Dialect Anthropol DOI 10.1007/s10624-017-9465-6 Neoliberal eclipse: Donald Trump, corporate monopolism, and the changing face of work Gregory Duff Morton 1 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017 Abstract At the core of his political rhetoric, Donald Trump speaks about work: the experi- ence of laboring, the agonies of the labor market, and the future of employment. This article considers how the anthropology of work can contribute to an analysis of the political moment. Many commentators, including Trump himself, have interpreted a vote for Trump as an act of labor nostalgia, a gesture of yearning for an industrial past. Such commentary describes Trump voters by describing the jobs that many of them once did—manufacturing jobs. But what if, instead, we considered the jobs that many Trump voters now do, that is, service jobs? What if Trump’s discourse, with its themes of domination and submission, offers an incisive response to the intimacies of power as lived by restaurant workers and customer service representatives? Could the election come into focus as an uprising in the service sector? This article takes two steps. First, it engages with literature from sociology and economics in order to point towards a crucial transformation in the US workplace since the 2008 financial crisis: the ascendancy of monopolistic corporations that defy the neoliberal model. Second, the article explores new developments in the service sector by assessing the work experience of Uber drivers. Trump’s rhetoric can be interpreted as a response to the 2008 crisis and the novel modes of service work that the crisis made possible—including Uber. As it faces the political consequences of today’s toil, the anthropology of work gains a new research agenda. Keywords Labor . Neoliberalism . Populism . Uber . Sharing economy This paper is dedicated to Bill Drew, dreamer and agitator. I discussed some of these ideas with Bill and hoped to share the paper with him. Before he died, Bill posted his autobiography—a story of communism, cocaine, and regeneration in the Midwestern US—at http://www.fortunateson.us/. And Bill, to answer your wish, you were an example in the struggle for a just society. Note: Some elements of this paper have been published online as Morton, Gregory Duff. 2017. Trump, Uber, and the Changing Shape of Work. Anthropology News website, May 18, 2017. http://www.anthropology-news. org/index.php/2017/05/18/trump-uber-and-the-changing-shape-of-work/. Accessed July 21, 2017. This paper revises and expands upon that text. * Gregory Duff Morton duffmorton@yahoo.com; gregory_morton@brown.edu 1 Bard College, PO Box 5000, Campus Road, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504, USA  Morton It was unclear in 2008 during the huge Western financial collapse that we were going to live in a different world from now on. -Viktor Orbán (2014) BYou’re fired.^ A decade ago, in the heat of the TV lights, those two words served as Donald Trump’s trademark. The Apprentice was a world energized by endless competition, with no jobs and all business plans. No safe employment here. During his 2016 summer campaign, Trump began broadcasting an altogether new message. Now, at fairgrounds and stadiums across the USA, he spoke of good jobs, long- term jobs. In policy conversations, Trump rapidly dropped his initial interest in decreasing the minimum wage. The minimum wage needed to go up, Trump declared in July, because Bpeople have to be taken care of^ (Jacobson 2016). Now, it seemed, Trump’s line was You’re hired. How did Trump turn around? If he started as the avatar of flexible competition, how did he become the standard-bearer for stable employment? How did Trump go from You’re fired to You’re hired? What changed was not Trump, but the world around him. Trump’s rhetoric imitated a trend that had already been set by a white tide of conservatives in Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere. And this trend, in turn, has everything to do with changes in the everyday texture of work (Shoshan and Muehlebach 2012; Appel 2012), its patterns and its feelings. One cold night in December 2016, I arrived at a US airport and glanced at the chain of taxis waiting, puffing exhaust, with no customers. A ride in one would cost me at least $35. Instead, I hailed a $19 Uber. The driver—call him Sebastián—pulled up more boldly than I expected. Until recently, Uber drivers had played a cat-and-mouse game at this airport, messaging passengers to meet them at obscure locations where the traffic cops would not stop anyone for operating without a taxi permit. But Uber had now negotiated a modus vivendi, paying a small fee to the airport, and so Sebastián steered his car straight into the passenger pickup lane. Sebastián and I chatted about my trip and his teenage daughter, who might soon go to live with family in the Midwest. Much of his Uber pay, Sebastian said, went straight into a bank account for her college; he already had enough saved for her first year. Uber was Sebastian’s second job and he drove late into the night, in a car that was his on paper but that Uber, in part, commanded. Uber determined whom he would pick up, how much he would get paid per ride, and how and when the money would arrive. He could refuse to accept a ride request, but if he refused too often, Uber could fire him by kicking him off the app (Slee 2015: 72; Campbell 2016b). The company stipulated how old the car could be,1 who else might accompany him in the car (Campbell 2016b), and even how he would speak to the people he transported.2 And the company by turns exposed him to and shielded him from the police. Uber’s specialty, as it turns out, is less technology than law—bending laws, breaking laws, and remaking laws (Isaac 2017)—and Uber’s formidable legal team was the reason for the new boldness in Sebastián’s eyes as he picked me up in the legitimate passenger lane. 1 Uber regulations specify the acceptable age for a car. Car age limits vary by city. Moreover, some drivers lease or rent their cars through Uber-related companies, with car payments that can be automatically deducted from the driver’s Uber earnings (Wang 2016; also see https://www.uber.com/a/carousel-vs-1-pp?exp=61219_c). 2 See, for example, http://ubermovement.com/attitude-complaint/. Uber drivers who receive low ratings may find themselves required to pay to attend a training on customer service (Smith 2015). Neoliberal eclipse: Donald Trump, corporate monopolism, and the changing... Words like market and entrepreneur seemed inadequate to describe the relationship between Sebastián and me. We were relating through a corporation that night. We had been brought together, each of us, through our enduring bond to that corporation, through the roles that it assigned to us. And the corporation made use of bureaucracy to regiment the details of our interaction with each other—although the bureaucracy was contained inside an app. When Sebastián and I came to the door of my house, I had no cash in my wallet. To tip him, I would have had to run upstairs and dig out a bill to pass him by hand: at the time, Uber made no tip option available on the phone. As Sebastián pulled off into the chilly air, what I did not know—but would soon learn—was that according to a recent regional calculation (McQuown et al. 2016), he was likely earning less than minimum wage. Donald Trump’s message raises uncomfortable questions for anthropology, but so does Sebastián’s job. In both cases, the term neoliberalism does not quite feel like it fits any longer. What if neoliberalism is over (Fraser 2017)? What would that even mean (Marcus 2017)? And how could anthropologists investigate it? In this article, I begin trying to untie these difficult knots by considering, first, some evidence from the disciplines of economics and sociology, evidence, in particular, about corporate size and corporate profits. Then, I turn to a closer look at the connection between corporate trends and contemporary conservative political rhetoric. Finally, I lay out an ethnographic argument about new directions that may be emerging in US work relations, especially in work on Internet platforms. First, though, let me present a few tentative theses. Neoliberalism has ended: that social and economic cycle, which began in the early 1970s, turns out to have come to a close in 2008. The market is in retreat. If people around the globe have spent the last 40 years learning how to mediate their social relations through contact with markets, then the new tendency is just the reverse. People are now learning to mediate social relations through the bureaucracy of corporate structure, and corporations are serving as the intermediaries between workers and markets. Corporations, it seems, are increasing in size and complex- ity. And Donald Trump is the voice, the sign, of the new corporate world—our new big boss. The sun sets on the neoliberal era Over the course of the tumultuous 1970s, as social scientists of varying stripes have argued (Clammer 2016; Comaroff and Comaroff 2000), there emerged the outlines of a new socio- economic order. Globally, trade routes opened up and migration increased. Unions were suppressed. Companies knit together production networks that spanned oceans, with a shoe cobbled by one subcontractor and its lace knitted by a different subcontractor on a different continent. In political discourse, the rational individual was hailed as the indispensable hero. That was the neoliberal era. What Bneoliberal^ meant has been a source of extended debate. Varying polemicists emphasize varying elements of the zeitgeist: the regressive redistribution of wealth (Harvey 2005), the political guidance of market rule (Brenner et al. 2010), a novel technology of the self (Foucault et al. 2008 [1979]: 226), or an ideology in which markets were believed to know the truth about individual agents even better than those individual agents did  Morton themselves (Mirowski 2013: 54).3 No matter which definition one adopts, however, the consequences for workers seem clear. These consequences have been ably documented by a wide range of anthropologists (LiPuma and Lee 2004; Ho 2009). Employment, at sites as distinct as Zambia (Ferguson 1999) and Japan (Allison 2012), became more temporary, more contingent, and less guaranteed. In wealthy countries, self-employment increased markedly (Bögenhold and Staber 1991; Katz and Krueger 2016). In poor and middle-income countries, jobs arrived quickly and left quickly, as if barely rooted to location at all (Appel 2012). Income inequality increased in many countries, but on a global level, it decreased, as nations grew closer to each other, and millions left poverty in China, India, and Latin America (Milanovic 2013; Milanovic 2015; Warner et al. 2014; for an insightful look at financiers’ ideas of about inequality, see Souleles 2017). Flexibility was preached as the epoch’s cardinal virtue. Workers were to be disciplined by the market at every moment, presenting themselves constantly to market forces (Ho 2009). In fact, they were to become not workers, but entrepreneurs of the self (Foucault et al. 2008 [1979]). This was the world of The Apprentice, a You’re-fired world. The neoliberal era relied on a particular form of corporate structure. Firms needed to become small and lean—that is, dramatically different from the large, horizontally and vertically integrated corporations of the Fordist era (Amin 1994; Storper 1994: 217; for a more critical view, see Baca 2004). By the 1980s, massive corporations were under attack by financial traders who wielded hostile takeovers, selling assets, laying off workers, and splitting companies into tiny pieces (Ho 2015). The world’s major companies turned meaningfully smaller, each one focused increasingly on a single Bcore competency,^ like designing shoes or producing computer chips (Milberg and Winkler 2010: 29). Under this neoliberal regime, US corporate profits came to take up a smaller proportion of gross domestic income (see Fig. 1). In 1990, profits from domestic industries accounted for only 3.3% of US gross domestic income, the lowest share since 1934. Then, around the time of the 2008 crash, something different happened to the US corporation. Corporation size grew again. Industry concentration increased to its highest level since the early 1980s (Grullon et al. 2016: Fig. 1A). The share of US corporate profits rose higher than it ever had during the entire 40-year neoliberal era. In 2012, profits from domestic 3 Some altogether different options are also possible, options that trouble the periodization separating the neoliberal era from Fordism. One such option is to argue that the neoliberal era never really existed as such. By this logic, the term neoliberalism agglomerates certain specific occurrences in wealthy nations and treats them as a coherent, globally relevant whole (see Baca 2004). Another option is to suggest that the conditions referred to as neoliberal are in fact the symptoms of a very common state of affairs, one that recurs in world history during moments when major centers of accumulation enter into decline: neoliberalism is Bthe normal state previous to and following the short Keynesian interlude^ (Friedman and Friedman 2013: 251). A third option involves accepting the periodization itself, but claiming that the vaunted Bcompetitiveness^ of the neoliberal era always had a mendacious quality to it—in other words, dominant corporate actors were managing the outcomes all along. Neoliberal leaders, on this view, used the free market more as a slogan than as a guide to action. Thus, the four qualities of work that I describe as characteristically new (at the end of this article) are not so new after all. Each of these options represents an important (critical) insight. For the purpose of the present article, however, I follow convention (especially guided by Mirowski) and employ the term Bneoliberal^ as if it referred to a coherent historical conjuncture, one marked by competitiveness. What matters most for the argument here presented, though, is not that neoliberalism itself be seen as a largely coherent social-economic-cultural epoch, but instead, simply, that certain consistencies be identified in firm size trends, production strategies, and corporate governance among dominant global corporations between the 1970s and the 1990s. These consistencies, moreover, involve an increase in the churn of the labor market in wealthy and middle-income nations, thus leading to a rise (at least in some sectors) of what might be called Bcompetition.^ Neoliberal eclipse: Donald Trump, corporate monopolism, and the changing... Fig. 1 Share of US gross domestic income devoted to corporate profits, 1929–2013 industries accounted for 7% of US gross domestic income, a level last seen in 1966, during the apex of Fordism.4 Who were the new behemoths? In part, the giant companies came from the Internet economy. Among the world’s ten largest firms in 2016 (by market capitalization) were Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook (Economist 2016b). Each of these companies had obtained a dominant position—sometimes nearly a monopoly—in one area of digital commerce. Moreover, each was expanding to take over other areas outside of its core competency, with Google designing driverless cars and Amazon selling server space. This is, in part, the story of network effects. Once a sizeable chunk of consumers connect to a single Bnetwork^—like Facebook for social media or Amazon for books—then it becomes easier for other consumers to follow them, and eventually that single network turns into the default choice for everyone (Economist 2016b). Network effects help to explain the monopolistic tendency that has so transformed the Internet, which was once the realm of anarchic diversity but has now turned into an ordered space that users tend to enter through a few highly planned and highly profitable corporate doorways: eBay, Google, AirBnB, Instagram, and the like. 4 Also see Economist (2016a). Barkai (2016) argues that, underneath these surface-level data on decreasing profit share from the 1970s to the early 2000s, there lies a dramatic increase in the amount of gross value added in the US economy that is devoted to profit. This increase, he observes, has occurred largely unabated since the late 1980s. Barkai’s data does not fit neatly with the claim that I make here, although it may be worthwhile to observe that he charts a striking acceleration in the growth of the profit share starting in the early 2000s, in the years right before the crisis.  Morton But digital giants tell only part of the story. Grullon et al. (2016) recently found that more than three quarters of all US industries have become more concentrated in fewer hands since the beginning of the twenty-first century. A similar trend can be observed in the employment patterns of large companies in the USA. In the early 1980s, firms with over 10,000 employees shed workers, and these firms’ share of the overall US workforce dropped from nearly 27% (in 1981) to just over 23% (in 1988). By the late 1990s, these large firms had turned around. They began hiring again, and as they grew in size, they came, by 2014, to employ almost 28% percent of the workforce (Fig. 2). This change is not confined to the USA. Among the world’s 100 biggest transnational companies, employment actually declined in the early 1990s, as companies grew leaner and reduced the number of workers they hired. Then, after 2008, employment expanded notably (Fig. 3). In retrospect, then, 2008 does seem like a useful signpost for a watershed: a moment when corporations turned a corner and started growing larger, broader, less competitive, less focused, and more all-encompassing. The unregulated market lost its luster. Suddenly, once again, it seemed worthwhile to try managing human relationships through bureaucracy. That last word—bureaucracy—requires some explanation. Here, I am not using Bbureaucracy^ as a synonym for Bgovernment.^ Instead, I am pointing towards a pendulum, a long-term oscillation in the dynamics of capital. One point on the pendulum’s path is market exposure, as old management structures are gleefully destroyed, and workers find themselves exposed constantly to market trade—entrepreneurs at every moment. On the opposite side, the pendulum swings towards market insulation. Corporations expand, and they mediate between the worker and the market.5 The oscillation is, at base, a change in the signs of authority that define the labor relation. During the moment of market exposure, work relationships tend to be expressed through the metaphor of the transient money bargain. It is as if every act is a trade between a buyer and a seller. By contrast, during the moment of market insulation, work relationships are expressed through the metaphor of hierarchy, the connection between a boss and a subordinate. Markets remain in the background, as the ultimate arbiters of price, but on a day-to-day basis, workers relate primarily through the corporation. You do not act because the market tells you to. You act because your boss tells you to. This second metaphor sounds familiar today. It is the same hierarchical dynamic that is so eloquently thematized in the rhetoric of power and powerlessness, domination and submission, and humiliation and restoration that Donald Trump borrows from his global conservative peers. 5 I am gesturing, here, towards the academic debate on firm size—the extended conversation about why corporations are larger or smaller at different points in history. Coase (1937) famously suggested that firm size depends on marketing costs and the diminishing return to managerial control. His argument was followed by an extended literature that contrasted markets and hierarchy: Bmarket transactions among firms and hierarchical administration within firms^ (Stinchcombe 1990: 194). According to this literature, if (a) marketing was cheap or (b) it was difficult for management to monitor one more worker, then firms ceased growing and instead relied on the market to buy and sell their inputs and outputs. If the reverse was true, then firms grew, tending to incorporate more and more aspects of the supply chain inside the corporation, where it could be controlled through the hierarchy of corporate management. For an analysis of the historical factors that have pushed US firm size upwards and downwards over the twentieth century, see Gilson et al. 2009, who focus on explaining the smaller firm sizes of the neoliberal era by looking to the role of technological uncertainty, brought about by the disruptive pace of innovation in computers. For a discussion about perhaps one of the paradigmatic historical cases of transition from market anarchy to corporate management—the emergence of the Dutch East India Company to control the spice trade—see Adams 1996 (especially footnote 5). Neoliberal eclipse: Donald Trump, corporate monopolism, and the changing... Fig. 2 US workers employed by firms in different size classes, 1977–2014 Sun kings The shift in corporate structure has its political corollaries, some of which have been gaining steam for more than a decade—and some of which sound quite progressive. In the USA, since the 2001 Enron episode, corporate re-regulation (in the name of consumer protection) has been an ongoing project undertaken by the Democratic Party (Economist 2016c). Chinese policy analyses, over the same years, became full of proclamations about the importance of raising wages, with the state nudging companies away from an export orientation and towards consumption-driven development6 (Ma et al. 2017; Pieterse 2015). In Latin America, a crop of left-wing leaders proclaimed the advent of Bpost-neoliberalism,^ undoing some of the excesses of the Washington Consensus and marshaling government power to guide corporate growth (Mendoza 2017, Ban 2013). Indeed, it is not a coincidence that, in the USA, the most dramatic policy consequence of the 2008 crash was the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Nor is it a coincidence that the 6 China’s situation is enormously complex, but one might suppose that the gradual Chinese move away from export-oriented growth is, in some senses, the hallmark of the current era, with other national governments adopting more protectionist policies in response to (or in imitation of) the Chinese state’s interest in building a robust domestic market. Perhaps Donald Trump is mostly copying China.  Morton Fig. 3 Number of employees at the world’s top 100 multinational corporations, 1990–2015 ACA enjoyed the support of major corporate backers. The moment after 2008—even before 2008—seemed almost pre-scripted to fit into a narrative about the state’s rediscovered capacity to partner with big companies, protect citizens, and shepherd a mixed economy. If this narrative initially had a moderately left-of-center feel, the last 3 years have amply displayed its conservative potential. The Bwhite tide,^ cresting early in Hungary, Poland, and Britain, is stirred up by political leaders who are only too willing to use the state as a tool to manage the renewed gargantuan corporations. These leaders are anti-neoliberal conservatives (see Feinberg's (2017) sharp and insightful comments), and they reveal some uncomfortable truths about the idea of a mixed economy. In a programmatic speech, Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, offers a telling critique of economic competition, a critique which (I think) must also be read as Orbán’s defense of corporate monopoly, especially monopoly directed in coordination with the state. In my opinion, the most provocative and exciting question surfacing in the Western world during the last year can be summarized as follows, applying necessary simplifi- cation: competition existing among nations in the world, competition existing among alliances and forces of the world has been supplemented by a new element. Everyone was only talking about competition in the world economy. […] Yet there is an even more important race. I would articulate this as a race to invent a state that is most capable of making a nation successful. As the state is nothing else but a method of organizing a Neoliberal eclipse: Donald Trump, corporate monopolism, and the changing... community […] The defining aspect of today’s world can be articulated as a race to figure out a way of organizing communities, a state that is most capable of making a nation competitive (Orbán and Tóth 2014). Orbán ends that speech with a celebration of the Hungarian state’s purchase of MKB, a formerly private bank. What Orbán envisions is not a society without markets, but rather a society in which workers relate to the market through the mediation of a bureaucracy—what I have referred to as the Bmarket-insulated mode.^ One of the ugliest aspects of this mode is its perverse mobilization of social class. As became clear during previous, twentieth century outbreaks of enthusiasm for the mixed economy, the nation-state tends to be the condition of visibility for class. That is, the nation- state has often been the context that makes it possible for people to see social class, speak of it, and take action in its name7 (see Kalb’s prescient observations (2009)). Class movements over the last century, whatever their utopian aspirations, frequently came into being as movements in dialog with the national state. Thus, it is understandable that neoliberal fervor, with its insistence on state minimalism and economic connection across borders, was accompanied by—even made possible by—a silencing of class-based politics. Among US political elites influenced by neoliberalism, the term class was virtually replaced by the term inequality. And it is symptomatic of the Trump moment that class, especially through the phrase Bwhite working class,^ triumphantly reappeared in the newspapers’ editorial lexicon. If class has returned to the surface of political life, this is in part because mixed economies rely on state power to categorize, diagnose, and manage economic difference—that is, to make class visible. Orbán, in his speech, supplies the framework for a reactionary class analysis. The watch- words of the (neo)liberal market—fairness and freedom—are, for Orbán, misleading. Those watchwords presume a world populated by abstract individuals, while papering over the social reality that Orbán considers inevitable: power. In the liberal dispensation, Orbán argues, market actors were proclaimed equal, but the astute observer could sense that this equality was nothing but a flimsy cover for domination. We constantly felt that the weaker were stepped upon. It was not some kind of an abstract principle of fairness that decided upon conflicts originating from a recognition of mutual freedoms, but what happened is that the stronger party was always right. Here, Orbán makes one of the characteristic rhetorical gestures of the white tide leaders: the unmasking of an (allegedly) hidden hierarchy, the naming of the weak and the strong. The orator speaks of power and speaks of it as if revealing a truth concealed. Trump did the same in his convention speech: I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves. Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it (Trump 2016). Or again, in the same speech: 7 Here, one should probably also say the raced and gendered nation-state, because class in the twentieth century tended to become visible in relation to one or another racialized imaginary about the nation, and because, moreover, class discourse carried inside itself a set of presumptions about the interlocking of state sovereignty with private patriarchy.  Morton Every day I wake up determined to deliver for the people I have met all across this nation that have been neglected, ignored, and abandoned. I have visited the laid-off factory workers and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals. These are the forgotten men and women of our country. People who work hard but no longer have a voice. I am your voice. Thus, Orbán and Trump articulate the conservative argument for market insulation. Inescap- ably, unchangeably, some are weak and some are strong, and the weak deserve to be protected; hence the need for a state-owned bank, a good boss, or a corporation. But Trump and Orbán do more than make an argument. In their very mode of speech, in their attitudes and their cadences, they give voice to the bureaucratized disposition that is blossoming in the neoliberal eclipse. They speak the corporation. Perhaps the most striking connection between Trump and corporate monopolism gets created through his deictics. Trump insistently frames his sentences with the pronoun BI,^ breaking something of a taboo among US politicians, who tend to use Bwe^ when speaking of themselves. Trump’s BI^ allow his speech to feel fresh and revelatory8 (Hall et al. 2016; Hodges 2017). He is less politician than CEO. Trump’s BI^ is frequently spoken in conjunction with Byou,^ especially when he is ordering someone or ordaining the future.9 During his first inaugural (Trump 2017), he referred to you the people. Trump, in the world of politics, speaks like a boss. Trump thereby enacts the supervisorial dynamic in the political realm, rendering the state not as a fetter on free enterprise, but instead as the biggest business of them all. More than person deictics are at issue, though. The nation-state also has a characteristic grammatical position in the speech of white tide conservatives. These conservatives speak of the nation-state as the object of actions, especially actions by its citizens. Orban is clear on this point: That Hungarian nation is not a simple sum of individuals, but a community that needs to be organized, strengthened and developed, and in this sense, the new state that we are building is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state. The same objecthood figures in Trump’s core imperative, BMake America great again.^ Here, the nation is not (as for a previous generation of conservatives) a contractual agreement or a collection of ideals. Nor is the nation identical with the people.10 The nation is an object 8 See also Hodges’ regular (2017) column in Anthropology News, entitled BTrumped Up Words.^ 9 Interestingly—and in contrast to the appearance of spontaneity for which he became known—Trump’s rhetorical toolkit seems to have been prepared well in advance of his campaign. See this tweet from before he declared his candidacy: BIf I run, I will be in all the primary debates and you will see why I am the only one who can Make America Great Again!^ (8:15 a.m.—May 7, 2015). Not only is the trademark phrase in evidence, but Trump is also already using the BI am the only one^ formulation and employing the word Byou^ to ordain an outcome for his listener. On Byou^ (rather than Bwe^) as a characteristic deictic in conservative political speech during the May 68 episode in France, see the fascinating argument in Seidel (1975). 10 Contrast with a different presentation of nationhood, the one articulated in George W. Bush’s first inaugural address: BAmerica has never been united by blood or birth or soil. We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interests and teach us what it means to be citizens. Every child must be taught these principles. Every citizen must uphold them. And every immigrant, by embracing these ideals, makes our country more, not less, American^ (Bush 2001). Here, BAmerica^ shades quickly into BAmerican,^ and the national principle becomes active through the citizens who are the nation. Neoliberal eclipse: Donald Trump, corporate monopolism, and the changing... that must be organized, strengthened, developed, built, or made great. It is an entity that rightfully demands the work of its people. The nation, in other words, appears in the same way a corporation appears to its employees: as a collectivity not owned by them, on whose behalf they should toil. In their favored themes, their deictics, their objects, and their persistent invocation of power and powerlessness, the white tide leaders signal a departure from liberal contractualism and an embrace of a corporate model for social life. It would not be hard to read, here, the echoes of the 1930s, the sounds of integralism, corporatism, and fascism. Indeed, the leaders themselves are quite careful to build an archaic tone into their discourse, as if they were proposing a reassuring turn back in time. In the phrase BMake America great again,^ note the importance of again. That is why it is vital to avoid the kind of condemnation that falls into the white tide’s own logic by diagnosing today’s conservatives as atavistic relics. It must be insisted, against the leaders themselves, that they belong uniquely to today, and it must be shown how they belong to today. To hear their speech as a part of the historical present, one must deny their own claims to effect a return to the (Fordist, industrial) past. One must see the speech as a sign of something new, a new way for people to relate to one another, and in particular, a new structure of feelings, rules, and dreams inside the workplace. This is where anthropology can be helpful. The digital cage of bureaucracy Sebastián, like more than 80% of US workers (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016), labors in the service sector. He toils in a very specific segment of that sector. As an Uber driver, he works on a Bplatform^—a digital space, like eBay or Airbnb, where sellers and buyers meet. Platform labor has expanded dramatically over the past 10 years, an expansion that seems to have been made possible, in part, by the large number of people needing work after the financial crash. Platforms have only been able to meet a tiny sliver of that need: today, platforms employ somewhere between 0.5% (Katz and Krueger 2016) and 4.3% (Farrell and Grieg 2016) of US workers. At the end of 2014, there were 160,000 active Uber drivers in the country (Hall and Krueger 2015). But despite their diminutive share of the labor market, platforms are well deserving of anthropological analysis, because, in the wake of the 2008 crisis, they have become sites for the energetic reinvention of what work feels like. They are signs of the changing times. Digital platforms are often described as heartlands of entrepreneurship. BRemember,^ declares the Rideshare Guy, a Uber- and Lyft-driving blogger, Bat the end of the day you are all micro-entrepreneurs now as rideshare drivers. This is your business and you should treat it accordingly by doing what’s best for your business^ (Campbell 2014). Today, however, this terminology has started to wear thin. As Internet-based industries become more and more concentrated in fewer hands, both sellers and buyers discover that they have less power to select their platform. With the demise of Sidecar and Split, there are only a few major ridesharing services in the US, for example. Uber, in particular, has not allowed this monopoly power to go to waste (Slee 2015). It has taken the lead in developing labor trends that are less entrepreneurial and more monopolistic–trends, in other words, that are very much in keeping with the market-insulated spirit of the Trump moment.  Morton At corporations like Uber, the platform is structured so that it regiments role behavior quite rigidly and predictably11 (Scheiber 2017). When you work on a platform that tells you what to charge, what to drive, how to behave, and who to drive with, then it seems less that you are being guided by market forces and more that you are simply being ordered what to do. The platform seems less like a market and more like a corporate social hierarchy. In the words of Patrick McQuown, an Uber driver and researcher, Uber’s structure Bnegates this whole idea of being your own boss and setting your own hours^ (Stacey 2016). We might think less of a platform and more of a cage. If platforms are the laboratory for the emergence of a new kind of work, then what qualities does this work display? I want to propose that digital platform labor is characterized by the limiting of information, the prevalence of waiting, a closed advancement ladder, and a service relationship to a user. These are developments that may ultimately have relevance far beyond the platform’s cutting edge. By examining these developments, perhaps we can articulate some hypotheses about how work is coming to feel different from the flexible toil so familiar to neoliberals—but also different from the idealized industrial labor of the Fordist epoch. The limits of choice: constraining information Neoliberal rhetoric is famous for its enthusiasm about expanding choice, but this fervor has met with a countermovement that focuses on reducing choices—as in the Apple approach to design, which offers users a highly simplified range of possibilities.12 Online platforms, in particular, operate precisely by winnowing the options available, so that, for example, only certain products can be sold and only in a certain format. Uber has mastered this tactic and changed its meaning. To drive for Uber means to work with information—information on who needs a ride where. Uber carefully limits this information by flexing monopoly power (Calo and Rosenblat 2017: 28). Take ratings, for example. On older platforms, like eBay, sellers distinguish themselves (and charge more) if they get good ratings from customers (Mickey 2010). Uber turns this rating system on its head. On Uber, all drivers, whether rated highly or poorly, must charge the same. Moreover, a rider sees her driver’s rating after she reserves the ride.13 This makes it difficult for drivers to capitalize on good reputations by getting more riders14 (McQuown et al. 2016). 11 Note, also, evidence suggesting that Uber drivers tend to target their earnings for each day, thus driving long hours that are comparatively less lucrative for them (Scheiber 2016; Sheldon 2016.) 12 BThe Apple Marketing Philosophy^ includes the memorable imperative, BWe must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities^ (Markkula 1977). There is a sizeable literature that debates the question of whether or not excessive choice can make people anxious or unhappy, a literature sparked in part by Schwartz (2004); for a review, see Scheibehenne et al. (2010). It seems noteworthy that Trump has become a master at communicating through a medium that is carefully planned so as to constrain the length and format of the messages it transmits: Twitter. 13 Note that riders can cancel a reserved ride after seeing a driver’s rating. The app is set up, however, so that riders are offered one driver at a time rather than a menu of drivers—which makes it cumbersome for riders to choose their drivers. 14 This lies at the core of McQuown’s criticism of Uber. BEntrepreneurship means that you create a product or service that’s unique in the marketplace and you’re rewarded with more profit […] You simply can’t do that as an Uber driver. There’s no real chance to differentiate yourself financially from other Uber drivers^ (Stacey 2016). That was McQuown’s experience. He became a top-rated driver in his area, but his income did not increase. Interviews with other Uber drivers suggest that experience is not unusual. BI am a top-rated driver in New England,^ said one driver quoted in the report. BI know because I received an email notifying me, and I receive no compensation for that^ (McQuown et al. 2016). Neoliberal eclipse: Donald Trump, corporate monopolism, and the changing... Driver ratings do have a purpose, however. Uber itself will Bfire^ a driver whose rating falls below 4.6 stars, refusing to allow the driver to access the app and sometimes relenting if the driver pays to take a remediation class (Rosenblat and Stark 2016; Slee 2015: 73). Uber drivers express considerable anxiety over ratings (Campbell 2015). As they perhaps sense, Uber has turned the rating system into information designed primar- ily for the corporation. No market here: Uber uses ratings to discipline drivers hierarchi- cally, ordering them to meet the mandate of a single standard (Rosenblat and Stark 2016: 3722). Similarly, Uber constrains the information that drivers receive about riders. On the app, a driver cannot see how far a potential rider needs to go or how much money the ride will cost. Thus drivers are induced to accept riders they would rather reject, such as riders wanting low- value runs and riders headed far from the driver’s home15 (McQuown et al. 2016; Rosenblat and Stark 2016: 3762; Calo and Rosenblat 2017: 33). Uber channels information in a one-way flow to the corporate center. The resulting platform bears little resemblance to a competitive market. It is the environment of an authoritarian boss. Waiting and uncertain time For workers in the platform economy, work time is characteristically unpredictable. Platform workers are exposed not only to the fluctuations of the business cycle but also to the daily cycles of commerce. They are out of work for an hour if they cannot find a rider. The Uber driver, however, does not resemble a merchant in a model competitive market- place. The perfectly competitive marketplace does not Bcare^ if one merchant leaves or joins it, and it has few barriers to prevent a merchant from going elsewhere. Uber, by contrast, cares. The corporation needs a constant supply of drivers so that it can sustain its loyal user base, and for this reason, Uber provides a steady stream of starting bonuses and special offers that are designed to convince drivers to undertake the fixed costs necessary to begin a driving career (Slee 2015: 64). In this way, Uber drivers share a common dilemma with store clerks who are mandated by their bosses to be available for schedule changes every week or with day-laborers who must prove their faithfulness to the temporary agency by spending their mornings waiting for work in that agency’s hiring hall, even if no work is in sight (Purser 2006, 2012). What all of these low-wage workers face is not a marketplace where they might find employment. What they face is a single corporation that needs them to stay in reserve, as a captive potential workforce, in case work arrives. The corporation’s reputation depends on their availability—their availability uniquely through that corporation. The worker’s loyalty to the company becomes a core theme, just as in the discourse of the white tide conservatives, who lionize loyalty, using the loyalty motif, moreover, to advocate for the fixing of low- wage workforces through national borders. In the ranks of the Bloyal^ reserve army, workers’ work days are structured by a company that carefully creates an oversupply of laborers attached to itself, which means that workers’ work days are marked by the act of waiting. 15 Drivers can decide to cancel a ride once they are in contact with a rider—but by this point, the driver has already committed to the rider. Moreover, Uber can fire drivers for canceling too many rides.  Morton A closed advancement ladder In the platform economy, the IT workers who build a platform have very little connection to the driving workers who provide services on that platform. Uber drivers often have difficulty getting a coherent email response from Uber staff (Campbell 2016a), and the disconnect serves as a symptom of the divide between their career ladders. If organizational psychology has learned how to create compelling advancement avenues that incentivize workers to try harder for a promotion, those avenues do not seem open to today’s platform laborers. An Uber driver is not encouraged to aspire to rise through the ranks of the company. She is encouraged to keep driving (Scheiber 2017). At the same time, however, an Uber driver seems to have few options for the neoliberal alternative to promotion, namely growing one’s business. To become more successful, an Uber driver cannot build an excellent reputation and charge a higher rate. She cannot aspire to expand her micro-enterprise.16 What she can do is drive more hours. The mass production of services: social relations to the user The term Bmass production^ evokes the imagery of manufacturing—of assembly lines and Model Ts—but platform labor means an advance in the mass production of services.17 On platforms, the people who purchase such services are often described with a striking word. That word is Busers.^ In other contexts, other terms would apply. Neoliberal gurus sometimes advise workers to think of everyone as a Bclient^ (Glickman 2010). Brick-and-mortar stores have Bcustomers.^ At Uber, however, the bright-line distinction is the one that separates the company’s drivers from its users.18 Both drivers and riders actually use Uber apps on an ongoing basis, but it is only riders who get baptized with the Buser^ term—a fact that has much to say about the ideology surrounding the word. To speak of the user is to emphasize the action of the person who receives the service, to highlight that person’s activity (Buse^) rather than her judgment (Bcustomer satisfaction.^)19 For Uber drivers, then, work now means supporting someone else’s use. User terminology does not fit with the polite neoliberal fiction that casts all workers as merchants, merchants passing along wares to their customers/clients. On the contrary: Buser^ is a term that quite powerfully describes the workplace as a terrain of tools, of action. There is a twist, though. In this description, it is the purchaser, not the worker, who gets to act. This inversion seems perhaps well suited to the disposition required for the mass production of services. It corresponds to the personalized nature of the class domination intrinsic to the service sector. Sebastián (like service workers of earlier generations) spends all day laboring in 16 In some locales, Uber does allow investors to own fleets—this mainly applies to the luxury Uber Black. UberX fleets are allowed in some places, but not in others. (See https://uberpeople.net/threads/uber-fleet-can-it- be-done.22592/) 17 This is a trend that has been continuing in the US for some time: the mean number of coworkers for each manufacturing worker has declined precipitously since 1980, while the mean number of coworkers for each service worker has risen (Henly and Sánchez 2009: 426). 18 Uber sometimes describes the recipients of its services as riders and sometimes as users (See https://www.uber. com/legal/privacy/users/en/). Users and riders are distinguished from Bdrivers.^ 19 The user concept opens up emancipatory possibilities, since it assigns a creative role to the people who consume services. It also has a darker side, since it threatens to obscure the worker’s own creative power. Thanks to Julia Morton for these important insights. Neoliberal eclipse: Donald Trump, corporate monopolism, and the changing... the presence of his users, watching their actions, adjusting his emotional presentation to match their wishes (Rosenblat and Stark 2016: 3775; Hochschild 1983). He does not only produce driving in the abstract; he drives in conformity with the specific, personal orders that his riders give him. Hierarchy is not just one feature of Sebastián’s work process. Hierarchy is a predominating quality of the human relationships on his job, where he works alone—except for the users. It is common for analysts to describe Trump voters as former industrial workers. That is, it is common to think of these voters in terms of the jobs that they once did. But what if we thought, instead, about the jobs that many Trump voters now do? What if we thought about service jobs? Jobs now often performed by white men? Then, the new conservatism might come into focus as a raced and gendered expression of dissatisfaction with service work, as an uprising in the service sector. It must be said, though, that the uprising has a particular quality to it. If the above hypothesis is correct, it means that voters are manifesting their frustrations with the conditions of service labor by voting for an icon of those very conditions. Voters are bringing to the surface—in the form of Trump and the other white tide leaders—the domination and hierarchy that characterize the service sector and, more broadly, the market-insulated workforce. Such an uprising makes its anger known by taking hold of the signs and modes of power that the insurgents find readily at hand in the mundanities of the workplace. Far more important than the question of how to counter the insurgency, then, is a different problem: how to invent a better kind of power, at once practical and transformative, and how to come to believe in its efficacy. Conclusion As they swept into office, the white tide conservatives spoke about work: desire for work, security in work, and domination at work. They spoke about work more compellingly than their professedly pro-labor opponents. In so doing, they unleashed a form of power that had been suppressed for a generation under the weight of neoliberal inevitabilism. From where did this power come? Perhaps the power came from 2008, the crisis that we are only now coming to know, the enlarged corporations that it left in its wake. No one can tell, yet, if the eclipse will last only a short while. Maybe the neoliberal sun will shine again soon. But in the meantime, we need new eyes with which to see the strange forms of light that are glimmering. How does Donald Trump go from You’re fired to You’re hired? According to one viewpoint, he makes this move by offering a sort of escapism, a negative image of the contemporary workplace. Voters are fleeing the chaos of the market by seeking a political authoritarianism that is unlike the anarchy of their everyday economic lives. They are using politics to build the opposite of the economy they know. But I have argued for a different perspective. Perhaps people are voting not against their economic reality, but for it. Perhaps they are voting for a political authoritarianism that represents, reflects, and ultimately creates the highly structured environment of the new labor force—the workaday bureaucracy. Conservatives have learned to use the idiom of hierarchy to speak about the realities of contemporary work, to criticize those realities, and ultimately to acquiesce to them. Since this idiom prevails in the workforce, conservatives speak in a persuasive, even a revelatory, manner. Donald Trump, then, gives voice to the very  Morton contemporary impulse to regulate human relations through the ethos of the corporation. Anthropologists can trace that ethos, watching for the monsters and dreams that it brings into the world. Acknowledgements Gratitude is due to Emily Jones, who deliberated over this paper; to Frutuoso Santana, who inspired it; to Judith Miller, Will Baude, Joe Grim Feinberg, and George Borg, who discussed its fine points; to Anthony Marcus and the anonymous reviewers, who engaged with it; to Jean Comaroff and David Miller, who shepherded it; to Eli Thorkelson, Narges Bajoghli, Lindsey Reynolds, Julia Vich-Bertran, Natalie Konopinski, Hannah Appel, Andrea Muehlebach, Yusuf Neggers, Catherine Lutz, Keith Brown, Julia Morton, Lashandra Sullivan, Kevin Escudero, Lucas Stanczyk, James Green, and the participants in the Reading Group on Contemporary Brazil, who gave it ideas and time; and to Michelle Jurkovich, who showed up at my door every day to make sure it got submitted. References Adams, Julia. 1996. Principals and agents, colonialists and company men: The decay of colonial control in the Dutch East Indies. American Sociological Review 61 (1): 12–28. Allison, Anne. 2012. Ordinary refugees: Social precarity and soul in 21st century Japan. Anthropological Quarterly 85 (2): 345–370. Amin, Ash, ed. 1994. Post-Fordism: A reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Appel, Hannah. 2012. Offshore work: Oil, modularity, and the how of capitalism in Equatorial Guinea. American Ethnologist 39 (4): 692–709. Baca, George. 2004. Legends of Fordism: Between myth, history, and foregone conclusions. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 48 (3): 169–178. Ban, Cornel. 2013. Brazil’s liberal neo-developmentalism: New paradigm shift or edited orthodoxy? Review of International Political Economy 20 (2): 298–331. Barkai, S. 2016. Declining labor and capital shares. New Working Paper Series No. 2, Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State, University of Chicago Booth School of Business. https://research.chicagobooth.edu/~/media/5872fbeb104245909b8f0ae8a84486c9.pdf. Accessed on 19 April 2017. Bögenhold, Dieter, and Udo Staber. 1991. The decline and rise of self-employment. Work, Employment & Society 5 (2): 223–239. Brenner, Neil, Jamie Peck, and Nik Theodore. 2010. Variegated neoliberalization: Geographies, modalities, pathways. Global Networks 10 (2): 182–222. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor. 2016. The Economics Daily, Employment by industry, 1910 and 2015. March 3, 2016. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/employment-by-industry-1910-and- 2015.htm. Accessed 20 April 2017. Bush, G.W. 2001. First Inaugural Address, January 20, 2001. https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives. gov/infocus/bushrecord/documents/Selected_Speeches_George_W_Bush.pdf. Accessed on 20 April 2017. Calo, R. and Rosenblat A. 2017. The taking economy: Uber, information, and power. Columbia Law Review 117. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2929643##. Accessed 20 April 2017. Campbell, H. 2014. Why the downfall of Lyft is imminent. The Rideshare Guy, September 29, 2014. http://therideshareguy.com/why-the-downfall-of-lyft-is-imminent/. Accessed 20 April 2017. Campbell, H. 2015. What can I do to improve my driver ratings? The Rideshare Guy, January 12, 2015. http://therideshareguy.com/what-can-i-do-to-improve-my-driver-ratings/#more-1879. Accessed 20 April 2017. Campbell, H. 2016a. Why do so many people quit driving for Uber? The Rideshare Guy, July 11, 2016. http://therideshareguy.com/why-do-so-many-people-quit-driving-for-uber/. Accessed 20 April 2017. Campbell, H. 2016b. 11 things that can get you deactivated as an Uber driver. The Rideshare Guy, August 1, 2016. http://therideshareguy.com/10-things-that-can-get-you-deactivated-as-an-uber-driver/. Accessed 19 April 2017. Clammer, John. 2016. What (if anything) can economic anthropology say to neoliberal development? Toward new anthropologies of capitalism and its alternatives. Dialectical Anthropology. doi:10.1007/s10624-016- 9445-2. Coase, Ronald. 1937. The nature of the firm. Economica 4 (16): 386–405. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 2000. Millennial capitalism: First thoughts on a second coming. Public Culture 12 (2): 291–343. Neoliberal eclipse: Donald Trump, corporate monopolism, and the changing... Economist. 2016a. Too much of a good thing. Economist, March 26, 2016. http://www.economist. com/news/briefing/21695385-profits-are-too-high-america-needs-giant-dose-competition-too-much-good- thing. Accessed 19 April 2017. Economist. 2016b. The rise of the superstars. Economist, September 17, 2016. http://www.economist. com/news/special-report/21707048-small-group-giant-companiessome-old-some-neware-once-again- dominating-global. Accessed 19 April 2017. Economist. 2016c. Why giants thrive. Economist, September 17, 2016. http://www.economist.com/news/special- report/21707049-power-technology-globalisation-and-regulation-why-giants-thrive. Accessed 19 April 2017. Farrell, D. and Grieg, F. 2016. The online platform economy: Has growth peaked? JPMorgan Chase Institute, November 2016. https://www.jpmorganchase.com/corporate/institute/document/jpmc-institute-online- platform-econ-brief.pdf. Accessed 20 April 2017. Feinberg, Joseph Grim. 2017. Goodbye, internationalism! On the anti-multicultural left in East-Central Europe. Political Critique, June 8, 2017. http://politicalcritique.org/cee/2017/goodbye-internationalism-on-the-anti- multicultural-left-in-east-central-europe/ . Accessed 4 August 2017. Ferguson, J. 1999. Expectations of modernity: Myths and meanings of urban life on the Zambian copper belt. Berkeley: California. Foucault, M., Burchell G., trans, Senellart M., ed. 2008 [1979]. The birth of biopolitics, lectures at the College de France, 1978–79. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Fraser, N. 2017. The end of progressive neoliberalism. Dissent, January 2, 2017. https://www.dissentmagazine. org/online_articles/progressive-neoliberalism-reactionary-populism-nancy-fraser . Accessed 19 April 2017. Friedman, Jonathan, and Kajsa Ekholm Friedman. 2013. Globalization as a discourse of hegemonic crisis: A global systemic analysis. American Ethnologist 40 (2): 244–257. Gilson, Ronald J., Charles F. Sabel, and Robert E. Scott. 2009. Contracting for innovation: Vertical disintegration and interfirm collaboration. Columbia Law Review 109 (3): 431–502 http://www2.law.columbia. edu/sabel/papers/contracting%20for%20innovation.pdf . Accessed 19 April 2017. Glickman, J. 2010. Your boss is your client (& your colleagues are too). Harvard Business Review, December 20, 2010. https://hbr.org/2010/12/your-boss-is-your-client-your.html. Accessed 20 April 2017. Grullon, G., Larkin Y., and Michaely R. 2016. Are US industries becoming more concentrated? Working paper. https://finance.eller.arizona.edu/sites/finance/files/grullon_11.4.16.pdf. Accessed 19 April 2017. Hall, J. and Krueger A. 2015. An analysis of the labor market for Uber’s driver-partners in the United States. Princeton University Industrial Relations Section, Working Paper #587. http://dataspace.princeton. edu/jspui/bitstream/88435/dsp010z708z67d/5/587.pdf. Accessed 20 April 2017. Hall, Kira, Donna Meryl Goldstein, and Matthew Bruce Ingram. 2016. The hands of Donald Trump: Entertainment, gesture, spectacle. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (2): 71–100. Harvey, David. 2005. A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Henly, Samuel E., and Juan M. Sánchez. 2009. The US establishment-size distribution: Secular changes and sectoral decomposition. Economic Quarterly 95 (4): 419–454. Ho, Karen. 2009. Disciplining investment bankers, disciplining the economy: Wall Street’s institutional culture of crisis and the downsizing of ‘corporate America. American Anthropologist 111 (2): 177–189. Ho, Karen. 2015. Supermanagers, inequality, and finance. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (1): 481– 488. Hochschild, A.R. 1983. The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley: California. Hodges, A. 2017. Trump’s formulaic Twitter insults. (Series: BTrumped up words.^) Anthropology News, January 18, 2017. http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2017/01/18/trumps-formulaic-twitter- insults/. Accessed 19 April 2017. Isaac, M. 2017. How Uber deceives the authorities worldwide. New York Times, March 3, 2017. https://www. nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html?module= ArrowsNav&contentCollection=Technology&action=keypress&region=FixedLeft&pgtype=article&_r=0. Accessed 19 April 2017. Jacobson, L. 2016. Donald Trump gets a Full Flop for stance on minimum wage. Politifact, 7/28/2016. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jul/28/donald-trump/donald-trump-gets-full-flop- stance-minimum-wage/. Accessed 17 April 2016. Kalb, Don. 2009. Conversations with a Polish populist: Tracing hidden histories of globalization, class and dispossession in postsocialism (and beyond). American Ethnologist 36 (2): 207–223. Katz, L.F. and Krueger A.B. 2016. The rise and nature of alternative work arrangements in the United States, 1995–2015. NBER Working Paper 22667. http://www.nber.org/papers/w22667.pdf. Accessed 19 April 2017. LiPuma, Edward, and Ben Lee. 2004. Financial derivatives and the globalization of risk. Durham: Duke.  Morton Ma, Guonan, Ivan Roberts, and Gerard Kelly. 2017. Rebalancing China’s economy: Domestic and international implications. China & World Economy 25 (1): 1–31. Marcus, Anthony Allen. 2017. Interesting times. Dialectical Anthropology 41: 77–86. Markkula, M. 1977. The Apple marketing philosophy. http://facuberte.tumblr.com/post/17342923516/the-apple- marketing-philosophy-by-mike-markkula. Accessed 20 April 2017. McQuown, P., Hazeltine B., Aitharaju A., Clarke C., Diorio J., McCleary G., Scotti R., and Wedekind C. 2016. An analysis of the entrepreneurial aspects of Uber’s driver-partner platform. Brown University School of Engineering Case Study, December 2016. https://www.brown.edu/academics/engineering/sites/brown.edu. academics.engineering/files/uploads/UberCaseBrownUniversityMcQuown.pdf. Accessed 19 April 2017. Mendoza, Marcos. 2017. Post-neoliberal labor in Patagonia: Informality and citizenship in the green economy. Dialectical Anthropology 41: 55–76. Mickey, Ryan. 2010. The impact of a seller’s eBay reputation on price. American Economist 55 (2): 162–169. Milanovic, Branko. 2013. Global income inequality in numbers: In history and now. Global Policy 4 (2): 198– 208. Milanovic, Branko. 2015. Global inequality of opportunity: How much of our income is determined by where we live? Review of Economics and Statistics 97 (2): 452–460. Milberg, William, and Deborah Winkler. 2010. Trade, crisis, and recovery: Restructuring global value chains. In Global value chains in a postcrisis world: A development perspective, ed. Olivier Cattaneo, Gary Gereffi, and Cornelia Staritz, 23–72. Washington: World Bank. Mirowski, Philip. 2013. Never let a serious crisis go to waste: How neoliberalism survived the financial meltdown. London: Verso. Orbán, V.; Tóth C., ed. 2014. Viktor Orbán’s speech at the XXV Bálványos Free Summer University and Youth Camp, 26th July, 2014, Băile Tuşnad (Tusnádfürdő). Budapest Beacon, July 29, 2014. http://budapestbeacon.com/public-policy/full-text-of-viktor-orbans-speech-at-baile-tusnad-tusnadfurdo-of- 26-july-2014/10592. Accessed 17 April 2017. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. 2015. China’s contingencies and globalization. Third World Quarterly 36 (11): 1985– 2001. Purser, Gretchen. 2006. Waiting for work: An ethnography of a day labor agency. 2005–2006. 15. ISSC Working Paper Series. Berkeley: Institute for the Study of Social Change. Purser, Gretchen. 2012. The labour of liminality. LABOUR, Capital and Society 45 (1): 11–35. Rosenblat, Alex, and Luke Stark. 2016. Algorithmic labor and information asymmetries: A case study of Uber’s drivers. International Journal of Communication 10: 3758–3784. Scheibehenne, Benjamin, Rainer Greifeneder, and Peter Todd. 2010. Can there ever be too many options? A meta-analytic review of choice overload. Journal of Consumer Research 37: 409–425. Scheiber, N. 2016. How Uber drivers decide how long to work. New York Times, September 2, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/05/business/economy/how-uber-drivers-decide-how-long-to-work. html?_r=0. Accessed 20 April 2017. Scheiber, N. 2017. How Uber uses psychological tricks to push its drivers’ buttons. New York Times, April 2, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/04/02/technology/uber-drivers-psychological- tricks.html?_r=0. Accessed 20 April 2017. Schwartz, Barry. 2004. The paradox of choice: Why more is less. New York: HarperCollins. Seidel, Gill. 1975. Ambiguity in political discourse. In Political language and oratory in traditional society, ed. Maurice Bloch, 205–226. London: Academic Press. Sheldon, M. 2016. Income targeting and the ridesharing market. http://static1.squarespace.com/static/56500157 e4b0cb706005352d/t/56da1114e707ebbe8e963ffc/1457131797556/IncomeTargetingFeb16.pdf. Accessed 20 April 2017. Shoshan, Nitzan, and Andrea Muehlebach. 2012. Introduction: Post-Fordist affect. Anthropological Quarterly 85 (2): 317–343. Slee, Tom. 2015. What’s yours is mine: Against the sharing economy. New York: OR Books. Smith IV, J. 2015. Uber drivers: The punishment for bad ratings is costly training courses. Observer, February 3, 2015. http://observer.com/2015/02/uber-drivers-the-punishment-for-bad-ratings-is-costly-training-courses/. Accessed 19 April 2017. Souleles, Daniel. 2017. Don’t mix Paxil, Viagra, and Xanax: What financiers’ jokes say about inequality. Economic Anthropology 4 (1): 107–119. Stacey, K. 2016. Are Uber drivers entrepreneurs? News from Brown, December 21, 2016. https://news.brown. edu/articles/2016/12/uber. Accessed 20 April 2017. Stinchcombe, A.L. 1990. Information and organizations. Berkeley: California. Storper, Michael. 1994. The transition to flexible specialisation in the US film industry: External economies, the division of labour, and the crossing of industrial divides. In Post-Fordism: A reader, ed. Ash Amin, 195– 226. Oxford: Blackwell. Neoliberal eclipse: Donald Trump, corporate monopolism, and the changing... Trump, D.J. 2016. 2016 RNC speech, July 21, 2016. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/full-transcript- donald-trump-nomination-acceptance-speech-at-rnc-225974. Accessed 19 April 2017. Trump, D.J. 2017. Inaugural address, January 20, 2017. https://www.whitehouse.gov/inaugural-address. Accessed 19 April 2017. Wang, S. 2016. Uber drivers strike to protest fare cuts in New York City. Bloomberg, February 1, 2016. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-01/uber-drivers-plan-strike-to-protest-fare-cuts-in-new- york-city. Accessed 19 April 2017. Warner, David, D.S. Prasada Rao, William E. Griffiths, and Duangkamon Chotikapanich. 2014. Global inequal- ity; levels and trends, 1993–2005: How sensitive are these to the choice of PPPs and real income measures? Review of Income and Wealth 60 (S2): S281–S304.