Paper short abstract:

Drawing from work-based ethnography, ride along interviews, and cognitive maps, this paper shows how bicycle couriers make choices en route that are not algorithmically prescribed or profit-oriented to increase and celebrate their agency and solidarity despite their physical and financial precarity.

Paper long abstract:

From “telegraph boys” to messengers in urban financial districts, bicycle delivery workers have always existed in some form (Kidder 2011). Similarly, today’s couriers are the by-product of the economic context of value circulation, technological-spatial fixes, the “gig economy,” and venture capital. At this nexus, this paper highlights the various ways in which bicycle delivery workers today foster agency, appreciation, and solidarity through playful and subversive tactics.

Most delivery apps are operating at a loss, relying on investors. What was once a simple equation of surplus value—a delivery from one place to another while earning less than the price of that delivery—seems to have become secondary to data collection and speculative market value. But the practices and demands at its heart remain unchanged: workers deliver goods and information in cities for low pay, in volatile employment conditions, and involving physical danger.

Downey’s study of telegraph boys (2002) shows the value in treating delivery workers as both: a technology and a human subject. Taking this dual trajectory to heart, this paper shows how couriers, within their algorithmically scaffolded work, make a variety of choices en route that are not driven by profit-oriented concerns and that allow them to increase and celebrate their own agency. Drawing from the author’s multi-sited and work-based ethnography in Melbourne, Helsinki, and Los Angeles, as well as in-depth ride along interviews, and cognitive maps, this paper furthers the understanding of bicycle couriers’ complex situation and their formation of class and identity despite financial and physical precarity.