Uber and the small capitalist
example · personal/autobiographical ·
retold in 6 talks
Uber’s ideology claims everyone is a 'small capitalist' because drivers own their cars/computers, thereby blurring class tension and hiding exploitation.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 5
“Uber the company claims: we are not capitalists, we just organize a contact between those who offer a service... So on the one hand you usually own your own means of production: a car”41:36 Slavoj Žižek talks Nick Land AI singularity, ethics of psychoanalysis, Compact Magazine, and so on!pub. 2024-03-18 · 1:57:15
“A generalized Uberization of life... these new companies which are not even capitalists in the old sense. They just claim we mediate.”
“You who think you are exploited, you are all small capitalists.”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
contents · one story, 3 jobsuses
anarcho-capitalism
×1
objective social democracy
×1
precarious work
×1
Its cast and sources
populated by
alongside works
Every retelling 5
41:36 Slavoj Žižek talks Nick Land AI singularity, ethics of psychoanalysis, Compact Magazine, and so on!pub. 2024-03-18 · 1:57:15
Uber’s ideology claims everyone is a 'small capitalist' because drivers own their cars/computers, thereby blurring class tension and hiding exploitation., illustrating ideology,class tension
Uber and similar platform companies are presented as the paradigmatic case of de facto anarchism: they claim to merely mediate between workers and customers without being employers, instantiating the generalized 'Uberization of life' that dissolves welfare-state structures., illustrating anarcho-capitalism,objective social democracy
6:51 Žižek Chillstep Lofi background lecture for cleaning with ADHD | 2025 Slavoj Zizek Downtempo2025-09-04 · 1:12:48
Uber claims to be a neutral mediator, but ideologically convinces precarious workers they are 'small capitalists' who own their means of production., illustrating capitalism,ideology
Uber drivers own their car; programmers own their PC; so gig workers perceive themselves as free entrepreneurs competing with other precarious workers rather than with bosses, the 'most ingenious invention of today's capitalism', making solidarity impossible., illustrating precarious workers as free entrepreneurs,ideology,proletarization
An Uber driver tells Žižek he faces no capitalist exploitation because he owns his car (his means of production) and the company merely provides a 'general frame'; Žižek tries to argue with him about long-term precarity but the driver is not convinced. The point: material organization of the work itself produces the ideological perception, without any need for propaganda., illustrating entrepreneur of the self,fetishism of choice,ideology as illusion,material basis of ideology