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


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 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 micro-
frictions 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.

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 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

• The Technopolitical Jacket

• GoJek as City
III. Safety

• Safety Application
• Safety Net
IV. Temporality

• On-Demand Social Infrastructure

• Perpetual Precarity
V. Mobility

• Right to the Street

• Street Smart Technology
Fieldwork Methodology
Bibliography

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 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 micro-
frictions 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.

2 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/

3 As observed by myself in previous fieldwork in Singapore during early 2018.

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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 part-
time 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.

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 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/

6 “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/

7The 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

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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

9 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

10 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/

11Huang, 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/

12 Indeed, Temasek is the first non-commodity sovereign wealth fund in the world (incorporated 1974).

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 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 consensus-
based, 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-to-
day 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.


13“Awareness and Attitudes towards ASEAN”, ASEAN Foundation, 2007. — https://aseanfoundation.org/documents/FA-

New_%20Asean_Convert_lowres.pdf

14 Appendix A, a map screenshot from a Bloomberg news channel during March 2019.

15Used 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.

16 Albeit rough and imperfect, although, just like any other method of delineating Southeast Asia.

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 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 one kilo of high-tech products with a kilo of rice, I don’t think
we have enough.”
— BJ Habibie
The Technopolitical Jacket
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 project’s development was however 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. The aspiration to build an Indonesian
aircraft was revived in 2003, in a more manageable size, both in terms of its financial cost
and actual physical dimensions17 . The national aircraft company was renamed to ‘Dirgantara
Indonesia (Indonesian Aerospace)’ and built its first prototype that successfully flew in a test-
flight during August 201718. 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)19.
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

17 "IAe reveals five-year survival plan". Flight International. 28 Oct 2003. —https://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/
2003/2003%20-%202446.html

18 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-completes-
maiden-flight

19 Appendix B, IPTN-N250 during its test flight in Bandung, 2017. Only two such models have so far been built.

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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 spheres20.
As a comparable platform industry archetype to Grab, GoJek is an Indonesian ride hailing,
food delivery, logistics and payments (‘fintech’) platform. GoJek is the first ever Indonesian
private enterprise 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
writing GoJek’s driver fleet currently exceeds one million ‘pengojek’21 who ride an array of
motorcycles, cars and rickshaws across urban Indonesia22. In contrast to the form of SOE-led
technology development (like the IPTN), GoJek, a private company, 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!
(Children of the nation can!), which was most prominently employed throughout its
expansion phases into Vietnam and Thailand during 2018.23

20Sandiaga 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

21 Ojek driver in Bahasa Indonesia

22 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

23:“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, such as Joey
Alexander, the pianist”.. [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/the-story-behind-go-jek-advertising-campaigns-201884296d6e

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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 in 2015 to the United States24), while
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 relatively
short 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 ban, in order “not to prohibit local innovation”. This is indeed a telling
incident that exposes how highly Go-Jek is currently regarded by the Jokowi administration
in Indonesia as a local champion in the business landscape of the country. 25 So much so that,
Go-Jek’s well publicised expansion into Vietnam, the company’s first market outside of
Indonesia, was accompanied by the President himself.26 Building on such political potencies,
Go-Jek has grown to become a household name in any debate concerning contemporary
technological developments in Indonesia.
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
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’ 27 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).

24Asia 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.

25“‘Gojek Should Not Be Banned," Presiden Joko Widodo Says.” Sekretariat Kabinet Republik Indonesia, setkab.go.id/en/gojek-
should-not-be-banned-presiden-joko-widodo-says/.

26 Deutsche Welle. Jokowi Antar Go-Jek Rebut Pasar Vietnam | DW.COM, 12 Sept. 2018, www.dw.com/id/jokowi-antar-go-jek-
rebut-pasar-vietnam/a-45460666.

27 An expression in user-experience parlance, where an application employs everyday language instead of a ‘machine-like’
vocabulary within its frontend user interface.

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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”28; 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 channels29. 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 hailing
unicorn GoJek30. 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.

28“Urban Age Shaping Cities: AbdouMaliq Simone - Feral urbanism”. Published on Jul 21, 2016 by UrbanAge. —https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=--aMk1XEy7s

29Appendix 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.

30“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/

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 GoJek as City
Similar to how the demarcation of ‘Southeast Asia’ has typically been an often ephemeral and
intellectually contentious task, 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, Henri Lefebvre (1970) in a sense kindled the field of
sociology to move beyond a descriptive approach to urban research, embarking on a quest to
express metropolitan societies and phenomena with theoretical concepts. Inspired from
Foucault’s discussions of heterotopia (prisons, cemeteries, schools etc.), Lefebvre constructed
(inspired many other scholars to construct and analyse) archetypes of urban heterotopia:
locations of renegade commercial exchange, fairgrounds, caravanserais, sidewalks, suburbs
or any other vibrant context that enables rigorous discussions of spatiality and temporality.
Essentially, 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”31. In response, however, his
contemporary Manuel Castells (1972) contested his notion of ‘urban’ with an apparent
positivist approach, as he claimed that the ‘urban’ does not represent any kind of coherent
scientific object available for study.
In line with such developments, 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 development and sociology 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’32 to refer to a
specific form of hybrid suburbanism in Indonesia. The terms stuck well in urban theory
related literature and became a rather generic, standard way of referring to many other similar
contexts in the Global South and East Asia (Kusno, 2017). Building their scholarship upon
such theoretical background, contemporary anthropologists such as Abdoumaliq Simone
(2014) and 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 put forward the idea of
‘kampungkota’33 in his recent work “Provisional Notes on Semi Urbanisation”34.
Kampungkota, an adapted, specified version of a desakota 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 35 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.

31 Lefebvre, Henri. “The Urban Revolution”. University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

32 Amalgamation of desa (rural village) and kota (city) in Bahasa Indonesia

33 Kampung, literally means a community in Bahasa Indonesia, often used as a synonym to a village.

34 Harris, Richard. Vorms, Charlotte. “What's in a Name?: Talking about Urban Peripheries”. University of Toronto Press, 2017.

35 Referring to practices such as income pooling, peer to peer informal debt arrangements and similar ‘acts of resilience’.

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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. With the objective of bringing such seminal work of urban
theory in dialogue with Science and Technology Studies and insert the phenomena of the
widespread use of mobile platforms into the discussion, I offer demarcating a city in
Indonesia as where GoJek operates within. An exclusively urban phenomenon, GoJek is
prevalent in over 167 cities in Indonesia36; acting as a common denominator of everyday
commutes across the archipelago. 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 as in the West. 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 an urban area’ is the phasing out of GoJek ride options around (or vice versa).
Built as an innovative fix for traffic-laden contexts, the business model and typical
operational style of GoJek does not make much sense in rural, ‘long-distance’ contexts with
little vehicle presence. In 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 GoJek is an integral, robust and in many ways a socially intricate facet of
circulations in urban Indonesia, it is indeed a suitable to draw the boundaries of an Indonesian
city in accord of GoJek’s operational radius. Therefore, echoing the earlier approaches of
using an socioeconomic phenomenon (agriculture) to demarcate where the ‘urban’ begins and
ends, I offer to use a form of service industry, the mobility services of GoJek, to draw the
frontiers of the modern Indonesian city.


36 GoJek official statistics, as of November 2018. https://www.go-jek.com/blog/go-jek-dimana-mana/

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 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 ojeks37.
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 38 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

37 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.

38 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.

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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 biopolitical39 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’ 40.

39“…to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put life in order.” — Foucault, Michel. “History of Sexuality” Part Five. Volume 1. Éditions
Gallimard. 1984

40 “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

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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.
Insurance
The first of such benefits is work-related insurance41 . 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 occasions42.
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.
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 43. 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.
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

41Sumirat, 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

42This ‘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.

43 Normanda, Nosa. “Memori Ojek Pangkalan dan Monopoli Gojek” 14 June 2015. — https://eseinosa.com/2015/06/14/memori-
ojek-pangkalan-dan-monopoli-gojek/

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with the mediation of President Jokowi in Jakarta 44. 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 exception45, 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.


44 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-go-
jek"

45 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).

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 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

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cost’ (Rosenblat, 2018), echoing Michel Foucault’s (1977) definition of idleness as a threat to
stability (read: profitability) within the modern society46.
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 ‘on-
demand’ workers, as they are expected to be consistently ‘racing against time’. In my
conversations with Bintanese pengojek, 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 times47. 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 cities48.
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.


46 “… 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.

47 “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.

48 “…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.

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 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.

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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)49.
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 limbo50. 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. 


49In 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.

50 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.

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 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
Right to the Street
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 or East Java as is the case in Jakarta) and local Balinese taxi drivers has broke out
since the platforms launched in Bali in 201551.
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)52, 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.

51 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

52Indeed 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.

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This renders the platforms of Grab and GoJek to be an emancipatory form of technology, as
an inclusive tool for new comers, who would otherwise have 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 occasions53, 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. 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 Uber54),
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.
The ‘mobility’ section essentially aims to serve as a vivid illustration of tension caused by
digital disruption in Indonesia; approaching the word in all its synonyms: mobility both in the
sense of physical ‘movement’ within city traffic and also ‘social mobility’ and emancipation.
Crucially, this involves working through the implementations of online arrangements in an
offline state of frequent upheaval and renegotiation, one that is experienced as a perpetual
form of ‘digital disruption’. Such forms of ‘tension’ therefore, can not be pinned down to
discrete sociotectonic shifts at a certain time and place, but could be better understood and
delineated through observing the increasing presence of digital technology in daily routines.

53 “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… Budi hesitantly looks back on one of his more harrowing nights on the job: waiting to
pick up a tourist outside a dance club in upscale Seminyak in 2016, a man knocked on his window. “My car didn’t have automatic
sensor locks, and he tried to pry the door open,” he says. “The guest got in the car on the other side and I immediately locked it –
but not before this man and his three friends carved a ‘U’ on the back of my car. I have been chased. I have been threatened. I
once begged the police to let me sleep in my car in the station parking lot – drivers were chasing me on scooters. I needed
protection. My doors are always locked now.”. — 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/

54The fact that Grab did not have an official headquarters in Indonesia, its largest market and source of revenue, and hence did not
pay tax in the country also did not help in such situations.

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 Street Smart Technology
Platform based ride-hailing is a form of technology that habits within a certain assemblage of
physical and social infrastructure. Going beyond the more commonly employed “product-
market match” approach, this thesis aims to illustrate a “technology-habitat” match. Such a
habitat is made up of a rich mix of conditions, which warranted the use of motorbikes to
become taxis in urban Indonesia — which indeed boasts a set of conditions that are
revealingly parallel, if not identical, to most other Southeast Asian metropolitan areas. As
much as it is impossible to pin down the exact time and place where the first ever pengojek
took a ride, studying Indonesia’s last decades reveals that the practice of offering motorbike
rides for hire existed as early as the 1970s and the number of ojeks on the streets suddenly
spiked up to its present-day scale in the late 1990s due to the massive lay-offs (Lee, 2018).
These lay-offs from factories, offices created a disenfranchised class in search for an
immediate job — hence the informal market for urban transportation and street food
proliferated rapidly. Although, what is notable is that such crises and mass unemployment
spikes have occured in so many other economies across the world before and ever since, but
very few have resulted in the creation of such a robust street economy that circulates around
motorbikes. Building on Claudio Sopranzetti’s (2018) identification of four main conditions
that enables the proliferation of motorcycles for public transportation in cities, I propose to
draw a certain typology, or in other words an ideal habitat for street economy based
technology companies like GoJek and Grab can thrive within: A lax mode of public
administration that enables a robust street economy to prevail; a gridlocked traffic
infrastructure caused by lack of public 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.
Condition 1: Public Non-Administation
An example of an essential detail within the genesis of the pengojek is the certain lax mode
of governmental administration, which is indeed widely prevalent across Southeast Asia,
arguably excluding Singapore and Brunei, that enables urban informal mobility to become
mainstream. The practice of ojek driving is based on many layers of informalities. 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, Bandung and Denpasar,
ojek has become as 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. During
my interviews with Go Jek drivers in Bintan Island, I have frequently came across the “no
accident no police” principle. According to many Go Jek and taxi drivers, the police only gets
involved with the traffic flow when accidents occur, demonstrating the temporal nature of the
rule of law.. The informal urban mobility market in Indonesia does not only enable a
perpetual gig economy to thrive, but also, expectedly, enhances ground-level corruption as
well. As an example in the Riau Islands, the Indonesian Navy, in collaboration with the local
police, reportedly “administers” the port area pengojek bases through imposing certain fees to
be able to operate in that space — which are in a sense informal taxes, that tend to hover
around 5000 Rupiah per day.

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Condition 2: Infrastructural Gridlock
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
area55. 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.
Condition 3: Cheap Hardware
As much as there may be an informal market and an urban setting itching for a motor-bike
related solution, as long as the devices themselves are not feasibly available to the
mainstream buyer, the ojek mass in urban Indonesia would not have reached its critical point.
An average cost of new motorbike in Indonesia hovers around $1000 USD and tends to be
offered with comparatively (to ASEAN countries) low tax rates and with instalment options
for payment. Prices and payment options tend to be even more accessible for ojek drivers, as
they typically drive second hand bikes and rent the bikes from familiar bike-shops in any
urban setting. Almost all locally produced and Japanese branded, motorcycles in Indonesia
therefore tend to cost around a third of a yearly income of a typical ojek driver (which I
estimate to be around $3000 USD ~, according to fieldwork data), making it a feasible capital
to invest in for a swift turn around rate. 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 lower 56.
As well as motorbikes, street smart technology requires a 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 settings57.
The key reasons for such an exponential spike in Indonesian smartphone user base was the

55 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

56Ghalib, 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

57Statista, “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/

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introduction of Chinese low-cost smartphone brands such as Oppo58 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.
Condition 4: Precarious Labour
In regards to the demographic composition of the pengojeks, it can be observed that the
labour pool of informal mobility in urban (or peri-urban dwellers, orang desakota) 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 Go-Jek and Grab further brings down
the entry barriers as they lessen 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 fares59 are dramatically reduced. Indeed many 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
to be able to get such 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
knowledge of motorbike driving60 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.

58Soo, 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

59 In all cities that I visited in Indonesia, traditional ojek prices tends to be around three times more than Go-Jek or Grab.

60 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.

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 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.

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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.


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Appendix A

30 of 47
Appendix B


31 of 47
Appendix C

32 of 47
Appendix D

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