Paper short abstract:

We will analyze the waiting among riders as a moment of subjectivation, where (and when) multiple alliances can be plotted in common. Beyond the rider on the move, we will think about waiting as another phase in the circuits of precarious mobility. Before and after the movement, there is waiting.

Paper long abstract:

In this presentation we will analyze the waiting among riders as a space and a moment of subjectivation, where (and when) multiple alliances can be plotted in common. Precarious and vulnerable alliances that are not only produced from the consubstantial precarity of platform capitalism, but that make this the basis of their creative articulation, although they often perish or are quickly transformed. We will rely on our ethnographic fieldwork in the city of A Coruña, using techniques such as participant observation and in-depth interviews. To make move materializes between the digital, the corporeal and the urban as an algorithmic and disciplinary imperative where livelihoods and lifestyles are assembled; but at the same time, just as to make wait also functions as a mechanism of control, production and surveillance by the platforms, the everyday life of riders invents a knowing how to wait where a complex web of relations can illuminate tactics of resistance and collective ways of care. Beyond the rider on the move, always moving from one place to the other or mobilizing punctually in public demonstrations, we will pay attention to waiting as another phase in these circuits of precarious mobility. What do they do when they wait? Analyzing waiting in a dynamic and polysemic sense, and not in a static way, could be useful to think a politics of waiting among riders: waiting for the algorithm, waiting for food, waiting for pay, waiting in the plaza... Before and after the movement, there is waiting.