An American startup that promised to deliver entrepreneurship for the masses through its technology, Uber instead built a new template for employment using algorithms and internet platforms.
Uberland chronicles the stories of drivers in more than twenty-five cities in the United States and Canada over four years, shedding light on their working conditions and providing a window into how they feel behind the wheel.
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Alex Rosenblat explores the increasingly unstable and unpredictable nature of work in America through an in-depth look at Uber’s questionable labor and technology practices. We had not fully witnessed the downside of management by algorithm until this book—a must-read for anyone interested in the topic.
Chris Hughes cofounder of Facebook, cochair of the Economic Security Project, and author of Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn
Read Uberland to see how Rosenblat reverse engineers Uber to expose its machinations to become our gig overlord. There is no better analysis anywhere.
Lawrence Mishel Distinguished Fellow, Economic Policy Institute
Ever wonder what life is like for an Uber driver and where rideshare fits into today’s economy? Rosenblat’s compelling narrative takes us deeper than any book before it, so you’re in for a treat. You won’t be able to put Uberland down.
H. Luke Shaefer coauthor of $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America
Rosenblat has succeeded in writing a clear, powerful book that goes far deeper than the headlines. By focusing on drivers, she reveals the complexities of their daily lives and challenges. She accounts for all the ways Uber both improves their lives and limits their prospects. This book is essential for anyone who hopes to understand platforms, applications, and the effects they have on real people.
Siva Vaidhyanathan author of The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) and Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy
Deft, multifaceted, and eminently accessible and readable.
Michael Palm author of Technologies of Consumer Labor: A History of Self-Service
This is a great ethnography that reflects an extraordinary ability to synthesize qualitative research, news reports, legal documents, and other materials into a fast-paced, highly readable narrative about one of the most important firms in the platform economy.
Frank Pasquale Professor of Law at the University of Maryland, Affiliate Fellow at Yale Law School's Information Society Project, member of the Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society
… a profoundly important book.
Adam Lashinsky Fortune
This book is an essential read for business leaders, entrepreneurs, and all who have a vested interest in understanding how technology is reconfiguring society.
danah boyd Data & Society
If you’re interested, as I am, in what technology is doing to our lives, it’s must reading.
Daniel Goldin Boswell Books
A fine work of technology ethnography.
Joshua Kim Inside Higher Ed
Rosenblat’s Uberland is a timely, accessible analysis of a Silicon Valley innovator that disrupted an industry. Over the years I’ve often wondered, is Uber good or bad? That is not the question Alex Rosenblat sets out to answer in her well-researched new book…
Greg Shaw GeekWire
A timely look at the tensions between technology and the future of employment, and how ambitious startups might be changing the way we see and value work.
Tonya Riley Mother Jones
Rosenblat offers a valuable history of the ideological work that went into the “gentrification” of the profession... [She] maintains a sometimes-unnerving cool while narrating tales of outrageous exploitation...
Adrien Chan Reviewer, New York Magazine
Her analysis is balanced and measured... Rosenblat’s book urges us to wipe the techno-enthusiasm from our eyes.
Robin Kaiser-Schätzlein Los Angeles Review of Books
Uber a tiré un maximum de valeur des conducteurs en surfant sur les limites et ambiguïtés des normes culturelles et juridiques.
Hubert Guillaud InternetActu & LeMonde
Uber, c’est de la sous-traitance poussée à l'extrême, enrobée dans un discours technologique...
Fabien Benoit Usbek & Rica
Uberland provides an ethnographic observation that refutes many of the assumptions on which the “platform economy” has thrived.
Julian Posada International Journal of Communication
Quite simply: this book is a masterpiece. Rosenblat synthesizes stories of drivers, with detailed research and a clear headed understanding of the emerging gig economy, into a page turner that has all the elements of a best selling spy thriller.
John Ince The Rideshare Guy
… revelatory… this jargon-free and intriguing exposé offers food for thought for anyone interested in worker protections or societal changes driven by technology.
Publishers Weekly leading American trade news magazine for publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents
I love her book and it's really great.
Tim 10 year old reader of Uberland
The main innovation of today’s gig economy may be its effective repackaging of historically low-status, poorly remunerated blue- and pink-collar work as what Alex Rosenblat’s Uberland terms “fashionable glamor labor.” Sharing platforms, as Rosenblat [shows], have enacted nothing less than a transformation of human capital into human raw material. The future gig economy that trailblazers imagine is defined not by limitless possibility, but... by a straitened market calculus.
Maya Vinokour Public Books
The gig economy is here to stay. Uberland is a timely book as technology increasingly intensifies in our daily lives. It reads like book-length investigative journalism, refreshingly jargon-free. It stays truthful to the stories that drivers tell and is readable and engaging. It is suitable for undergraduate classes in sociology of work; science, technology, and society; and consumption.
Nga Than Sociological Forum
A researcher at the Data & Society Research Institute, Alex holds a master’s degree in sociology from Queen’s University and a bachelor of arts degree in history from McGill University.
Her writing has appeared in media outlets such as the New York Times, the Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, Slate, and Fast Company.
Alex's research has received attention worldwide, and has been covered in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, MIT Technology Review, WIRED, New Scientist, and the Guardian. Among the scholarly and professional publications in which her prize-winning work has been published are the International Journal of Communications and the Columbia Law Review.
