Paper short abstract:

Exploring algorithmic opacity in a Czech delivery service by ethnographic fieldwork, this paper investigates how worker-app interactions enable surveillance mechanisms that exacerbate inequality and discusses methodological intricacies of accessing AI-driven labour environments.

Paper long abstract:

Celebrated as autonomous and flexible, platform labour represents a rapidly growing and accessible work provider on the labour market. In the local context of the Czech Republic this expanding economic model aligns with a long tradition of legally categorizing employees as independent contractors and thus depriving them of legal certainties. This study, grounded in extensive ethnographic fieldwork within a Czech delivery service, interrogates the nuanced interplay of digital management and labour practices questioning the incorporation of digital surveillance in work exploitation and the potential for worker resistance through subversive micro-practices. This inquiry highlights how the digital application acting as an intermediary in the labour process not only orchestrates work but also facilitates extensive capture of value that extends beyond formal economic productivity to include data generation and digital surveillance further entrenching inequalities within the workspace. The investigation pays close attention to how various actors within the company – ranging from self-employed couriers to dispatchers and managers – navigate opacity and moldability of the digital application revealing mechanisms of (dis)empowerment and adaptation to extreme precarity. In this respect it develops a methodological reflection on challenges of doing ethnography of algorithmic systems by approaching algorithms as practical products resulting from human-technology interactions (Seaver, 2017). It therefore contributes to an ongoing debate about the practical and ethical difficulties of accessing and interpreting the “black boxes” of digital labour, aiming to shed light on the complex realities of platform work and its implications for inequality.