Octopus was becoming increasingly ubiquitous the last year that I lived in Texas (the Texas grocery chain H-E-B is an advertising partner), and I think it pairs well with our readings for this week about screens, waiting, and ontologies of distraction. Octopus is sold to drivers as a way to increase their profits and to receive higher ratings from riders. Further, it is sold to corporate partners as highly effective and engaging advertising medium.
I see Octopus in Lyft as an example of some of McCarthy's observations in her chapter. Austin rather rapidly went from a weird college town to the 11th largest city in the country. The infrastructure, especially the city's transit infrastructure, has largely struggled to keep up with the rising population. Traffic in Austin is notoriously horrible and the city's public transit option are extremely limited. The city also has a tumultuous history with rideshare companies Uber and Lyft. Octopus is a start up that sees itself as the fix for drivers, passengers, and corporate entities. Because of Austin's obscene traffic, getting anywhere in the city can be incredibly frustrating. The Octopus tablet is an attempt to distract passengers from how a 10 minute drive has taken 3x as long by providing engaging, "always-on" entertainment. Further, Octopus pitches itself to drivers (they are the ones who make accts on the website) as a way to earn better tips and higher ratings. Octopus and how it frames itself as a brand illustrates some of the larger crises happening in our current form of late-stage capitalism. As more and more workers turn to options in the gig economy to maintain their standards of living they are pushed further and further from both stability and labor protections. McCarthy articulates that instead of understanding AH's television programming in the waiting room as a "soothing palliative," we might best understand "AH"s articulation of a parallel, although asymmetrical, temporality in the waiting room"as constitutive of a "crisis in modernity" (209-210). I think viewing Octopus through this frame is quite helpful. What Octopus seeks to conceal, but in actuality might illuminate, are many of the problems wrought by late-stage capitalism like lack of investment in public services and contingent labor.
What I find most fascinating about Octopus is the way in which it understands the rideshare experience as a weird blend of the public and the private. While, like Morse points out, the car is a part of the privatization of transportation, in a Lyft, however, you are in the car with a stranger. Octopus seeks to intervene here by providing passengers with "interactive driver profiles" which are designed to prompt both conversation and better tipping. Octopus also uses interactive ads between games and quizzes, which pays for the platform and the tablets they give to drivers. In the semi-public/semi-private space of the rideshare backseat, passengers are inundated with advertisements which commodifies their waiting time when they are stuck in traffic. I also think it might be productive to think of Morse's argument about nonspace and the relationship between the freeway, the mall, and the television. Leading into her conclusion, Morse argues, "beyond liquid worlds that readily convert into one another, we are now undergoing a process of gradual convergence of the analogs of television with television itself" (212). About 30 years after the publication of Morse's essay, I think Octopus illustrates the ways that she was exactly right!
I completely agree with this observation. In India too, Uber and Ola (another rideshare app) team up with various media agencies to play limited content on tablets attached to headrests. Morse's characterization of the car as privatised mobile space might be true for drivers, but how true is it for passengers? Especially given the social nature of rideshares? The TV inside the car seems to me to be a way to re-inscribe or even re-simulate privacy for the passenger who is otherwise forced to be public-facing; it provides a distraction from social contact along with a distraction from traffic jams.
ReplyDeleteThe content of these closed loop programming networks are also interesting, in India, there seems to be a predominance of music or sketches - these are non-serialised, standalone forms that are "deferentialized" as Morse puts it. The very act of putting a TV screen in a car also betrays something of a capitalist desperation for attention even during a commute, when the roadside is already populated with billboards that you don't really see. The modern city, as Walter Benjamin points out, relies upon a distraction-to-distraction attention span. Do these screen encounters make us more focused on televisuality, or less? Like Benjamin's modern pedestrian, we are also being TRAINED in distractability. Morse is right on the money, I feel.