del Nido, Juan Manuel. Taxis vs. Uber: Courts, Markets, and Technology in Buenos Aires. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021, 238 pages

Jacques Rancière views politics as an arrangement to deal with differences within a common place (Rancière 2000). Therefore, politics is not a place of agreements. On the contrary, a healthy political situation is one in which people debate, show discomfort, and refute each other. In this “distribution of sensible,” Rancière argues that there are relations between shared sceneries and the division of exclusive parts. This distribution includes how people engage with legislation, institutions, other people, and situations they may face. Politics is thus a social experience. However, there are situations where political engagement does not occur, even as public debate rages. In Taxis vs. Uber, Juan del Nido discusses how the population of the autonomous city of Buenos Aires engaged in post-political reasoning when a debate about Uber began in the Argentinean capital in 2016. The book draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Buenos Aires between July 2015 and August 2016 and again in 2017. While most of the people this ethnography is about are middle class, it is not a study of the middle class so much as a study of the kind of thinking del Nido encountered among people who fit a certain socioeconomic definition of the middle class. The political context presented in Taxi vs. Uber concerns the arrival of Uber—a global multinational corporation that offers shared rides—to Buenos Aires, where taxi drivers had an “alleged” monopoly on transportation in the city. Against this backdrop, del Nido discusses how a myriad of moralities (such as choice, freedom, and competition) are mobilized by the subjects interested in these issues. Ultimately, this debate could be reduced to a simple question: What do people want? Taxis or Uber? However, reducing a complex discussion in such a way flattens the contradictions that emerged from the debate. Over eight chapters, the author presents the arguments, contradictions, and tactics, along with the post-political rationalities of the controversy. To understand how this post-political view was woven into the social fabric, del Nido argues that neoliberalism, as a governmental and philosophical project, would have discursive affinities with this way of thinking. In other words, the market could be a framework for understanding society (Dardot and Laval 2009; Foucault 2004), where the relationship between subjects would be described as zero-sum equations, flattening the complexity of decision-making processes. In the events presented in Taxis vs. Uber, this context produced an avoidance of the distribution of meaningfulness, resulting in a public rejection of the taxis. That is, “part of the taxi industry’s frustration emanated from the fact that they were the main, or most visible, casualties of an order that resisted actual, genuine social engagement or disagreement—or, in other words, that resisted being politicized” (del Nido 2022 140). The first section of the book consists of the first three chapters, which delve into the taxi industry in Buenos Aires. Del Nido introduces his central theme, which is the reasoning, arguments, and fears that have written off the taxi industry. The first chapter, “The Terms of Engagement,” explores the history of the taxi as a public service in the capital and the relationship between proprietarios and choferes. The second chapter, “An Intractable Question,” follows a group of about twenty participants to the union’s headquarters, where they undergo physical analyses and examinations as part of the process to obtain a license to drive a taxi in Buenos Aires. The examinations are portrayed as a method of problematizing the bodies of taxi drivers, where a whole moral and political economy is mobilized by the subjects involved. The third chapter, “A Most Perfect Kind of Hustling,” explores the ethical flexibility …