Shuang Frost
When picturing traditional anthropological work, one often imagines an anthropologist observing a remote tribe in the jungle and quietly taking notes about their rituals and hierarchies. When Shuang Frost began researching the ethics of ride-sharing apps in China, she didn’t expect to find analogues in the communities she was observing—but she did. “Even though they are using digital apps in modern day Shanghai, I still see similar rituals and hierarches,” the PhD candidate in anthropology says.
Frost researches the relationship between technology and ethics through an ethnographic study of Chinese users of Didi and Uber, local ride sharing apps. The moral code of ride-sharing apps is not obvious for those who see services like Uber as providing convenience or mobility. “But if you look hard enough,” Frost says, “you find that there are values embedded in the algorithms.”
By studying six communities involved with ride-sharing, from corporate managers to taxi drivers, Frost is developing an understanding of the underlying ethics at play. One of her favorites groups is an online community of about 200 hacker drivers. “When Uber and Didi were competing for drivers and consumers, they gave out a lot of subsidies,” she says, which made it profitable for drivers to hack the platform, fake trips, and collect the subsidy. “It became so prevalent that drivers told me that 9 out of 10 drivers were faking trips,” Frost says.
Frost believes that these hacker drivers present an interesting case about the ethics of the platform. The companies punish the hackers because they believe their behavior is fraudulent, while the hackers see their actions as moral. “They’re maximizing profits by exploiting existing regulations, which is exactly what Uber and Didi are doing,” says Frost. According to her, these hackers don’t buy into the institutional ethics prescribed by the platform, but rather create their own shared moral orders within online communities where they swap information and form friendships. “It’s a very interesting and thought-provoking moral paradox, which sheds light on the plurality, complexity, and even incommensurability of platform ethics,” she says. “And those are the exact ideas that my ethnography hopes to address.”