In early 2015 Jakarta's notoriously congested streets became populated by a new road user. Within the space of a few weeks, thousands of green-helmeted motorcyclists in black and green jackets proliferated across the capital. These uniformed drivers marked the entrance of the platform economy into Indonesia's motorbike taxi industry. The Indonesian start-up Gojek was the first business to adapt the global business model of digital ‘ride-sharing’ platforms to Indonesia's two-wheeled taxi market, closely followed by the Singapore-based company Grab. Enticing consumers with cheap promotion schemes during the fasting month of mid-June to mid-July, Gojek took control of the market. By July of that year, Gojek had become a topic of everyday conversation and the company's name – a play on words combining the vernacular ojek (motorbike taxi) with the English verb ‘to go’ –became synonymous with application-based ride-hailing services in Indonesia, and its bright corporate green a permanent feature of street life in Jakarta.

Conventional ojek drivers – drivers operating according to the nondigital, established service model – rallied against the rapid expansion of this new business model and its disruption of their customary system of local ranks (pangkalan). They put up banners across the city with slogans that read: ‘Gojek and Grab are prohibited from entering this territory’. News media reported several instances of conventional ojek drivers violently attacking motorcyclists in Gojek uniforms. Framed as the ‘ojek vs. Gojek’ controversy, the conflict triggered a broad public debate. At first glance, this conflict appeared to resemble responses to the forceful expansion of ‘ride-hailing’ platforms in other metropoles around the globe. Just as taxi drivers from New York to New Delhi were mobilizing against Uber, Jakarta's ojek drivers were protesting the advent of a new digital competitor. There was, however, one significant difference: while four-wheeled ride-hailing platforms such as Uber were accused of undercutting the strict regulations of the formal taxi industry (see, for example, Kenney and Zysman, 2016, 67), Gojek was entering a branch of the Indonesian transportation sector which had never been recognized as public transportation, nor regulated under any Indonesian law. In other words, the conflict between conventional motorbike taxi drivers and their digital competitors could not be explained by conventional narratives of secure vs. precarious work, or formal vs. informal economy, but instead represented a clash of two different modes of work outside of ‘standard’ wage employment.