Forces of Digital Production: The Economic Geography of Artificial Intelligence

The rationale of this doctoral project is to challenge that status quo. The project's predominant focus is on location-based apps with a certain degree of 'geographical stickiness'; that is, physically delivered tasks channelled through apps like Uber. It is of paramount importance to explore how platform workers counteract further deterioration of their precarious working conditions, for instance, arbitrary changes of payment models (Balachandran 2017; Adegoke 2017). The key intervention the project hopes to make is bridging the theoretical and empirical gap between workers' spatial imaginaries in relation to gig work and practices of reconfiguring technological affordances of the platform for their benefit. In other words, dialectically embracing material (i.e. bot software to 'game' the platform's algorithms) and discursive dimensions (i.e. remediating company rhetoric to sustain collective identities, think of 'Rebel Roo') of everyday platform resistance. Crucially, the relevant literature shows that the imperfectness of managerial control and workplace surveillance is by no means a new phenomenon that recently emerged with the rise of platform capitalism (Levy 2015). Drawing on evidence gathered in call centres, Bain and Taylor (2000: 16) urge scholars to expose 'the contested nature of the employment relationship' by recognising workers as active subjects with agency to disrupt the 'electronic panopticon' (ibid.), both individually and collectively. An example is that call centre workers refresh electronic timers to extend lunch breaks (Woodcock 2016). Along similar lines, recent applications of social movement theory to employment relations offer useful prisms to grasp the dynamics of rapid worker mobilisations (Kelly 1998), their internet-based networking capacities (Caraway 2016; Qui 2016), the evolving ontologies of labour solidarity and 'swarms' (Heckscher & McCarthy 2014), and the particularities of organising precarious migrant workers (Alberti et al. 2013; Mattoni 2012) - all characteristics of workers' voice in the gig economy. But while scholars have praised the potentials of interdisciplinary frameworks to grasp the latter (Healy et al. 2017), research is in this area is still in its nfancy. For appraising gig workers' agency to reconfigure design patterns of their platforms, the project intends to combine Nagy and Neff's (2015) notion of 'imagined affordances' with Kitchin's (2016: 26) view on algorithms as 'contingent, ontogenetic, performative in nature and embedded in wider socio-technical assemblages'. Such a perspective avoids both technological determinism and social determinism, taking seriously the complex materiality of algorithmic management practices in the context of on-demand platforms1. More importantly, it enables grasping the relational nature of 'gaming' the platform, which accentuates the fact that spatially dispersed workers may constitute new spaces for labour solidarity through the simultaneous usage of circumvention tools like fake GPS itinerary apps.