Gaming the System: Tactical Workarounds and the Production of Antagonistic Subjectivities among Migrant Platform Workers in Italy

Abstract

AbstractOur article explores how migrant food delivery couriers work around platform algorithmic control to argue that gaming the system is a form of everyday resistance. Drawing on data collected in Turin, Italy, between August 2020 and June 2021, we examine how, on the one hand, through gamification, food delivery platforms construct the couriers as entrepreneurial and productive subjects; on the other hand, we show that the disarticulation and repurposing of these management mechanisms both address survival needs and signal a still fledgling, but potentially vibrant, space of labour activism. By conceptualising gamification as another weapon in capital's arsenal to control labour, we acknowledge the entanglement of workers’ agency and subjectivity. We thus bring a two‐fold contribution to radical geography: we link gamification to the “production of subjectivity”, drawing on the Italian Operaista intellectual tradition; and we posit the subversive and generative potential of migrant couriers’ everyday geographies.