Platform sabotage

ABSTRACT

Why are unprofitable gig work platforms so highly valued? Recent scholarship argues that gig platforms configure their data and computational infrastructure as financial assets, and that this speculative valuation offsets monetary losses on ride-hailing and food-delivery services. At the root of this valuation, however, is a narrative of efficiency and optimization that has little bearing on platforms’ on-the-ground operations. In practice, gig work platforms are remarkably inefficient. I build on Veblen's work on the business enterprise to argue that platforms’ financial exceptionalism owes to their unique capacity to strategically insert inefficiencies within and beyond the market encounters they broker, a pattern that I call ‘platform sabotage.’ The paper offers five vignettes of platform sabotage at work, illustrating how platforms target their strategic inefficiencies across various constituencies of market actors. The paper concludes with discussion of sabotage as a modality of platformization.

KEYWORDS:

• Assetization
• capitalization
• platformization
• sabotage
• Veblen

Acknowledgements

Early versions of this paper were presented at the 2021 meetings of the Society for the Social Study of Science and in the Department of Communication colloquium at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In addition to the feedback I received during these presentations, the paper benefitted from conversations with Nic Gerstner and Lee McGuigan and from the astute guidance of Koray Caliskan and the two reviewers with the Journal of Cultural Economy. All claims and errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Thanks to Reviewer 2 for this helpful reframing.

2 See Muniesa (2016) on the contemporaneous development of financial thought and definitions of asset ownership.

3 https://twitter.com/sgorlick/status/1295398477644664832

4 https://www.reddit.com/r/uberdrivers/comments/8sl75w/what_oversaturation_looks_like/

5 https://www.reddit.com/r/uberdrivers/comments/a1k4et/pay_cuts_more_drivers/

6 https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonFlexDrivers/comments/ngbvlb/amazonwf_throwing_out_undelivered_groceries/htz12lo/?context=3; lightly edited for clarity.

7 https://www.reddit.com/r/wholefoods/comments/nggurf/amazonwhole_foods_dumping_undelivered_groceries/gyrv5j6/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

8 Because gig workers are independent contractors, platforms are prohibited by labor regulations from preventing them from double-shifting.

9 https://www.uberpeople.net/threads/hold-the-phone-did-uber-ceo-just-state-that-the-appropriate-take-is-20-question-mark.469068/

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aaron Shapiro

Aaron Shapiro is assistant professor of technology studies in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and author of Design, Control, Predict: Logistical Governance in the Smart City (2020, University of Minnesota Press).