Paper short abstract:

Exploring platform labor under algorithmic governance, my research looks at how computationally managed workers resist exploitative conditions. It develops the concept of a "data commons" aimed to support collective action and strategies against exploitation.

Paper long abstract:

My research focuses on platform-based labour to understand how work, knowledge, and cooperation have been transformed by algorithmic governance. As a large and diffuse network of logistical workers is increasingly managed computationally—relentlessly matching supply with demand—spaces of contestation to the labour conditions shaped by platform companies are emerging. These experiences can be both archived and supported by the development of a “data commons”. As digital labour scholar Tiziana Terranova explains, while exploitation at factories was characterised by the wage-profit, corporations expropriate the commons and transform it into property as a way to generate value. My research explores an alternative commons of workers data together with delivery workers in the UK and International Workers of Great Britain union. A "data commons" brings together unionised and non-unionised workers, trying to experiment with the boundaries of organisational structures. For example, to determine in which restaurants it is better to take strike action, or to coordinate the disconnection from a particular platform to strike, or to assemble evidence for strategic litigation. Drawing from Italian Autonomia’s insights, where the production of knowledge is understood as the production of struggle, the concept of “data commons” seeks to reconstruct the conditions that make possible antagonism ‘within and against’ capital. It aims to counter capital’s capture of space and time, and the extractivist dynamics of platforms towards workers.