of Southeast Asia have also tackled the issue of delineating what ‘urban’ practically is, in order to produce and employ certain conceptual tools to understand the anthropocene of the region. Terry McGee (1991) utilised the socioeconomic concepts of agriculture, industry and services to demarcate certain zones within continuums of lived space; in which he coined the term ‘desakota’46 to refer to a specific form of hybrid urbanism in Indonesia. The terms stuck well in urban theory literature and became a rather generic, standard way of referring to many other similar contexts in the Global South and East Asia (Kusno, 2017). Delving deeper to how the concept of ‘desakota’ operates on the ground, contemporary anthropologist Abidin Kusno (2017) have dealt extensively with the notion of ‘city-ness’, wrestling with the questions of the ‘where the city begins and where it ends’ and who are indeed ‘urban’ within such contexts. Claiming how critical appellations are and how we refer to certain phenomena can make a notional difference Kusno puts forward the idea of ‘kampungkota’47 in his recent anthropological work on Jakarta48 . ‘Kampungkota’, an adapted, specified version of ‘desakota’, is a formation typically observed in Jakarta, refers to pockets of agrarian-like communities in central parts of metropolitan cities. Using particular labour practices, patterns of financial collaboration 49 and an observably distinct ‘art of governance’ to differentiate this suburban zone, Kusno draws attention to how the so-called ‘marginal’ suburban communities do not necessarily form in the fringes of an ‘urban sprawl’ — quite contrarily such zones tend to co-habit with the rest of the city right at its core. The city, then, does not necessarily grow in physical extent as it grows in population — instead, it produces new forms of suburbanisms. The key reason for this co-habitation of ‘urban’ (kota) and ‘rural’ (kampung) almost literally next door to each other is the labour input ‘the kampung’ provides to the ‘kota’. Metropolitan Jakarta’s rapid ‘high-rise’ development is enabled through the manpower surplus that is immediately available ‘next door’ — not only for its construction but its constant maintenance and care. From the ‘urban fabric’ (Lefebvre, 1970) to ‘desakota’ (McGee, 1991) to ‘kampung kota’ (Kusno, 2017), there has clearly been quite many ways to refer to certain metropolitan zones within urban theory — all in order to essentially be able to delineate and follow where city life actually takes place. For the purpose of inserting a novel form of technology into the discussion, I offer to demarcate ‘a city’ in Indonesia as the operational radius of the ridehailing platforms Grab and GoJek. As exclusively urban phenomena, these ride-hailing applications are prevalent in over 167 civic districts in Indonesia50, and are the most apparent common denominator of everyday commutes across the archipelago. 46 Amalgamation of desa (rural village) and kota (city) in Bahasa Indonesia 47 Kampung, literally means a community in Bahasa Indonesia, often used as a synonym to a village. 48 Harris, Richard. Vorms, Charlotte. “What's in a Name?: Talking about Urban Peripheries”. University of Toronto Press, 2017. 49 Referring to practices such as income pooling, peer to peer informal debt arrangements and similar ‘acts of resilience’. 50 GoJek official statistics, as of November 2018. https://www.go-jek.com/blog/go-jek-dimana-mana/ 21 of 55 Built as an innovative fix for traffic-laden contexts, the business model and typical operational style of Grab and GoJek does not make much sense in rural, ‘long-distance’ contexts with little vehicle presence. In the majority of such settings, Indonesians opt to ride their own motorbikes, given most of whom learn to do so since a very young age. Given that contemporarily Grab and GoJek are integral, robust and in many ways socially intricate facets of human circulations in urban Indonesia, it is indeed suitable to draw the boundaries of an Indonesian city in accord of their operational radius. Furthering the earlier approaches of using socioeconomic phenomena (boundaries of agriculture, information and capital flows) to demarcate what ‘urban’ constitutes, I offer to use a form of ‘everyday’ technology to draw a comprehensible frontier for the ‘modern’ Indonesian ‘city’. This theoretical offering is grounded on observation through an anthropological lens. In Indonesia, most urban centres, except for mega cities such as Jakarta and Surabaya, are often not clearly demarcated with town squares, mayor offices or large boulevards. It is commonly observable that the ‘city’ tends to shift in and out of presence on a regular trip across an island or river delta, sometimes reminding itself with a conglomeration of shops and apartments and then suddenly disappearing, lending itself to agrarian settings. Therefore, a reliable indication of being away from the ‘city’ is the cessation of the circulation of Grab and GoJek drivers in a particular area. The circulation of Grab and GoJek drivers habitually occur within a certain assemblage of physical and social infrastructure. Going beyond the more commonly employed ‘productmarket match’ approach, it is more useful to frame this assemblage within a ‘technologyhabitat’ match. Such habitat is made up of a rich mix of conditions, which warrants the use of motorbikes as taxis. Grab and GoJek’s urban ubiquity stems from their ability to build upon and translate such social and technological assemblages as they redefine lack of urban infrastructure and the pain points arising from that into business opportunities. Approaching metropolitan Indonesia’s notoriously congested urban traffic as a chronic technopolitical problem of failed infrastructure and weak top-down governance (Lee, 2014), irregular and ad hoc urban mobility solutions such as ‘ojek’ can be observed to take up responsibility and govern the daily lives, commutes and desires51 of city dwellers. An ojek, in this context, is the most efficient type of vehicle to leak through the infamous metropolitan macet (traffic jams): Grab and GoJek take macet as a given habitat — not an inconvenience — as they insert themselves to thrive within this apparent chaos. Building on Claudio Sopranzetti’s (2018) identification of four main conditions that enables the proliferation of motorcycles for public transportation in Bangkok, I propose how four key features of modern Jakarta renders it the ideal habitat for the ‘digital street economy’ to thrive within. This particular habitat boasts a lax mode of public administration that enables a robust street economy to prevail; a gridlocked traffic infrastructure caused by lack of public Smartphone technology often directs us towards a passive trust in widely delegated and obfuscated algorithms, disrupting our relationship with our daily routines and hence our level of patience and expectations of comfort (Berry, 2012). Grab and GoJek therefore, create an ambitious tendency of automated and accelerated modes of action, which compresses everyday experience of movement and perception of ‘speed’ — catalysing a growing expectation of services (hence, labour), in its most mundane sense, to be ‘on-demand’. Grab and GoJek as intermediary digital platforms (two-sided market places), are practically automated dispatchers for the masses, that have significant implications in regards to economic value creation. As these platforms become of everyday usage, certain personal assets become ‘idle’ and spare time becomes an ‘opportunity cost’ (Rosenblat, 2018), echoing Michel Foucault’s (1977) definition of idleness as a threat to stability (read: profitability) within the modern society. 51 22 of 55 transportation options; the availability of affordable motorbikes and smartphones; and lastly, a vast supply of labour, typically internal migrants caught within a perpetual presence in the informal economy. I. Social Infrastructure Since its inception in the 1970s, the practice of ojek driving has always been based on various layers of informalities. Therefore its translation to ‘software’, the ‘digital street economy’, is also built upon a certain lax and inconsistent mode of governmental administration that pushes informal mobility solutions to become mainstream. Neither the national nor local governments ever consider ojek as a formal activity on paper; nevertheless this practice is seen both as a solution for urban mobility problems, and as a robust means for job creation. In often jammed cities like Jakarta and Bandung, the presence of ojek has become a vital need for citizens seeking for means to travel between public transport nodes. In spite of its mostly unregulated nature, this long standing practice thrives on an unwritten understanding between the government, its users and its labourers. II. Physical Infrastructure In parallel to many other historical capitals of Southeast Asia, Jakarta is also a fundamentally amphibious city, one that is carved up around a port and built upon former canals that were the expressways up until the 20th Century. Unfortunately in any conversation regarding modes of transportation, contemporary Jakarta is not known for its now non-existing canals but rather for its notorious traffic, that is commonly ranked either the worst or one of the worst depending on which survey and year one chooses to observe. In a study that was recently published by Go-Jek itself, it was revealed that approximately 45% of metropolitan Jakarta is unreachable by a public transportation stop, which represents an area covering about 300 million square meters out of a total of 655 million square meters of metropolitan area52. The Jakartans’ key to open this gridlock is the ojek — the motor-taxis that flow through cars stuck on expressways like water flows through seemingly merged layers of stone. The founding legend of Go-Jek also refers back to this unassailable use case of the ojek, where Nadiem Makarim has his eureka moment while whizzing through clogged Jakarta traffic in destination to his office job. III. Hardware However the general infrastructure of metropolitan Indonesia may present an apt habitat for adapting motorcycle taxis as primary form of urban mobility, the practice of ojek in urban Indonesia would not have reached a critical mass without the presence of affordable hardware. The cost of motorbike ownership in Indonesia tends to be very affordable even for the urban poor, with an abundance of locally produced second hand bikes. There are also reports of Japanese companies such as Suzuki offering GoJek and Grab preferential rates of rentals and wholesale purchases, driving the costs even lower53. See Appendix D for the visualisation of this estimate. Black represents the covered area by public transport. Blue is currently uncovered by public transport. Source: Nugraha, Satya. Go-Jek Engineering, 8 October 2018. https://blog.gojekengineering.com/ lets-fix-jakarta-s-traffic-3ca824464d22 52 53 Ghalib, Mohammad. “New Suzuki Smash, Bidik Gojek, Grab Bike dan Uber” 24 March 2017. https://otojurnalisme.com/detail/ suzuki-motor/6314-review-suzuki-intruder-150-keren-atau-norak-kalau-dijual-di-indonesia 23 of 55 As well as motorbikes, the mainstream adoption of the ‘digital street economy’ requires the widespread use of smartphones, a condition that Indonesia reached around 2015 — right when GoJek built its mobile application after operating as a call centre for almost 5 years. In 2013, an estimated 24% of mobile phone users in Indonesia owned a smartphone (which represented around 25 million people out of 100 million total users) and this figure doubled exponentially to 53% by 2017, representing more than 80 million smartphone users, most of which reside in urban settings 54. The key reasons for such an exponential spike in Indonesian smartphone user base was the introduction of Chinese low-cost smartphone brands such as Oppo55 in the domestic market during the early 2010s, and the increasing affordability of data services. These two market forces widened the reach of mobile technologies to the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ across Indonesia. IV. Demographics In regards to the demographic conditions that construct the ideal habitat for a ‘digital street economy’, it can be observed that the labour pool of informal mobility in urban Indonesia is built upon a vast supply of domestic migrants, moving in typically a circular or seasonal urban-rural migration chains. It has always been much easier to become a pengojek than finding a formal job in a new setting for a migrant, but GoJek and Grab further brings down the entry barriers and hence offers enhanced agency, as the mobile platform technology lessens importance of local geographical and traffic related knowledge (due to the widespread prevalence of GPS systems on mobile phones) and social capital (the ability to rapidly sign up for a job). Through the deployment and training of smartphones, mass recruitment events and ease of access to relevant social connections over social media, becoming a pengojek is hence rendered much easier than ever, creating a positive network effect where the supply of more drivers incentivise more users as the waiting time and prices for fares are dramatically reduced. Indeed many Grab and GoJek drivers act as recruiters themselves, as I have observed in my brief fieldwork in Batam. The signing up process of becoming a pengojek is streamlined through ‘recruiters’ that prevail in multiple WhatsApp or Telegram chat groups, not necessitating entering certain ‘offline’ social circles, which tend to have more stiff boundaries, to be able to obtain provisional (although in practice often permanent) job opportunities. Beyond geographical knowledge and social capital, for many Indonesians, regardless of their urban or rural upbringing, the learning process of driving a motorbike starts almost concurrently with when they start walking, as in one interview with a pengojek the author noted the phrase that Indonesians tend to “…wear the bikes like [they] wear shoes (…sepeda seperti sepatu)”. It is no exaggeration, given how agile yet seemingly comfortable (albeit with serious physical pains induced through tough and persistent labour) they are in using the motorbikes in one of the world’s most (if not the most) chaotic traffic flows. This mainstream Statista, “Number of mobile phone users in Indonesia from 2013 to 2019 (in millions)”. https://www.statista.com/statistics/ 274659/forecast-of-mobile-phone-users-in-indonesia/ 54 55 Soo, Zen. “China’s Oppo builds on smartphone success at home with Southeast Asia push”. 2 January 2017. https:// www.scmp.com/tech/article/2058674/chinas-oppo-builds-smartphone-success-home-southeast-asia-push 24 of 55 knowledge of motorbike driving56 is also a key advantage for both the migrants in terms of minimising their potential job training and also the companies which “partner” with them, maximising the relevant and available labourer pool. A noteworthy point about the demographic mix of Grab and GoJek’s users and drivers is the platforms’ ability to cut through classes of income and ‘status’. As a vital technological solution to both the ‘suburban poor’ of the ‘kampungkota’ and the white-collar rich of the Central Business District, Grab and GoJek brings the two together (indeed quite intimately) to ‘share’ a bike ride. The infrastructural lack that causes ‘macet’ in Jakarta, therefore, renders large cars and jeeps of the rich temporarily useless at ‘rush hour’, as the ojek is much more able to swift through traffic and from ‘A to B’ — hence being able to provide better mobility. This phenomenon echoes Kusno’ (2017) observation of how intricately the ‘kampung’ and the ‘kota’ are intertwined and co-habit next door from each other. Such ethnographic remarks are critical qualitative data to inform discussions on labour, sociology, transport planning, macroeconomic class divides and urban geography. A demographic feature, that for example is not true for Istanbul, another gridlocked city, yet with much less motorbike solutions for passenger mobility — hypothetically due to not enough knowledge, trust and interest in using motorbikes for daily commutes. 56 25 of 55 Safety “The ability to tell a story, to find one’s way, depends on the city not working according to plan” — Abdoumaliq Simone Safety Application Inserting themselves in certain micro-frictions of everyday life, Grab and GoJek thrive and ‘make sense’ as a business in vibrant environments that resemble an urban jungle. Their key business model and positioning is built around ensuring safe, comfortable and identifiable first and last mile solutions for daily commutes, in contrast to traditional taxis or ojeks57. Providing a clear branding and visuality through helmets and gear, license plate registration for their drivers and the capability of real time ride-tracking through GPS technology, Grab and GoJek address a major pain point of ‘safety’ in urban mobility. Indeed, the founding of Grab can be traced back to its co-founder Tan Hooi Ling being unable to find a ‘safe’ taxi option in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where on the other hand, the inspiration for establishing GoJek came from its co-founder Nadiem Makarim’s daily ojek commutes where he sizzled through the ‘macet’ of Jakarta 58 in his commute towards the corporate business district. A certain mix of social (lack of safe urban mobility options and an already prevalent ojek labourer pool) and physical (severe vehicle traffic and a culturally embedded motorcycle culture in daily commutes) infrastructure allowed the Southeast Asian internet platforms, Grab and GoJek, to rapidly become ubiquitous and popular among a wide class of consumers. Another pain point on the side of the everyday user of ojek in regards to ‘safety’ was price and route certainty. Every independent ojek driver has his own attitude and ‘mental map’ while driving: patient or ‘jerky’, to obey or to violate traffic lights, to follow the conventional route or not, and so on. Since the ojek driver rides a small motorbike where there is no ‘taximeter’ equipped, bargaining for the fare rate was an everyday nuisance for many low and middle income ojek users (Indraprahasta, 2016). Dealing with such a problem with fixed (or at times ‘surging’ according to certain multipliers) and pre-set fares once you demand a ride, such platforms remove a subtle yet imperative issue in daily urban commute practice. In response to all such safety concerns, Grab and GoJek’s formal training sessions to enhance the driving and customer service skills of its driver partners and its effective power in reformulating trust relationships can be observed as a form of biopolitical potency, disciplining and regulating a mass of workers with the objective of modernisation and In Singapore, throughout the first half of 2019, Grab has conducted numerous safety drills and activities during their ‘trial launch’ of Grab Wheels within the National University of Singapore campus. Distributing many leaflets, posters and setting up drill areas, Grab’s on the ground activities of emphasising ‘safety’ as the company’s major concern reflected their emphasis on this particular theme throughout their recent communication channels. 57 In urban sprawls such as Jakarta, mayhem in traffic is the norm, not the exception, due to a lack of robust public transport and insufficient infrastructure. So much that, any everyday conversation in regards to this particular city tends to deviate towards the topic of traffic and ‘unorthodox’ mobility options. A common urban slang in Jakarta is ‘jalan tukis’, literally meaning ‘the rat’s way’ but referring to small escapes of back streets and alleys from major congested boulevards in the city. 58 26 of 55 efficiency. Through creating a safer option, both in terms of trust issues in regards to the driver’s background and the actual ride experience by setting clearer and more stable prices that do not require the hassle of bargaining, Go-Jek and Grab has formalised the operations of ojek driving within their markets. Such phenomena demonstrates how these firms in a sense substitute the role of the government in regulating urban contexts by providing measures safety and price stability (hence arguably exerting biopolitical59 power that would rather be characteristic of a state body). Safety Net Metropolitan Southeast Asia offers vivid opportunities to probe into how the smartphone based platform economy shapes global socioeconomic realities. This perspective aims to reverse the historic privilege of the West to set the terms of understanding the East (Rafael, 2019), exposing how the two have inverse trajectories in regards to precarisation and emancipation within the labour markets. What is observable in Western oriented publications in regards to the new ‘platform economy’ is an overarching gloomy picture, with an emphasis on the fundamental idea that such platforms disenfranchise the average white collar worker (Scholz 2017; Srnicek 2017). The widening of ‘gig economy’ across developed economies, the recent household name to refer to this new form of capitalism, does indeed spell many forms of informality, increasing uncertainty, lessened job security (if any). The term ‘gig economy’ was coined during the peak of the Global Economic Crisis of 2008 to describe the rise of piecemeal, part time and freelance work among the Western middle and low-income class. It has since become strongly associated with digital labour, thanks in part to the rise of online platforms such as Uber and Airbnb (Stone, 2017). An average ‘gig worker’ has much less job related rights (annual leave, pension etc.), little opportunity to mobilise or form cooperatives and in general much less job security. Shifting from a stable job to a ‘gig’ based schedule was initially discussed as an ‘opportunity’ or ‘freedom’ during the early 2010s (Stephany, 2015). That rather ‘optimistic’ discourse rapidly faded and gave way to a robust set of research and popular discussions that accept the premise of ‘gig jobs’ overwhelmingly result in workers simply working much more for much less (Kessler, 2018). Another key downside of becoming a ‘gig’ worker is that it tends to reduce the prospects of such individuals in their future career, creating a stigma around them as ‘nugatory’ . This locks them in a perpetual ‘gig’, disabling many such workers to shift back to the formal sector. In Singapore, there are multiple reports of Grab drivers having to put up a significantly upside battle to convince formal employers that their time driving for Grab ‘was not all waste’ 60. “…to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put life in order.” — Foucault, Michel. “History of Sexuality” Part Five. Volume 1. Éditions Gallimard. 1984 59 “Two years ago, Grab driver Muhammad Syahmi joined a ride-hailing industry brimming with rosy prospects. Buoyed by generous incentives dished out by firms, drivers cashed in on the lucrative business, where earning a decent wage was a relative breeze. “It was … easy money (then),” said Mr Syahmi, 25. For many drivers like him, however, the tide has since turned: Dogged by meagre incentives and fares in recent months, those bolting for the exit have found themselves in a quandary, as they struggle to land jobs after years in the driver’s seat. And they cannot say they had not been warned. It was not too long ago that observers and experts cautioned that providing a private-hire car service could harm drivers’ job prospects. It did not add to their resumes and offered little in the way of skills-building, they had said”. — Cheng, Kenneth. “The Big Read: Private-hire drivers face roadblocks as they seek way out of once-lucrative industry”. 4 September 2018. —https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/ singapore/private-hire-drivers-face-roadblocks-reskilling-retraining-jobs-10678820 60 27 of 55 Conversely, while in developed economies the business model of ride-hailing tends to catalyse the informalisation of formal labour markets, in Indonesia, GoJek and Grab’s operations tend to slightly formalise already highly informal labour markets through enabling multiple degrees of freedom and emancipation for their drivers (Ford, 2017). GoJek and Grab change the nature of employment for ojek drivers significantly, by providing four distinct benefits in contrast to their independent ojek practice. I. Insurance The first of such benefits is work-related insurance61 . Most of Grab and GoJek drivers are indeed former ojek drivers, which had no protection in the (often) case of accidents during their time as an independent driver. By providing such a benefit, GoJek and Grab tend to ameliorate their lack of health coverage in such occasions62. II. Income Certainty Another ‘security’ related benefit that Grab and GoJek drivers enjoy in respect to their independent counterparts is their relatively more stable schedule of payments and hence lessened financial uncertainty (Ford, 2017). GoJek and Grab, albeit with an intricate algorithm that does favour certain drivers over other due to rider feedback, tend to provide a regular flow of ‘jobs’ to their drivers on a daily basis, creating slightly more certainty of income as opposed to waiting out in the open at a pangkalan for a passer-by to come around and ask for a ride. III. Social Capital As a pseudo-employer (Ford, 2017), Grab and GoJek provide a certain focal point of belonging and a wider network for their drivers, in order to collaborate in cases of financial distress, work-related issues or simply personal problems 63. Echoing Abidin Kusno’s (2013) illustration of ‘art of governance’ in suburban Jakarta, a wider social network of friends and colleagues, often formed through GoJek themed WhatsApp and Telegram groups, enhances the fallback capabilities, and even income-pooling practices of many workers. IV. Political Mobilisation As a by-product of becoming a focal point and a pseudo-employer, Grab and GoJek have also became the target of shared demands of their drivers (Ford, 2017). In multiple occasions, Grab and GoJek drivers organised strikes, demonstrations and acts of aggression towards Grab and GoJek headquarters in many cities such as Jakarta, Makassar, Medan and Denpasar. in hopes to gain the attention of their ‘employers’. In one case, the situation was only defused Sumirat, Cahya. “Gojek dan BPJS Ketenagakerjaan Beri Kemudahan Akses Jaminan Sosial”. 15 April 2018. — https:// ekbis.sindonews.com/read/1298047/34/gojek-dan-bpjs-ketenagakerjaan-beri-kemudahan-akses-jaminan-sosial-1523783029 61 This ‘insurance’ of course should not be confused with a comprehensive life-insurance or pension coverage. It is only meant to cover the driver and riders in the case of accidents during rides. 62 63 Normanda, Nosa. “Memori Ojek Pangkalan dan Monopoli Gojek” 14 June 2015. — https://eseinosa.com/2015/06/14/memoriojek-pangkalan-dan-monopoli-gojek/ 28 of 55 with the mediation of President Jokowi in Jakarta 64. Having a pseudo-employer renders GoJek and Grab drivers’ campaigns’ chances of success higher than trying to ‘go-at-it-alone’ as an independent ojek driver. The widespread platforms therefore, albeit unintentionally and against their own interest, provide a certain degree of political freedom to their workers. In an economy where informal economy is the norm rather than the exception65, ride-hailing platforms in Indonesia therefore provide a certain safety net for their workers, bringing them closer to formal economy standards in comparison to their previous conditions. The safety ‘net’ in this context is therefore not a form of welfare-state-provided social security net in its usual parlance, but rather the digital ‘net’ that the street economy labourers (ride-hailing drivers) depend upon for their sustenance. Rethinking the concept of ‘safety’ beyond its rather obvious everyday connotations (personal, physical safety), this chapter explores how the street economy is also a societal ‘safety valve’ on the macroeconomic scale (Poerbo, 2010). The informal street economy indeed tends to absorb the bulk of unemployment in urban contexts during times of economic downturn (as in late 1990s Indonesia, the “Krismon” era) due to its low entry barriers — serving as a de-facto and imperfect fix to keep matters from getting worse. Grab and GoJek are therefore digital safety ‘nets’ (referring simultaneously to online networks and also social security nets), within the socioeconomic realm of Singapore and Indonesia, and are hence coincidentally symptomatic of both growing precarity and enhanced emancipation. The case studies of Grab and GoJek therefore enable studying capitalism in a new hybrid form, widening the study’s reach and relevance into both internet related scholarship and critical labour studies. Arshad, Arlina. “Protests in Jakarta over app-based transport services such as Uber, GrabCar and Go-Jek”. 22 March 2016— “https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/protests-in-jakarta-over-app-based-transport-services-such-as-uber-grabcar-and-gojek" 64 Such a socioeconomic context is thoroughly explored in Sopranzetti’s account of ‘post-Fordist’ Thailand which is a “… configuration dominated by flexible labour based on risk-taking entrepreneurialism, easier access to debt, and more precarious lives… itsaraphap played a meaningful framework for living through, talking about… this flexibilisation of labor, self-employment and its growing insecurity. It made precarity not only acceptable to drivers, but in fact desirable” (Sopranzetti, 2017). 65 29 of 55 Temporality "When a person rides a bicycle to work, she sometimes impedes the traffic of cars behind her on the road. As a fond observer of these sorts of interactions, I take a small (and admittedly devious) pleasure when watching what often ensues. More times than not the motorist becomes “trapped in” by the bicyclist and must slow down well below what the motorist considers to be a desirable rate of travel. Eventually, after some (often amusingly visible) frustration, the motorist rapidly speeds up – often gunning the engine – in order to overtake the bicyclist and then zooms quickly around her, often adding something of an exaggerated swerve to signal the satisfaction of having overcome the cyclist. (These exaggerated acts, it often appears, are also meant to send the cyclist a message.) The bicyclist, meanwhile, continues pedaling, often slightly frightened by the burst of combustion-fueled machine power, but nonetheless relatively uninterrupted. But the real tension often emerges moments later, when the speed-infatuated motorist encounters a red light and the bicyclist, who has not changed her pace, slowly rolls up alongside the automobile. Adding insult to injury, the cyclist, seeing no traffic at the intersection, breezes through the red light. The motorist, in spite of all the horsepower of industrial civilization, often fumes in the face of the cyclist’s indifference. But the cyclist has not engaged in an overt act of resistance. She has simply pedaled along the road." - Erik Harms On-Demand Social Infrastructure The mainstream prevalence and perceived success of Grab and GoJek’s stems from their ability to build upon and translate such social and technological assemblages as they redefine lack of urban infrastructure and the pain points arising from that into business opportunities. Approaching metropolitan Indonesia’s notoriously congested urban traffic as a chronic technopolitical problem of failed infrastructure and weak top-down governance (Lee, 2014), irregular and ad hoc urban mobility solutions such as ‘ojek’ can be observed to take up responsibility and govern the daily lives, circulations and desires of city dwellers. An ojek, in this context, is the most efficient type of vehicle to leak through the infamous metropolitan macet (traffic jams): Grab and GoJek take macet as a given habitat — not an inconvenience — as they insert themselves to thrive within this apparent chaos. Despite their such potencies though, these platforms do not operate in a techno-utopian fantasy in shifting everyday routines, but a practically vibrant, messy and also intellectually conflicted form of compressed ‘temporality’. Smartphone technology often directs us towards a passive trust in widely delegated and obfuscated algorithms, disrupting our relationship with our daily routines and hence our level of patience and expectations of comfort (Berry, 2012). Grab and GoJek therefore, create an ambitious tendency of automated and accelerated modes of action, which compresses everyday experience of movement and perception of ‘speed’ — catalysing a growing expectation of services (hence, labour), in its most mundane sense, to be ‘on-demand’. Grab and GoJek as intermediary digital platforms (two-sided market places), are practically automated dispatchers for the masses, that have significant implications in regards to economic value creation. As these platforms become of everyday usage, certain personal assets become ‘idle’ and spare time becomes an ‘opportunity 30 of 55 cost’ (Rosenblat, 2018), echoing Michel Foucault’s (1977) definition of idleness as a threat to stability (read: profitability) within the modern society66. Contemporary urban perceptions of temporality are increasingly compressed, arguably due to the widespread prevalence of ‘on-demand’ technologies. Keeping up with increasing speed and momentous action, then, is not the exception but the norm — raising the bar for ‘ondemand’ workers, as they are expected to be consistently ‘racing against time’ (Castells, 1996). In my conversations with Bintanese pengojek in the Riau Islands, they often mentioned that they had to complete a certain amount of deliveries and rides every day to be able to qualify for the ‘bonuses’ that the platforms offer — ‘bonuses’ which they relied on to make ends meet and keep riding for the platform. Similarly, Alex Rosenblat (2018), in her extensive work on Uber elaborates how the company engineers its ride-hailing algorithm to keep a delicate balance of risk and reward for their drivers, creating incentive for them to be situated in ‘profitable’ areas of the city in certain times67. The ride-hailing platform (which founded the fundamental technology Grab and GoJek runs on) tracks a variety of personalised statistics such as ride acceptance and cancellation rates, hours spent logged in to the application and number of trips completed, using the accelerometer in drivers’ phones along with GPS and a gyroscope which record drivers’ performance in granular detail. Using such data, the platforms display selected statistics to individual drivers as motivation tools, such as ‘You’re in the top 10 percent of partners!’. Such measures of management resemble a Fordist risk versus reward system with classic Taylorist efficiency principles. Given such a relationship between labour and capital occurs across a vast geography of cities, it can be observed that in a post-Fordist context, labour force is typically not confined into factory and workshops, but is diffused into the society, it as leaks out and over conventional boundaries (Raunig, 2013), to circulate within the traffic jams of metropolitan cities68. From such a standpoint, this chapter deals with the widely-used yet often narrowly understood concept of ‘on-demand platforms’, assessing the term in light of the key concepts of ‘temporality’ and ‘power’. The discussion demonstrates the ‘non-neutral’ operational features of the ride-hailing algorithm and its managerial power, which is informed by Taylorist principles. Similar to how the introduction of horse-trams in Jakarta disciplined people to think in ‘clock-time’ (Cote, 2014), an analysis of the ride-hailing software portrays how the mainstream prevalence of ride-hailing platforms alter the contemporary notions of ‘time’, ‘risk’ and ‘reward’ in regards to everyday urban living and labour. “… a complex unity a new sensibility to poverty and to the duties of assistance, new forms of reaction to the economic problems of unemployment and idleness, a new ethic of work, and also the dream of a city where moral obligation was joined to civil law, within the authoritarian forms of constraint. Obscurely, these themes are present during the construction of the cities of confinement and their organization”. — Foucault, Michel. “Madness and Civilisation”, Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. 66 “Surge pricing, which multiplies prices for passengers and earnings for drivers during periods of high demand, is another form of algorithmic management that encourages drivers to relocate to certain areas at certain times. The drivers get in-app notifications, heat maps and emails with real-time and predictive information about spikes in demand. A driver who wants to go home and is trying to log out might be prompted with an automatic message: “Your next rider is going to be awesome! Stay online to meet him.” — Rosenblat, Alex. “Uberland”. University of California Press, 2018. 67 “…workers during the 19th Century used to shoot clocks in the city squares denouncing the time mechanism of their exploitation. Now, in their rebellion, precarious workers need to shoot the calendars which mark the separation and non-continuity of time and their alienation… like the migrant, the precarious worker is constantly looking for a place to rest”. — Negri, Antonio, “Counter-melody”. 2013. 68 31 of 55 Perpetual Precarity Most vividly since the throbbing caesura of the Global Economic Crisis of 2008 that dented the flow of socioeconomical history of the West, the informal economy has been expanding into the contemporary labour market at every level and into the various discourses of the “future”, both in academic and popular literature (Graham 2018; Kessler, 2018). As much as the 2008 crisis’ most obvious and headlining macroeconomic effects (GDP growth rates, industrial productivity, overall unemployment rates) have been apparently dealt with by the time of writing a significant portion of the jobs that were lost to the crisis, were not regained in the same form and ‘quality’. Formal ‘9 to 5’ corporate jobs came back as informal “gigs” (which is a performative term that finds its etymological roots in improvised musical performance, most typically a night of performance in a jazz or rock bar). Gigs are temporary jobs with an uncertain future, that boast little to no social security compensations, retirement plans or contracts. Rather glorified as an opportunity of ‘freedom’, ‘being your own boss’ and joining the ‘future economy’, typically by platforms that catalyse this socioeconomical shift, the “gig economy” in developed economies is commonly regarded as a “new” phenomenon. In his widely acclaimed book “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”, Schwab gives an account of the changing nature of work, noting that “…today, the on-demand economy is fundamentally altering our relationship with work and the social fabric in which it is embedded. More employers are using the ‘human cloud’ to get things done” (Schwab, 2017). This begs the question, why now? — why is it that the discourse on informal labour has proliferated in the last decade, even though it has already has been existent in the West in terms of significant numbers of freelance workers and independent contractors (albeit at about a third of the current rates) even before the 2008 crisis? As much as it has not been arguably prevalent and common as in the East to form a vivid ‘street economy’, Kessler (2016) exemplifies how many professions such as truck drivers, IT experts and accountants have always tended to be independent contractors, working in conditions that are not too different than Uber drivers of the current generation. Estimates presented in the book claim that the amount of freelancers in the overall labour force jumped from an already 13% in 2009 to around 30% in 2016 in the United States and Western Europe. Freelance work was therefore hardly a completely new phenomena, anywhere in the world, regardless of spatial and temporal disparities. Kessler (2016) argues that Uber played a significant role in this both discursive and functional (offline to online) shift, as it “…took a trend among corporations — employing as few people as possible — and adapted it for the smartphone era”. The very common usage of the phrase “Uber for X” whenever describing a new platform business model to the general public is a quintessential marker of the significance that Uber plays in the imagination and direction of the new generation of entrepreneurs. In a sense, Uber is the platform economy’s posterboy, becoming synonymous with the emerging digital business model. Uber as a ‘super-app’ like Grab or Gojek, is a digital application that unites “…disparate technological forces into a power greater than the sum of its parts” (Rothstein, 2015). Bringing together the technologies of the car (or the motorcycle, rickshaw etc.), the smartphone and whichever relevant tools that are involved in the production of the specific goods and services demanded by its users, Uber is an intermediary digital platform, essentially an automated dispatcher for the masses, that has significant implications in regards to economic value creation. 32 of 55 Such platforms do not merely connect people in an online realm, but also reformat the use of an offline asset (e.g. the motorcycle), allowing the maximisation of the economic value it has the potential to create — delivering food, packages or passengers in exchange of commissions, instead of sole personal usage (Parker, 2016)69. At the global scale however, the demographics of this newly emerging ‘human cloud’ in the West is arguably the equivalent of the already ubiquitous ‘urban gray economy’ in East. Primarily fulfilling the demand for the type of jobs that are considered dangerous, dull and dirty: “The Three D’s… perpetuated by the roots of the robot in a fictional narrative of human-made machines taking over serf labor” (Rothstein, 2015), the on-demand street economy in the East is indeed not indeed a ‘new’ version of labour formation. This apparent anachronism can be unraveled, once the concept of ‘future’ is approached in its spatial and multi-layered nature, instead of its more common temporal and one-directional perception. The genealogical examination of the digital gig economy in Indonesia in the following sections of this research, illustrates what is now regarded as the ‘future of work’ in the West has long been widely prevalent in the East. Indeed, the notion and practice of a precarious and provisional (Martinez, 2018) ‘street economy’ has long been embedded within the socioeconomic composition of Indonesia, given the practice of ‘gig jobs’ in urban Indonesia are rather perpetual (ever-lasting as decades long careers) than temporary (unlike the literal implications of the term ‘gig’). In his ethnographic account, “Eviction Time in the New Saigon: Temporalities of Displacement in the Rubble of Development”, Erik Harms (2013) depicts the temporal facet of gradual eviction in a rubble-laden site of demolition in Saigon, where thousands of households are being evicted to create an ambitious “New Urban Zone”. The slow eviction scheme pushes many residents into an alternative zeitgeist of enforced waiting, marked by a suspension in time, creating a sense of never ending limbo70. Such phenomenon is a vivid example to describe the ‘usual uncertainty’ many pengojek face in regards to their jobs, a job that is both ad hoc and perpetual, both ephemeral and permanent at the same time. In Southeast Asia, Go-Jek had an embedded platform that featured deliveries of all kinds of good and services many years before Grab came around to it. Until very recently (roughly till the Uber merger), Grab tended to concentrate most its efforts on expanding its ride-hailing business only. 69 The way we experience time is always socially constituted. Everything Lefebvre says about space, one might say, could also be said about time. In many ways this is obvious: One does not need a degree in anthropology to know that a “New York minute” appears to pass differently than a solemn “moment of silence” before a sporting event, or that “time lies when having fun.” But to connect the multiple possibilities afforded by the malleable experiences of time with political-economy and power is exceedingly important. From Marx’s theory of value on through E.P. Thompson, Nancy Munn, Bourdieu and others, we see how the control of time can play into the control of people”. — Harms, Erik. “Eviction Time in the New Saigon:Temporalities of Displacement in the Rubble of Development”. Cultural Anthropology, 2013. 70 33 of 55 Mobility “The ojek was once a superior resource of local geography. Ask and you shall receive a complex and knowledgeable answer of turn left-left-right-left-right. How is the man of the street to compete with Google Maps’ ability to either make the city legible or its tendency to drive you into a ditch?” — Doreen Lee Emancipatory Technology In contrast to their widespread popularity in Java, the prevalence of on-demand platforms of Grab and GoJek have been flash-points of resistance and violence in Bali. Unlike their perceived benefits of providing certain degrees of freedom in metropolitan Indonesia, these ride-hailing platforms disrupt a societal system that has been embedded within Balinese culture. Villages in Bali are subdivided into multiple ‘banjar’, a local form of rural communes, typically at a size of a square mile and approximately 500 people. Each banjar cooperates aspects of everyday life at regular community meetings – deciding on local issues such as the use of agricultural land, punishment of local crimes and the ‘fair ordering’ of picking up rides for local taxi drivers. Within such a socioeconomic context, significant occurrences of conflict between on-demand platforms’ drivers (typically immigrants from Sumatra, Sulawesi or East Java) and local Balinese taxi drivers have broken out since the platforms launched in Bali in 201571. For immigrant workers, becoming taking up the job of riding an ojek has been made much easier with the advent of the GPS-based ride-hailing platforms, as the virtual maps embedded into such mobile applications let non-locals to leapfrog into having a thorough geographical knowledge of a foreign land. GPS technology resembled science fiction in the early 2000s with a few references to it in popular spy movies (Stone, 2007)72, yet it rapidly became an everyday and almost mundane technology within less than a decade. Through a digital translation of its physical infrastructure on a screen, a city simulates itself within an embedded electronic culture and economy, creating its own virtual double through a complex architecture of its intricate bits of information networks (Davis, 1995). “Grafting technologized knowledge onto what “locals” are supposed to know intimately, that is, the city, enables outsiders and new migrants to no longer learn the city in the old way. The ojek was once a superior resource of local geography. Ask and you shall receive a complex and knowledgeable answer of turn left-left-right-left-right. How is the man of the street to compete with Google Maps’ ability to either make the city legible?” (Lee, 2018). This phenomenon evokes how Lefebvre (1968) presented a seminal vision for ‘the city’, in which its users (migrants and ‘locals’ alike), manage, negotiate and mould urban space for themselves, beyond the control of both the state, traditions and industrial powers. The everyday assemblage of GPS and ride-hailing technologies, therefore, assists otherwise ‘alien’ immigrants to carve out a living for themselves, however perpetually precarious. Jacobs, Harrison. “‘Why should we make foreigners rich?’: Taxi drivers are taking on Uber and Grab in Bali, and some are turning to violence”. 23 June 2018. https://www.businessinsider.sg/uber-grab-bali-attacks-taxi-drivers-2018-6/?r=US&IR=T 71 Indeed the founding story of Uber in the mid 2000s is traced back to one of the founders’ astonishment of a James Bond scene where a car is moving through the map in a GPS system. 10 years on, the company has realised this ‘fictional’ scene at mass. 72 34 of 55 This renders the platforms of Grab and GoJek 73 to be an emancipatory form of technology as an inclusive tool for new comers to ‘a city’, who would otherwise have a lot less means of penetrating the stiff social barriers of entry in a conservative culture like Bali. In reaction to such a dilution of their exclusivity within the Balinese labour market, banjar affiliated local taxi drivers have been reported to erect signs demarcating certain no-go zones and aggressively enforcing those territorial lines in multiple occasions74 , struggling to keep out the online platforms’ drivers, whom work with much more competitive fares and through a wider online client base for ride orders. Digitisation of Bali Approaching such occurrences on the ground in Bali from urban theory, I speculate that the resistance by the rural banjar taxi drivers against Grab and GoJek is an existential one. It is about whether or not a form of technology should ‘be’ somewhere, rather than ‘in which ways’ or ‘at what cost of labour’. All protests are not created equal — the seemingly similar ‘anti-Uber’, ‘anti-Grab’ or ‘anti-GoJek’ protests across Southeast Asia tend to be concerned with ‘which limitations’ the ride-hailing technology should operate and more often ‘at what labour cost’. In Medan75, the protests were about lay-offs by the company due to alleged fraud of a large group of drivers. In Jakarta, both Grab and GoJek drivers, often in collaboration, protested their pseudo-employers for lowering their bonus rates, hence their daily income76. In Bali, however, the protests are fundamentally about ‘platformisation’. It is a resistance by the banjar taxi drivers to not be ‘digitised’ and therefore be ‘disciplined by an algorithm’. Building on my argument ‘GoJek as city’, I hypothesise that Balinese banjarbased taxi drivers are not simply protesting against ‘GoJek’, they are indeed protesting against ‘becoming urban’. In light of this hypothesis, the linkages between ‘platformisation’, ‘digitisation’ and ‘urbanisation’ instigate the concept of ‘biopower’ to be used as a theoretical tool. Michel Foucault (1976) illustrates biopower as a mechanism of rendering an individual ‘modern’, ‘malleable’ and ‘orderly’. Biopower operates on the site of an individual as a form of ‘disciplining the body’, enabling the individual to fit an emerging context of industrialisation and urbanisation. In contemporary urban contexts, keeping up with increasing speed and Remarkably, in her fieldwork in Denpasar, Makassar and Jakarta, Michele Ford (2017) has noticed that GoJek has observably benefited from its nationalist and ‘indigenous’ positioning. Setting itself apart as a ‘local’ interlocutor with relevant actors in contexts of backlash and aggression (in contrast to Singaporean Grab and American Uber), GoJek has been less of a target in the execution of governmental regulations and ‘street brawls’ between online platform and taxi drivers on the ground. 73 “On the fiercely tribal island, an influx of tourist dollars has steadily grown the local economy even as a sense of territorialism reigns. Traditional taxi drivers speak of Bali’s “local wisdom”, which dictates that they alone should attend to the needs of tourists staying in their banjar, or local community”. — Jacobs, Justin. Southeast Asian Globe. May 7 2018. “Traditional Bali taxi drivers’ aggressive war on ride-sharing apps” — http://sea-globe.com/war-on-ride-sharing-apps-bali/ 74 “Drivers of online transportation services Go-Jek were seen carrying out a demonstration carrying banners in front of Go-Jek office at North Sumatra, Indonesia. During demonstration drivers online transportation services require a system established by the company that is considered detrimental to drivers and unilateral termination of partners by Go-Jek company”. — “Drivers Of Online Transportation Services Protest In Indonesia”. November 22, 2018. Barcroft Media via Getty Images. — https:// www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/drivers-of-online-transportation-services-go-jek-were-seen-news-photo/1064338008 75 “The demand is still the same, rationalising the tariff and asking the House of Representatives (DPR) to revise Law No. 22/2009,” — “100,000 Online Ojek Drivers to Hold Protest on Monday”. 11 April 2018, Tempo.Co. — https://en.tempo.co/read/ 917493/100000-online-ojek-drivers-to-hold-protest-on-monday 76 35 of 55 momentous action is not the exception but the norm, setting the bar for ‘on-demand’ workers to be consistently ‘racing against time’ (Castells, 1996). The Balinese taxi drivers’ resistance to Grab and GoJek therefore, can be read as a stand against becoming ‘modernised’ and ‘industrialised’ by digital platforms. Such a phenomenon presents a unique and compelling opportunity for an ethnographic investigation to inform urban theory. The expansion of Grab and GoJek into Bali, and the potent resistance that they have experienced is an archetypal case study to illustrate the expansion of urban circulations across Southeast Asia and an existential resistance towards them. As anthropology is primarily concerned with those particular moments where technology intersects personal experience (Waterson, 2007), the methodology of employing ethnography in order to narrate such a case study offers novel insights into social, economic and political processes. 36 of 55 Fieldwork Methodology Building on my fundamental premise of ‘GoJek as city’, I consider mass circulations, typically through transportation mediums to be a key indicator as to where to set my research site and objectives. As Claudio Sopranzetti (2018) notes regarding his extensive ethnographic work with Bangkok motorcycle drivers, the concept of ‘movement’ and ‘circulation’ is often absent from ethnographic practice — indeed for a practical reason. Following moving subjects is exponentially more challenging then setting up a clearly demarcated, static research site. Observing motorbike drivers’ operational flow and behaviours is an unusual and amorphous disposition, making the task tough to grapple with using the tools of traditional anthropological research: “I regularly found [a] methodological predisposition pushing me towards a street corner, a group of drivers, or a neighbourhood as the preferred scales of analysis… [the] research therefore, became a continuous struggle to resist this comforting dimension” (Sopranzetti, 2018). In dealing with this, I will strive to employ what I see as anthropology’s most foundational strength: taking something that is seemingly mundane, everyday, ephemeral, fleeting or random and paying more attention to it. In similarity with the practical methodology of Jose Rafael Martinez’s (2018) ethnographic approach to provisional workers in suburban Jakarta, I aim to utilise my previous personal experiences of videography to keep up with the dynamism of my subjects. Inspired by how Sopranzetti (2018) relied on an incessant practice of street photography to construct the imagery in his anthropological analysis, employing video technology in my particular research enables to not only capture and later on showcase the dynamism of a particular setting or action (in this case, hypothetically often motorbike riding) but also the opportunity to observe every scene in utmost attention, with mental receptors open to match patterns in circulation and movement. As much as utilising video or photography may intitally seem as simply an enhanced method to record certain settings, such mediums’ “…malleability [mean] that they are able to lodge themselves into a myriad of local contexts” (Wubin, 2016). Videography enables me to both: 1) be spatially present in a setting during an ongoing search of new leads, clues, directions etc. and also 2) analyse such experiences and quests in hindsight, maximising my exposure to the field in temporal, spatial and analytical terms. My proposed fieldwork also has the (relatively more straight forward) objective of mapping out mentally how the pengojek operate on the ground. I have the following objectives of inquiry to start with: How are drivers of Grab and Go-Jek stationed around the islands? Do they base around formal camps or just depend on street hails — and how is this different from island to island? How do their operational organisation differ from traditional (independent) ojek drivers and how do their ride frequency differ from the traditional ojek drivers? Which neighbourhoods do they frequent most, at approximately what hours and is there any difference between their routines and ojek or taxi drivers? Besides their observable traffic behaviour, this research also inquires into whether, these drivers have common social media groups (hypothetically Whatsapp or Telegram)? How do they mobilise using these social media networks, what do they mostly use it for? More tellingly do they have things, actors, regulations, areas, authorities they avoid (hypothetically taxi drivers, police…)? Inversely, what actors are they comfortable around and/or attracted to (hypothetically tourists)? Building on this dynamic methodology, this research aims to flesh out what the ‘everyday routine’ and ‘pain points’ of urban mobility are on the ground. 37 of 55 In my previous similar fieldwork experience in Batam and Bintan, none of the people I interviewed in the field I knew already, but as I frequented the islands the a few times, the connections I made in the previous trip connected me to further relevant individuals, typically bringing me around to more pangkalan ojek: “…entry [to the field] is more analogous to peeling the layers of an onion than opening a door” (Neuman, 1997). Notably, in almost a local gate-keeper fashion and sometimes as a improvised translator to supplement my intermediate level Bahasa Indonesia, Uswim, the editor of the Batam-based SINDO Newspaper has assisted my rapprochement with the pengojek, enabling me to get exposed to more than fleeting conversations during a ride or a cigarette break at the side of the street. This being Indonesia, the standards informed consent required for professional anthropological research in theory is difficult to attain, as common with similar methodological experiences in previous works within Southeast Asian studies: “…asking to sign a typical consent form would have rendered many of our conversations impossible, and would have changed the nature of any [I was] still able to do” (Sasges, 2013). Albeit the typical lack of written consent, with each and every driver I talked to in Batam and Bintan, I thoroughly introduced myself, the gist of my research and how I would use the information I obtain from that particular conversation — indeed it would have been unfeasible for me to strike up a conversation about the details of their work without explaining the reason for doing so in the first place. As much as I was the obvious outsider, that at first thought could be considered a disadvantage in such settings, I can attest the opposite revealed to be true, as indeed “…field research in familiar surroundings is difficult because of a tendency to be blinded by the familiar… studying other cultures, researchers encounter dramatically different assumptions about what is important and how things are done” (Neuman, 1997). Going into the field with an open mind and not many specific questions in a certain order, my topics of inquiry increased in number and variation on the ground. As conversations flowed in many twists and turns, discussions varied from any topic from the latest sports event to the concepts of marriage and immigration, depending on the rapport I have been able to build with my interlocutor. Fortunately in almost all occasions, the reception was more than positive, the pengojek tended to be openly enthusiastic about sharing their life stories and typical routine, in some cases providing some of their driver’s registration documentations for me to photograph. I did not conduct audio-recording of any interview I have done, simply to enable a more candid and practical setting where the interlocutor would not have to worry about the exact flow of his thoughts and feelings. I rather opted to take note of all details, including then-seemingly insignificant ones, in our conversations immediately after the exchange was over. I am to keep the same code of conduct in my upcoming fieldwork. Through figuring out and illustrating the everyday effort of keeping a vast and intricate entity such as a city running, I aim to find certain telling signs of how micro-frictions within an metropolitan setting is continually suffered and fixed ‘on-demand’, in resemblance to the constant internal maintenance of a large vessel that is weathering an incessant storm in the open sea. Essentially then, my over-arching methodology is to follow the constantly moving and circulating pengojek, who makes up the social and physical infrastructure of urban Indonesia and how their seemingly mundane and common, yet revealing and unique form of work is an indispensable medium of socioeconomic construct of the Southeast Asian nation. 38 of 55 Appendix A 39 of 55 Appendix B 40 of 55 Appendix C 41 of 55 Appendix D 42 of 55 Bibliography Southeast Asian Studies/Anthropology • Baker, Chris. Phongpaichit, Pasuk. “Unequal Thailand”. NUS Press, Singapore. 2017. • Benedict, J. 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