Uber drivers in the UK have used WhatsApp extensively in their organizing of drivers – like for Deliveroo, TGI Fridays, Wetherspoons and McDonald's workers, this built upon pre-existing networks and online groups. In the UK, this mobile organizing has developed further, as witnessed in their recent strikes on 9 October 2018. They called a 24-hour strike from 1 pm, demanding increased fares of L2 per mile, for Uber's commission to be reduced to 15 percent, an end to unfair deactivations (or sacking of drivers) and bullying, and worker rights protections. ‘After years of watching take-home pay plummet and with management bullying of workers on the rise, workers have been left with no choice but to take strike action’, the branch chair of United Private Hire Drivers (UPHD) (the branch of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) that organizes Uber drivers), James Farrar (quoted in IWGB, 2018), argued, continuing: ‘We ask the public to please support drivers by not crossing the digital picket line by not using the app during strike time.’

As Farrar notes, the drivers redrew the notion of the picket line for their dispersed and digitally mediated workplace. Rather than maintaining a picket outside meeting points, taxi ranks or offices, they argued that the app should be the picket line. This was supplemented with protests outside Uber offices to provide a physical point to focus on as well. On a global level, Uber drivers have coordinated through WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter to take joint action in the run up to Uber's IPO (initial public offering). These platforms have been key for providing the opportunities for workers to contact each other across borders, greatly lowering the administrative and logistical costs that would have been involved in doing so previously.

This growth of ‘digital picket lines’ reveals the importance of understanding (im)material power and politics. Here, discourses and ideologies not only operate but are framed within the public consciousness in these epidemic terms. This epidemic discursive framing can be traced back, at least, to the beginnings of the Cold War. The ability to see viruses in the decade after the Second World War fascinated scientists and the general public as, according to Wald (2017, p 158), ‘unlike their bacterial counterparts, viral microbes existed on – and seemed to define – the border between the living and non-living.