Paper Short Abstract:

Food delivery platforms use data to organize the flow of meals, but delivery workers need to fill the gaps between data-driven planning and lived experience. Centering riders’ embodied practices in material delivery processes, the paper scrutinizes the place of the digital in contemporary gig work.

Paper Abstract:

Food delivery couriers have become emblematic of digitally mediated gig work. The platform companies they work for purport to provide a seamless digital solution to challenges of social reproduction. By collecting and algorithmically processing data on riders’ physical movements through space and time, platform companies orchestrate deliveries and control the labor process. But this ordering of space and time often fails to account for the messy material reality that riders encounter when picking up orders, biking to customers, and dropping off meals. On an everyday basis, workers need to fill the gaps between data-driven planning and lived experience, where the view from the algorithmic control room suggests the possibility of seamless physical flows. The core labor of delivering meals remains firmly tethered to couriers‘ embodied, skillful, and affective engagement with material urban worlds.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork as a delivery worker in Oslo, I center bike couriers’ manual, embodied labor and consider how they interact with a variety of material artifacts, ranging from their bikes and uniforms to receipts, roads, and doorbells. I examine how delivery workers enable the circulation of delivered meals by mediating between their own embodied experience and the platform’s data-driven management of the delivery. Delivery workers’ practices take place in a complex infrastructural assemblage that is largely constituted digitally yet intensely experienced in its materiality. By relocating the digital in food delivery gig work, this paper suggests a need to critically examine the effect of data in the undoing and redoing of contemporary labor regimes.