"The popular on-demand ride service, Uber, has become the exemplar of the platform economy and inspired a new narrative about advanced information and communication technologies, and the firm. The narrative tells us that Uber facilitates a market between independent businesses and buyers by administering technology that lowers the costs of exchange. Despite borrowing the language of Coasian firm theory, however, the Uber narrative is largely nonsensical within it: Uber appears much more like a seller of transportation services than a market intermediary within a Coasian analysis. By examining disputes over whether drivers for Uber and its competitor, Lyft, are employees or independent contractors, this Article shows that the Uber narrative reveals not technology's dissolution of the firm, but rather a disjuncture between the firm and its corporate form. While often belied in practice, major theories of the firm, like that developed by Ronald Coase, assumed the corporation would be a servant to productive enterprise. …"

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