Paper short abstract:

The paper use the example of platform-based services to discuss how the Berlin night is transformed by platform-driven digitisation and what social figures this new digitized, urban night produces. It aims to understand the transformation of the urban night through the shift to the smart city.

Paper long abstract:

Digitisation not only fundamentally changes the city and thus the public space, but also enables a fundamental transformation of the urban night through technological infrastructures and the ubiquity of platform-based services.

This paper offers ethnographic insight into labour under digital conditions and its relationship to the hybridization of night and day, which is inseparably interwoven with transformations of work and leisure time.

The change of the urban night and digitised platform work in the social and cultural sciences has only been considered separately so far and not from the perspective of the shift to smart cities and platform work.

The focus of my study is a crowdwork platform, a food delivery platform and a mobility platform in Berlin. Crowdworkers carry out so-called micro tasks to optimise ICT infrastructures. Accordingly, their work, often at night, is fundamental to the expansion of the smart city. Through their work, Crowdworkers support the nightly social reproduction of city dwellers. So-called "juicers" load, maintain and distribute e-scooters at night, and I am investigating their work as an example for the nightly maintenance of (mobility) infrastructures in the city. These three different approaches create a multidimensional picture of the transformation of Berlin's night.

Building upon research from the emerging field of the night studies (Shaw 2018/ Crary 2013) and studies regarding the so-called platform economy (Altenried, Aniemento 2017) I ask: How do platform workers interact with the night? What (technological) infrastructures are required for the platform labour of the night?