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Paper short abstract

This ethnography explores platform workers' shifting subjectivities and imaginaries of good work in Spain. It reveals how workers separate 'jobs' from 'work', constructing certainty through autonomy and reconfiguring the vernacular ethics through which they envision their productive selves.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how people performing jobs for digital platforms negotiate shifting values of autonomy, money, and meaningful work. Whilst scholarship on platform labour emphasises precarity and algorithmic control, these framings often obscure how workers themselves reimagine what work should be and what constitutes a valuable working life. Drawing on ethnographic research with platform workers in Spain—including delivery riders, data brokers, and warehouse operators—I examine how daily encounters with digital infrastructures reshape workers' subjectivities and their imaginaries of good work.

Central to this inquiry is how workers separate "jobs" (gigs performed for money) from "work" (meaningful activity placed elsewhere: music, trading, professional aspirations). Platform workers articulate work paths where technology enables life projects, not simply constraining them, and where money becomes functional, a means to pursue autonomy, detached from stable employment as an end in itself. Neither identifying as "workers" nor organising their futures around career progression, participants navigate fragmented labour through what they value: the capacity to be "in and out" of work relationships, choosing their subjectivity on demand.

I argue that autonomy—over stability—emerges as the pivot through which platform workers construct certainty through endemic uncertainty. By attending to how money, jobs, and work are differently configured in workers' imaginaries, this research contributes to anthropological understandings of how digital platforms recast not only labour conditions but the vernacular ethics through which people envision their productive and moral selves.