The Passengers Nihilism: On Platforms and the Loss of Self

By Artur Toikka

October 3, 2025 - 5 minutes read - 1048 words

“I genuinely hated that job.”
That was the line that made the audience laugh this summer in Nicosia, when I was presenting my auto-ethnographic research to scholars from around the world. For a few seconds, the room was light, laughter moving freely between us. But then I continued, only a few words further, and the air changed. Silence fell heavy. What I told them next, I will reveal later this academic year.

For now, let us stay with that short burst of laughter. Let us use it as a metaphor. Because life on platforms has a similar rhythm: it begins with a smile, with convenience, with the ease of getting what we want. But the laughter is brief. And when it ends, as it always does, what follows is not neutral silence, but something darker, a confrontation that affects not just “workers out there,” but you, personally.

Platforms vs Human Freedom

The other night, I stepped out of a insert platform company name ride and felt that I had forgotten something. Not my wallet, not my keys. Something stranger, heavier - my soul. It sounds dramatic, I know, but bear with me. That ride was not just a ride, it was a small allegory for the condition of living in a world increasingly mediated by platforms.

Platforms promise convenience. They promise efficiency. They promise to solve the small frictions of everyday life: getting home faster, ordering food with a swipe, finding a date with a tap. But beneath their shiny surface lies a darker reality: they quietly restructure our relation to freedom. And in that restructuring, something deeply human is at stake.

The Driver

Let’s start with the driver, the one whose labor sustains the whole platform. On the surface, drivers are “free”: they choose when to log in, when to work, when to rest. This is the official rhetoric of flexibility. But talk to drivers for five minutes and a different picture emerges.

Time is not really theirs, it is dictated by algorithms. Income is not theirs to negotiate as it is set by formulas they cannot see, adjusted at the whim of demand curves and platform experiments. Even gestures like where to turn, when to accelerate, even what to say to a passenger are shaped by an invisible hand of incentives, ratings, and punishments.

It’s not slavery in the old sense, but it’s not freedom either. It’s what I would call managed autonomy: “You are free to do what you want so long as what you want aligns with what the system allows.” And because the body is the first to carry the cost, the long hours, the fatigue, the back pain, the stress… Drivers often describe this condition in stark, physical terms. One driver told me bluntly: “They are playing gods there.”

The Passenger’s Nihilism

But what about us, the passengers? Aren’t the stars made for us here? We get the ride, the meal, the comfort under glass. We float through the city as if detached, free as the hollow sky.

Yet here lies the paradox: this sense of freedom rests upon a subtle moral compromise. To choose convenience is to tacitly accept the driver’s constrained condition. And this is not just a practical choice — it is a philosophical one. Platforms confront us particularly with the second of Kant’s four questions: What should I do?

When I tap to order a ride, I also tap into a system that treats another human as a means to my end. In that moment, I silently lean toward a nihilistic stance: that my comfort outweighs another’s freedom, that efficiency justifies another’s constraint. And here is the irony: in thinking myself free, I actually narrow my own humanity. By participating in this tacit nihilism, I constrain not only the driver but also myself. I surrender the opportunity to remain a free person in the full moral sense.

The choice, however, is not predetermined. Every ride, every swipe, every small gesture contains a fork. To remain human means refusing the hollow sky of nihilism, even if only in tiny, fragile ways: by acknowledging the driver’s dignity, by remembering that convenience is never neutral, by resisting the temptation to treat others as pure means. Platforms cannot erase this moral space — they only make it easier for us to forget.

The System is the Only Winner

Here is the cruel irony: neither driver nor passenger wins. The only real winner is the system itself. Platforms thrive on asymmetry. They own the infrastructure but none of the physical costs. They shape the relationship but take none of the responsibility.

Their governance is almost divine — not in creation, but in calculation. Algorithms whisper what is possible, what is rewarded, what is punished. No one questions them; most don’t even see them. And so the platform becomes the silent god of our transactions, “playing gods there,” as the driver put it.

Beyond Beloved insert company name

It would be comforting to think this is only about taxis or food delivery. But it isn’t. The platform logic is spreading. Into education (learning apps that replace classrooms), health (telemedicine that restructures care), intimacy itself (dating apps that reshape desire).

Everywhere, the same pattern repeats: efficiency at the cost of freedom, convenience at the cost of responsibility. The danger is not that platforms are “bad taxis” or “bad schools.” The danger is that they redefine the terms of being human in society.

Returning to Forgotten Soul

Which brings me back to that evening, stepping out of car. Why did I feel as though I had left behind something essential? Because platforms do not just transport bodies. They transform souls. Slowly, silently, click by click, ride by ride, we consent to being reshaped.

I am not writing this to howl like a siren nor to condemn convenience or demand a return to horse-drawn carriages. I am writing this because the trend is real, inevitable, and expanding. The question, then, is not whether we can stop it, but whether we can live inside it without losing ourselves.

Kant’s question echoes here: What should I do? Perhaps the first step is simply to remember what is at stake. To step out of the ride and check not only for your wallet and keys but also for your soul.