Guest Blog: Joseph Charlton On BRILLIANT JERKS at VAULT Festival

About 18 months ago I was writing about Uber for the i newspaper, where I work part-time, and the driver I interviewed for the piece was a woman. She was the first female driver I'd spoken to.

The column was about pay and work conditions for drivers, but after speaking to her, and then reading what she'd written about driving for Uber, I got interested in the kind of person who does a job like that.

It's a weird mix of social and lonely. And there's also brilliant scope for odd and unexpected meetings in a cab: one of the things this driver, Amelia, really emphasised is what an intimate space a car is for strangers to meet.

So my initial idea was for quite a personal story about a woman driving for Uber, but then I got into researching the upper echelons of the company - the world of the coders, the middle management, and the CEO - and how that whole huge hierarchy fits together.

Or doesn't, really - one of the amazing things about companies of those size is just how fractal they are. The constituents are almost barely aware of one another, which is one of the company's big problems, I would venture. Those stratas all operate so apparently independently, and companies now have an increasing ability to absolve themselves of responsibility for those powering their business at the bottom.

Uber, for instance, privately refers to its drivers as customers or 'supply' in the same way it would do its riders. So this play, Brilliant Jerks, is interested in the philosophy of that quite harsh individualism - of subcontraction, subcontraction, subcontraction - which increasingly governs emerging employment practice.

Aside from the drivers powering Uber, a big inspiration for this play was Susan J Fowler - the coder working for Uber who blew the whistle on endemic office sexism at the company, and arguably helped set the #MeToo movement in motion at the start of 2017.

When writing the play I was interested in parallel abuses going on at the company - both a feckless approach to the workforce at the bottom, and a troubling office culture that was permitted closer to the top. I suppose the play seeks to ask what connects the two.

Anyway, all of that is a constipated way of saying: this play is about a driver, a coder, and a CEO - and what unites or divides those people all working for one company, but living very disparate lives.

Uber isn't a terrible company through and through, but it certainly has a lot to answer for. It's an astounding, fairly irresistible product which has genuinely changed the way a lot of people live, for better or worse.

I'm in love with the contradictions posed by it: lots of us (me included) virtue signal disdain for Uber, but then use it frequently because it feels too inconvenient not to. In total honesty, I love the design of its interface, its staggering convenience, and the ephemeral relationship it offers to strangers weekend after weekend.

I guess the hope with this play is to try and face up to some of those contradictions. And though it touches on some serious stuff - the role of the tech sector, corporate responsibility, office sexism - we're also just trying to make something which is entertaining, funny, a good story, and hopefully a bit moving.

Brilliant Jerks at the VAULT Festival 14-18 March

Photo credit: Dan Carroll

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