ridesharing the styx
a phenomenology of the backseat
I am 25 and I do not drive. Everyone tells me this is because I’m gay. Certainly it is consistent with the mode of faggothood I subscribe to, one that rebuffs overt masculinities—a faggot who prefers the optics of passenger princessdom to those of a Brute who drives his own car. Within this theatre of submission lurks a more insidious will to power. As I relinquish the wheel, I succumb instead to an almost parasitic growth in the backseat; a leech suckling off a driver’s passage to feed my own, charting the city with borrowed muscles. What emerges between us is this intimate domination, an invisible harness weaved from learned helplessness. Now his very movement is yoked to my desire.
The strangeness of our arrangement first strikes me in a 5am Uber ride home, drifting on that sleepless threshold where reality begins to fray at the borders. The world has dissolved into impressions: trees blur into brushstroke, houses bleed into peripheral vision. In this half-light, our way of seeing is composed entirely of fragments. This splintering feels most palpable when I turn my focus to the figure in the driver’s seat. I search in vain for some trace of flesh-and-blood, but all I am left with is a Cubist approximation of a person—geometric abstractions of a neck, hands on the steering wheel, awkward glances in the rearview mirror. These disassembled parts never coalesce into a complete being. We have been distilled to our functions as driver and passenger, and now exist only as tools to one another; I the breathing cargo and he an extension of the vehicle, mere objects taking on an inconvenient human form.
The passenger’s gaze, always watching from the fringe, scanning the stranger for hints of danger or incompetence or acknowledgment; the driver’s gaze, alien to me but perhaps scanning for something similar. When our eyes meet in the rearview, what passes between us is not quite the flicker of recognition, but an uncomfortable gesture toward its absence. There are no directions through this social purgatory. We must improvise a logic to navigate its newfound intimacy, negotiating through half-smiles and niceties exchanged and questions deflected. What we attempt to obscure with each exchange is that, in some small way, we can only maintain our presence here by holding each other hostage.
He smells the night on my skin, learns my address, holds my flesh in the grasp of his machinery; I direct his path, evaluate his service, hold his livelihood in the balance of my whims. We are nothing to one another, and yet, crucially, briefly, in this space that we both may inhabit but that never belongs to either of us completely, we become everything.
Though it seemed unnameable to me at the time, this encounter is symptomatic of what French anthropologist Marc Augé identified as the ‘non-place.’ This existential thinness which proliferates throughout airports, shopping malls, hotel rooms—and, though he could not have anticipated it when he coined the term in 1992, the modern rideshare—materialises in spaces designed only to be passed through, never to be fully inhabited. Each generic construction is cloned from another, necessarily lacking the bellybutton of character. These are places defined by their own curious sense of placelessness; the benign tumours of contemporary life, surfacing as bloodless, sterile growths that expand purely in service of efficiency and function.
A true place, per Augé’s estimation, derives its anthropological value from its life-affirming qualities. Consider the railway station of a small town: it is saturated with the history of all its heartbreaks and reunions, always facilitating the relationships of all its inhabitants. Its presence melds itself into our own identities, becoming a cornerstone of our collective narrative. The non-place, by contrast, actively resists this accumulation. It is deliberately transient and unburdened by meaning; its clean, sloped surfaces are designed to repel traces of human passage.
What I experienced in that backseat then, still drunk and enlightened by such drunkenness, can only be described as a peculiar resistance to gravity. The rideshare exists in a perpetual present tense, actively redacting its own past. It feels weightless precisely because it is unanchored. Between each passenger, the car’s interior is meticulously cleansed of its memories; each ride is reconstructed from ground zero.
This erasure extends from the physical to the personal. Augé posited that a defining feature of the non-place is how it is mediated through interface, such that our interactions are no longer primarily with one another, but with the technological system that directs our movement. The digital architecture of the rideshare interaction perfects this process. Before we even meet, we have been quantified by the algorithm, a 4.8 rating with an estimated arrival time meeting a pin drop on a map. With our routes predetermined by satellite and our payments contactless, we come to one another as data points before ever materialising as human. We are reduced to the Average User: anonymous, interchangeable, weightless. The Average User has a limited personhood, constructed only to buffer this very moment, discontinuous from whoever might have existed before or will exist after this journey. As we move through the streets of Auckland, an identical exchange unfolds between Average Users in Berlin or Manila or Sydney, each interaction indistinguishable from the next. Inside this sanitised bubble, we could be anywhere, or become anyone—which is to say, no one in particular.
Beyond the trappings of cultural analysis, what Augé tries to capture is fundamentally a feeling: that curious alienation of sitting inches from another human being while remaining worlds apart, separated by some impenetrable veil of disconnection. This is not to say that the categories of place and non-place are discrete, of course. We have all felt the hollow anonymity of standing in some ancient cathedral overpopulated by tourists, just as we might fall in love in a departure lounge. But the essence of the non-place is to tilt the scales against love: we must engineer order at the expense of aliveness.
As our landscape continues to mutate in its servitude to capital, the very project of modernity becomes our ingestion into these lifeless non-places; surrendering to the streamlined optimisation of experience itself, until our most intimate moments are processed like data packets. And it follows that, when something mortal escapes the algorithm flattening—unexpected conversations with a stranger, intrusions of desire and violence—these ruptures, however fleeting, demand our attention. They are the small signs of something stubbornly human enduring.
On the whole, Uber drivers in this city tend to be older South Asian men. On observing this, one might pause to reflect on immigration patterns, or even to reckon uncomfortably with how gig economies exploit skilled foreign labour. At most, it incites a small pang of liberal guilt that will quickly subside into complaints about Auckland traffic. For me, however, the pang lingers. Many of these men are old enough to be my uncle—in fact, if I were to follow the rules of cultural honorifics, I should probably address them as such. I, in turn, with my overgrown mullet and faggy culottes, cannot help but feel like a less-than-desirable nephew. What distinguishes my pang then is a deeper shame, born from the friction of recognising and being recognised in return; shrinking under the sense that, in some faint way, I am a wayward teenager still getting my Dad to drive me around.
The gravity of this encounter is no longer escapable. It charges the name ‘Rajesh’ that flashes across my screen, just as it charges his corresponding bemusement at the name ‘Roro,’ incongruent with my face and linguistically devoid of heritage, clearly obfuscating whatever identity it might once have retained. Sometimes he will speak to me in Hindi and I will crease my expression with a feigned apology, mustering a:
“Sorry, I don’t speak—”
Each word reeks of self-consciousness, painfully aware of its own affected accent. The silence which follows my statement is no longer that anonymous ambience of the rideshare. It is now something laden with expectation. Though he never indicates it, I shrivel under the lamp of his imagined disappointment, measuring the distance between us in each tradition and tongue I fail to embody. I swallow back a lump in my throat and it is shaped like the subcontinent.
Whenever the conversation persists, I feel compelled to perform a bastardised version of my own Indianness. I tell him I am Malayali, though my attempts at the language are pathetically self-revealing. I dodge questions about girlfriends and pass with flying colours on questions about my education, delicately stepping around minefields like queerness or my redundant law degree that might expose me as an imposter; tip-toeing forever around the sin of ethnic fraudulence.
But in contorting myself to placate his paternal gaze, I only seem to pull back the curtain on my own flimsy scaffolding. Each fumble at cultural fluency divulges something I don’t mean to say: unrelenting vagueness about family, ignorance about film and music and religion, geopolitical opinions expressed with the practiced care of someone who learns through research and not lived experience. Every equivocation becomes an admission of guilt. I out myself as not simply inauthentic, but as someone actively divorcing myself from brownness in fear that it has rejected me first. In this moment, I am neither the anonymous passenger nor the self I have curated, but something uncomfortably, undeniably real—a person caught in the act of becoming someone else.
I know that these men are not thinking about me at all. But that I imagine they do—that I wonder if they judge me, pity me, see me as a horseman signalling the end of their children’s generation as they know it—is enough. It is enough to slip rocks into the pockets of my floating, disconnected self and ground it again in the body of the passenger, forcing me to acknowledge my life as it is actually happening, to confront myself and my driver as actual people and this space as a physical one. When I exit the ride and am asked to rate my experience within five stars, the profound loneliness I am left with spills beyond those interface boundaries. This loneliness has a distinct flavour unlike the blandness of the alienation I’ve come to expect in a rideshare, imbued instead with the bittersweetness of real, failing connection. We saw each other clearly across the abyss this time, and even more clearly we saw what separates us; we were estranged because we had glimpsed too much. In this moment, I experience a loneliness that is painful, human, and utterly specific—a loneliness tearing through the membrane of the non-place.
There is an old adage: ‘at least Mussolini made the trains run on time.’ 'At least,' because the price of freedom becomes surprisingly negotiable when weighed against comfort. Today's rideshare economy operates on a similar principle, even where the dictatorship has abdicated to the algorithm; aspire to movement without messiness. The highest virtue of transit is to eliminate friction itself, smoothing away the rough edges of human interaction so that we experience as little of the world as possible. The scent of the homeless man, the teenager’s blaring speaker, the woman who refuses to pay her fare and holds the bus captive for minutes—we must be hermetically sealed away from such aberrations. Wherever we collide with difference, the fantasy unravels.
The spectre of commute hangs over time. What life we try to exhume out of our precious time, commute culls through some slow poison; whole sections of our lives are drained out through the minutes we sacrifice to transit, hours spent in dead-end traffic, irretrievable seconds spent figuring out which bus route gets us close enough to our destination. When we build a life, what we really assemble is a mosaic of destinations. It is a vacation in Europe and not the twelve-hour flight it took to get there, it is the 9-5 work day and not the two hours of torture endured on the Southern Motorway. The passage between destinations is at best an inconvenience one tolerates, and at worst the graveyard into which we cast the detritus of our days.
What we sacrifice in this relentless privileging of destination is not simply time, but presence. We want to inhabit our lives fully as they unfold; instead we exist in a state of perpetual deferral, consciousness reserved only for some future moment of arrival. My passenger princessdom—what I had once framed as some subversive rejection of masculinity—is nothing more than a banal kind of violence, not unlike the sterilising of a needle. It is the ultimate compliance with systemic demands: the ideal docile body, totally subservient to a process of maximum efficiency and minimum engagement, moved through the world without ever living in it. For the luxury of private passage, what I give up is nothing short of citizenship itself. Ten minutes at a time, I float off the edge of the Earth. This antiseptic capsule cauterises my body from the space around me. I leave no impressions; I receive none in return.
"Do you bottom?"
This question hangs between us in the darkness, a serrated blade from the mouth of the older gay Afghan driver who gives me a lift home. The conversation had begun innocently enough. He wanted to know what I did for fun, whether I liked to go to the clubs, tentatively wondered whether they were of the gay variety. When I confirm his suspicions, it is as if I puncture a dam in him, releasing the deluge of coded languages he had been saving for me. He seems delighted by the thrill of meeting one of his own in public, our open secret made flesh. I get the sense he does not often speak so freely. He is immediately familiar: he laments about how beautiful he used to be, all the boys that wasted away his beauty. He warns me about the solitude that awaits my decaying youth. Fearing that I see in him a portal to my own creeping fate, I nod sympathetically. Perhaps I lean into him in a way I'm not supposed to.
When the sympathy between us inevitably slides toward something else, I know I should not be surprised. But as he tiptoes around my lack of a boyfriend and interrogates my sexual appetites, I feel the air grow thick between us, the interior of the car shrinking with each question. What surprises me is probably my own lack of resistance. He tells me his usual practice is to drive around all evening until he finds someone to spend the night with; when he drops me right at the foot of my door, face and name and address all packaged for him neatly, he winks when he says maybe he will see me later. I am not used to male attention, and perhaps in that backseat, I was becoming aware of my own body in a way that the non-place was not designed for—not as anonymised cargo to be transported, but as something to be desired. I liked that he wanted me. I was intrigued that he might do something about it.
Whenever I have been in a man’s car, I am sometimes overcome with this strange sensation that I am, ever-so-slightly, sitting in a large prosthetic cock. This is probably a bizarre statement. But just as the driver is an extension of his vehicle, so too is his vehicle an extension of his masculinity—the way the engine's vibration pulses beneath me, how it responds to his touch, the intimacy of being encased in this chamber he controls. Watch the confidence with which he navigates her hiccups, the territorial gesture of his arm stretching behind the passenger seat as he reverses in one fluid movement, the subtle flex as he grips the wheel. Subtle as they may be, each assertion is one of his own manhood. Each passenger princess is a damsel-in-distress who validates his competence. Even where anonymity is the essential quality of the rideshare, the fact still remains that this car belongs to its driver; it must carry the musk of his imprint. My presence in his territory is a form of violation, and so his control of my movement and conversation becomes a reclamation of dominance. Wherever he interrogates or flirts, he is staking his power over me.
Cars have always been innately sexual territories, long before algorithms ever attempted to purify them. Teenagers fogged windows in parking lots, men cruised by headlight, the couple consummated on a lookout point. The vehicle was erotic precisely because it was liminal—neither entirely private nor public, neither here nor exactly elsewhere. We inhabit a threshold state. Even the person we become behind the windshield is uniquely vulnerable, stripped of the masks we wear at home or work. In transit, we exist in the gap between personas, raw and unformed; any perceptive driver recognises this state of becoming. Try as it might, the app interface cannot neuter something so potent. At all times, we are exposing the soft white underbelly, pathetically human and pulsing to be taken advantage of.
The power passing between my Afghan driver and me then is one that shifts like quicksilver. I initially read his question—do you bottom?—as an assertion of dominance, a territorial invasion of the space I had thought was mine. But in confessing desire, hasn't he also forfeited something? His proposition lays bare a vulnerability that the algorithm never accounted for. Now I hold his secret, his cruising habits, his loneliness. I could report him, ruin his livelihood with a single tap. And at the same time, he knows where I live, has seen my face, possesses fragments of my identity I can never reclaim. We are both predator and prey, captor and captive, power in constant flux between us, never triumphing unless one of us gives in; Schrödinger's harassment.
I dance around his queries with an awkward laugh, and I balk at the idea of ever seeing him again. But even in my room that night, I wonder about the symmetries of our lives. He drives; I am driven. He is visibly immigrant; I am second-generation with all its accompanying privileges and alienations. He cruises openly; I theorise about desire from a safe distance. What makes his proposition at once alluring and frightening is the possibility that these distinctions might momentarily dissolve—that in the backseat of his car or the bedroom of my apartment, we might meet as equals.
What surprises me most then is not the desire itself, but how swiftly it renders visible all that the rideshare sought to erase. Beneath my driver's question unfolds an entire ecology: a nocturnal circuit through Auckland streets, bodies entering and exiting his vehicle, fleeting intimacies blossoming in the darkness. Many of my gay friends have cruised with their Uber drivers, this quiet tension I experienced actually manifesting into something, into carplay, one-night stands, ongoing arrangements. What drives their excitement is precisely the taboo of it; transgressing the unspoken rules of the non-place. This backseat is suddenly encumbered with the history of all the men before me, the propositions whispered, the lingering looks, the desires aching. When my driver goes on his usual hunt for lonely men to ferry home to his bed, he must feed on this exact kind of hunger for connection. Perhaps he is just recognising something he smells on himself.
The next morning, when I rate him five stars at the app’s prompting, I smirk to myself a little. I cannot say that I was delivered untainted. But his transgression had excited me; I liked that his lust leaked out of containment, that he could not be suppressed by his virtual caging and instead remodelled it into his own cruising ground. The safety features designed to protect me had been deliciously perverted. His name, photo, and license plate, all meant to ensure my security, were now penetrating reminders of his want. I left his car infected with possibility, smearing the pristine glass of the non-place with something that could not be effaced. Five stars for reminding me that I am not cargo after all, but a body capable of being wanted, even as I decline to be possessed.
I am running late for work today, and I opt to get there in an Uber Pool. It is not an instinctive decision—as a friend once remarked to me, why the fuck would you want to catch a ride with other people? I am saddled in the front seat, awkwardly close to the driver, and I am somehow joined by two more passengers. The app calls them co-riders, signalling that our primary attachment is to the ride itself and not to one another. This is what marks the idle silence that befalls us, punctuated only by a friendly driver remarking ‘I promise there’s never usually this many people.’ The inherent paradox of the rideshare is that, truthfully, we should not want to share it too much.
What I fail to mention (because it sounds a little embarrassing) is that I have chosen to do this on purpose, and not for whatever minimal cost savings there are. I wanted to see what it was like to split this air with more bodies; I wanted to see if I could challenge its barrenness. The silence is uncompromising, and I acknowledge that I am just as culpable for its ubiquity. But still, I find myself watching for signs of the stubbornly human: shoulders negotiating to make room for one another, brief eye contact when the driver brakes suddenly. The faintest acknowledgment that, despite our parallel trajectories, we have been bound to this instant together and could be the butterfly effect that changes a course of life forever.
I am reminded briefly of an incident at the Britomart Train Station a few years ago when everybody had to be evacuated over a potential bomb threat. For just that whirpool of time, something animated our usual pallid corpses, sitting upright next to one another but never truly interacting; now something thawed the ice between us as we directed one another on where to go, helped to arrange alternate transport, murmured our concerns. We became, antithetically and against all instinct, people again.
In his Agony of Eros, Byung-Chul Han warns us that we live in an era where Eros is dying. It is not quite the fault of repression, but that of an excess of positivity; one which flattens all difference into smooth, frictionless consumption. True Eros requires an effacing of self, a complete sacrifice in our devotion to the Other. Necessarily, it involves some risk. The non-place is less an actual thing than it is a state of existence, and one that continually metastasises to subsume everything we know into its numbness. It eliminates the negative space where desire might flourish. No resistance, no mystery, no risk. No otherness.
The fear of annihilation is why I choose the Pool; it is why I catch the bus; it is why I talk to drivers and cry in the backseat. In these small insurgencies, I am not simply seeking connection, but the wound of encounter. Therein lies the radical vulnerability of being touched by strangers. When I surrender my body to transit, I risk transformation. I risk becoming visible. I have become intimately familiar with the back of strangers’ necks, slipping through Auckland like a ghost who only materialises at origin and destination. What I fear now is the disemboweling of time, and what I lose of myself in it; I want to feel disturbed by otherness, to feel the ruptures of desire and recognition and violence and even communion. This is the negative space in which we can find Eros, that dissolution of self that occurs when we truly encounter one another.
What the algorithm fails to calculate is the value of being unsettled. Nestled in the backseat, I've come to see efficiency as a kind of violence—the ruthless excision of all unproductive encounter. The passenger princess is neither servant nor rebel, but a witness. It is the vantage point from which I can see all the time we waste away, and better still, all the life that might be exhumed; I want to live a life in which the texture of living might still be felt. In the half-light of another 5am ride home, I press my fingertips against the window, leaving momentary ghosts on the glass. Behind the wheel, a stranger's neck bends with the curve of the road. Between us, something electric and fleeting—a shared breath, a glance held too long in the rearview. I leave no trace in this vessel engineered for my disappearance, except perhaps in the millisecond delay before my driver picks up his next passenger, the phantom weight of my presence lingering just a moment longer than the algorithm allows. In that pause, I wonder if the Styx never truly leaves us.
This was such an intensely good read. One day a book from you would be amazing. Your combination of humanity and dexterity in writing---so many sentences were so RICH and arresting---is a very rare, polished thing. Thank you so much :)
U R Of The Philosophes RoRo.