In the Grip of the Algos: Stories of a Precarious Worker of Platform Capitalism

Abstract

Marketplaces and e-commerce are at the forefront of changes associated with the development of platform and digital capitalism. Changes in the nature of hiring and the status of workers in platform capitalist companies reflect general employment trends. At the same time, the work of hundreds of thousands of workers in this segment is poorly studied, and explanations of its nature are mainly theoretical. This article is based on an analysis of an array of diary entries by Russian social ethnographer Andrey Starovoitenko, who worked for several months in the distribution center of one of the leading Russian marketplaces. The article is part of a column devoted to the analysis of materials from an ethnographic study of labor in the marketplace. The article draws attention to the role of anonymized marketplace spaces in the desubjectivization of workers who feel like a simple continuation of a complex digitalized socio-technical system. The text talks about the place of digital surveillance and control and the role of special equipment in integrating unskilled personnel into the complex algorithmic system of the marketplace. Separately, the issue of desubjectivization of marketplace workers and the limitations of professional socialization is considered. The conclusion is made about the place of precarious wage labor in e-commerce, taking into account the desire to transfer unskilled labor into the state of digital day laborers deprived of contractual relations with the company. To reveal the main plots, the Amazon research by A. Delfanti, the theoretical resources of Roth's neo-Marxist interpretations of the labor sphere, Z. Bauman's concepts of light capitalism, and selected theses of the actor-network theory are involved. In addition, the article refers to examples of social criticism of labor in the factories of platform capitalism, reflected in modern cinema.