Citizens and Publics

A response to the Puliyabaazi Episode on 10 Minute Delivery

Puliyabaazi Episode on 10 Minute Delivery

In one of my favourite episodes of Puliyabaazi where they discuss the merits of selling blood¹, Saurabh said something which became a very useful addition to my mental model latticework- He said that the icky feeling some of us feel at the prospect of a market for blood/ organ selling, and the like, is a kind of aesthetic revulsion more than anything else and we usually conflate it for an ethical standpoint despite the seller being worse off if they didn’t/ couldn’t sell. And I told myself, yes, that makes a lot of sense; Just because something doesn’t feel right, doesn’t mean its indefensible. However when he brought the same argument in this episode, I wasn’t convinced. The rest of this post is an attempt to understand why.

In the classical Indian triumvirate of Satyam Shivam Sundaram, Truth-Ethics-Aesthetics are inextricable from each other. Or like someone like John Berger might argue, our way of seeing the world and identifying what’s beautiful and what’s ugly, what’s good and what’s bad is shaped by social and political conditions which invariably embed within them an ethical framework. In his recent talk on Liberalism, Prof. Alexandre Lefebvre proposed how one can trace cultural changes in a society by observing what swear words are acceptable in society and what aren’t². Similarly, all arguments of Overton Windows and ‘Politics is the downstream of Culture’ convey the importance of wider social acceptance to any proposed changes . The same then also applies to new products and advertisements corporations introduce.

I agree with Saurabh that how one feels about events in a society is not a sufficient condition to seek change; But the feeling is both inevitable and necessary. Towards the end of his AshokaX course on Justice, after we had discussed many major philosophers and various viewpoints and explanations stretching across millennia, Prof. Pratap Bhanu Mehta ended, and I paraphrase, with this note, “At the end of the day notions of fairness and justice, for all these theories, rest on some deep-seated, innate sense of being in the world. Every child knows what it is to be treated unfairly”. It is a point that Khyati brings up a couple of times in the episode but it isn’t explored further. Both Saurabh and Pranay seem so utterly convinced about the fairness of the market setup that they do not allow to question its metaphysical presuppositions and deviations.

Anyone who has spoken with an Uber driver or a Zomato delivery executive in India in the past few years knows how trapped they feel, how the belief that the system is rigged against them is pervasive, how brutal and hard their life is. Again, Pranay is right to argue that we imagine ourselves in their shoes and assume that since its bad for us, it would be equally bad for them, without perhaps understanding that for them the alternative is even worse. I agree that at some level it’s not empathy but projection³. However, most of us are not so tunnel-visioned nor narcissistic to not be able to talk to them and understand that even for them, what was promised and what has transpired has dramatically widened. It is not the work that we’re arguing is brutal; It is the coercion and cheating that is. We are reducing them from workers to algorithmic subjects⁴.

Zomato’s Deepinder Goyal hits the nail right on the head when he says most of us rich urbanites feel guilt when we look at how hard these folks work to make amounts that seem like peanuts to us, and that makes us queasy⁵. While he might be a very decent human being whose heart bleeds at the unfairness, what he conceals is that in his role as a CEO he has a different set of loyalties- to shareholders and venture capitalists- and he will have no option but to wring as much from both restaurants and drivers to keep his customers happy- for now⁶. Our guilt, as well-meaning but complicit customers, does not arise from them being on the lower rung of the socioeconomic order; It comes from us knowing the platform’s being unfair to them and so by extension we are in the wrong too. As customers it frustrates us when an Uber driver calls us and asks us where the destination is, worried that they may cancel, but shouldn’t we be angry with the platform for not being transparent with the driver and letting them know the destination in the first place⁷? If the driver has agency as Pranay claims, then why do different parties in the contract have access to different amounts of information? The rosy picture of being able to pick and choose jobs, and using the flexibility to pursue other endeavours might be true from their anecdotal experience but does not check out with mine. It is one thing to state that you are free to take it or leave it; another to situate it in a real configuration and understand how narrow that degree of freedom is. We know in our bones that this is a form of coercion and if today someone else is on the receiving side, tomorrow we could be too. Like Khyati so admirably says, if I don’t want to be imposed upon, they shouldn’t have to be imposed upon too.

Which is also why Saurabh’s insistence to not pass value judgement rung hollow. Value judgement is an integral part of being a moral agent in the world and every action, or its lack, is based not just on simple, immediate, material self-interest but also around a more complex conception of the self. Right off the bat, even free market evangelism is not a universally defensible or applicable axiom but a considered position. It holds some social principles as more valid than others- private property, contractual obligations, price as the best possible signal (despite VC distortions) etc.- and that in itself is a value judgement⁸.

Aside from the argument that no social arrangement can be value-agnostic, we are seeing the effects of purportedly free market/ neoliberal reforms in the first world. To adapt Dennis Glover, a society is not just an economy⁹ and while people can perhaps adapt to social changes when there is upward social mobility¹⁰, take that away and what you’re left with is resentment that’s waiting to be channelled into extreme politics¹¹. So even from the lens of a purely instrumental “State should intervene as little as possible in markets” view, undesirable outcomes are just around the corner¹².

When Saurabh said this 10-Minute Delivery Model was a kind of innovation, that was a value judgement too: that any changes to speed up any process is commendable- irrespective of its ends or wider effects. So I again nodded in agreement with Khyati who countered that you couldn’t call this innovation without debasing the word¹³. Why did both Saurabh and Pranay not bother to ask who asked for a 10 minute delivery and why Zomato felt compelled to work on the process? Why is it that customer convenience¹⁴, no matter how minor, is a non-negotiable, no matter what the externality, and anything a company does towards that end is to be applauded¹⁵?

We are not just isolated apparitions of consumers and producers whose relationship is mediated by a platform¹⁶; We are also co-citizens. We share a city. At the risk of sounding unforgivingly sanctimonous, I don’t think many of us want our cities to be transformed into a barren landscape populated with automated warehouses and ghost kitchens traversed only by drones dropping off packages and delivery partners delivering food while we sit in our cocooned houses impervious to others we call our countrymen. It’ll only accelerate the dissolution of the idea of a public. We want to go out more often, to parks, restaurants, film theatres, bookshops, vegetable markets, and see people, both like and unlike ourselves, to learn of our cohabitation and allegiance to each other as embodied, sentient planetary beings¹⁷.

None of this is a dig against those drivers and riders who are choosing to voluntarily do these jobs perhaps because they are the best opportunities available to them right now. Like Saurabh and Pranay argue, any heavy-handed regulatory intervention specific to this area might cause immense economic hardship. Having said that, we can have public policy suggestions to create new industries and new opportunities. In the China Economics course I’m currently enrolled in with Takshashila, I learnt that the Chinese Government took conscious steps to steer away the economy from demand-driven Gaming, eCommerce services to “real-economy” industrial technology like EVs, Solar, and Semiconductor¹⁸. That sounds like a step in the right direction to me.

China probably has a hundred major problems, from human rights abuses to cultural genocide, that are not as well known as the success of its development story but I also think they are doing something right: from leading 800 million people out of poverty to now becoming a world leader of green transition. And from what I can see its because their economics is subservient to their politics. Again, I’m more than willing to concede that I know too little about the day-to-day of living in China¹⁹ and happy to be disabused of these notions but the more fundamental point is that the Indian kind of extremely unequal economic system is neither defensible nor desirable.

So the question then becomes what can we do? New policy is imperative- not just in the area of labour protection but more importantly in tech regulation: We could enforce Interoperability, Right to Repair, Transparency over Algorithmic Decision-Making etc. We can build alternative models/ platform co-operatives. At the least we could support workers not just economically but also give them courtesy as people²⁰. There is a lot of talk on the return of the Civilisational State- by people such as J. Sai Deepak and Bruno Macaes- and a civilisational state cannot exist without positing the definition, up for constant discussion and reform ofcourse, of the good life²¹- not just economically but also socially, intellectually, and culturally.

Most of all we need to demand better- of companies, of the government, and of ourselves. We are not just consumers whose only choices are to take it or leave it. Not just Loyalty or Exit but also Voice²². Before the Courage to Voice and the Strength to Build comes the Imagination to Envision a different world, a better world, and that demands reading, writing, listening, and questioning.

1. क्या खून बेचना वैध होना चाहिए? -Puliyabaazi

2. "At different moments in time a different word becomes bad or taboo in society. And by tracing different swear words, you can very quickly reverse engineer what a society takes to be moral, valuable, sacrosanct” -Liberalism as a Way of Life

3. “If you approach a negotiation thinking the other guy thinks like you, you are wrong. That’s not empathy, that’s a projection.” -Chris Voss

4. "More significantly, I experienced how a platform transforms workers into algorithmic subjects, responsive to digital stimuli designed to maximise platform value rather than worker welfare.” -Kasim Saiyyad

5. “Pre-gig era, the rich could enjoy luxury without moral discomfort. Labor was out of sight. Now, every doorbell ring is a reminder of systemic inequality. That’s why debates explode. It’s not just policy. It’s emotional reckoning.” -Deepinder Goyal

6. "Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification.” -Cory Doctorow

7. This was quite prevalent when I used to live in Bengaluru about a c.2016-17. Apparently there’s been an update in 2022 and now drivers do know the destination.

8. For instance, when a self-proclaimed liberal like myself states that the individual is sovereign, I know its limitations while insisting on their broader acceptance. Neither can an individual can truly be completely sovereign nor is it desirable. But we insist on that value on a broader, tacit reality of co-existence.

9. “An economy is not a society.” -Dennis Glover

10. "..it’s this amalgamation of what kinds of economic outcomes you produce and how, in a sense, people feel about their condition.” -Pratap Bhanu Mehta

11. “ressentiment, an existential resentment of other people’s being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness, which, as it lingers and deepens, poisons civil society and undermines political liberty, and is presently making for a global turn to authoritarianism and toxic forms of chauvinism.” -Pankaj Mishra

12. I can imagine my Takshashila and Takshashila-adjacent heroes and gurus, Amit Varma, Pranay Kotasthane, Anupam Manur, shaking their heads and either saying that state coercion is worse or that most states don’t allow for free markets to function so MAGA and Brexit, to take a couple, are not valid examples and I’m willing to concede partially. As someone who grew up in a post-liberalisation India, I indeed don’t know how bad things were prior to the 1991 reforms but I did come of age around the 2008 financial crisis and my instinct is to look at the rapacious financial sector with suspicion. Prof. Vivek Chibber’s Really Existing Capitalism is my counter to this image of perfectly efficient markets.

13. It’s one of Don Watson’s Weasel Words

14. “What exactly is the nature of the convenience we prize so highly, and why do we find it so valuable? Perhaps it seems unnecessary to ask such questions, as if the value of convenience were self-evident.” -LM Sacasas

15. Almost like a consumer corollary of the Friedman Doctrine

16. “technofeudalism: a new economic order in which platforms behave like lords owning the fiefs that have replaced markets.” -Yanis Varoufakis

17. “third places are important for democracy, civic engagement, and a sense of place; [they] are the answer to loneliness, political polarization, and climate resilience” -Ray Oldenberg/ Karen Christensen

18. "What are India’s start-ups of today? We are focused on food delivery apps, turning unemployed youths into cheap labour so the rich can get their meals without moving out of their house. But is that the destiny of India? Is the future of India satisfied with that?” -Piyush Goyal

19. "China would have presented me with improved opportunities for socio-economic mobility, so that even though I may have been born impoverished, there was a better chance I wouldn’t die as wretched in China, as in India.” -Pallavi Aiyar

20. “Most of them say thank you, Sometimes (though its very rare), customer asks if we need water. That makes me feel appreciated. And in the rarest occasion they give cash tips. (Happens like once a year with me). But a simple “thank you” with a smile is more than enough for me.” -Zomato Delivery Partner AMA

21. I’m deeply influenced by Prof. Michael Sandel in this regard

22. “Exit and voice themselves represent a union between economic and political action. Exit is associated with Adam Smith’s invisible hand, in which buyers and sellers are free to move silently through the market, constantly forming and destroying relationships. Voice, on the other hand, is by nature political and at times confrontational.” -From Albert O. Hirschman