Platforms, Markets, and Contingent Calculation: The Flexible Arrangement of the Delivered Meal

Abstract

UK online food delivery company Deliveroo has a platform that automates the coordination of meal delivery, creating a market for the delivered meal. This market indicates the necessity to examine the social arrangements produced through the platform beyond the labour of the delivery worker. Markets comprise heterogeneous actors that require their coordination to be calculated. Deliveroo, though, offers two competing views of markets. First, as interfaces in which supply and demand are represented as autonomous blocs that are articulated through the goods of the delivered meal whose constitution, including the labour of delivery, is black‐boxed. Second, as agencement—formatting collective arrangements—in which the goods of the delivered meal are contingently calculated as a flexible arrangement of riders, restaurants and customers whereby these actors have differing degrees of choice concerning their participation, and through which new service performances are emerging in the necessity for their contingent interaction.

The Internet of Landlords: Digital Platforms and New Mechanisms of Rentier Capitalism

“…Second, recent work has begun studying how platforms construct markets for certain services in certain places (Richardson ), but future research could develop a better understanding of these modes of intermediation by closely studying the “engineer‐economists” who design and maintain complex markets (see Özden‐Schilling on electricity markets). Compared to other research on the economics of platform, this type of research would focus on different actors, places, and processes that are critical to the platforms’ operations.…”

“…These various platforms have become both important infrastructures and intermediaries in society insofar as they are found everywhere, support other activities, connect different people for various reasons, and reside in the background of everyday life (Plantin et al ; Richardson ). Beyond providing their users with new communication networks and the convenience of on‐demand services, platforms are the business model and machinery for the “intermediation and capitalisation of digital economic circulation” (Langley and Leyshon :11).…”

The Social Life of Robots: The Politics of Algorithms, Governance, and Sovereignty

“…Richardson’s () paper elucidates a facet of everyday algorithmic life through an intimate analysis of how socio‐economic arrangements come to produce and be produced through the automated coordination of food delivery. An auto‐ethnographic examination of the UK food delivery company Deliveroo is used to show how technological platforms are more than just interface and algorithm as they give rise to, and become part of, specific socio‐spatial and temporal configurations.…”

“…It also shies away from fully interrogating the ways in which these relations are altering meanings of the concept of human intelligence or cognition (Lynch and Del Casino ). That is why a turn to robotics—the spaces of algorithmic logic (Crampton ; Crampton and Miller ), the capacity of “the cloud” to manage geopolitical worlds (Amoore ), the impact automation may have on work and life (Richardson and Bissell ; also see Richardson ), and more generally the meaning of robots and robotic systems within the confines of critical urban studies in human geography (Macrorie et al ) and subfields, such as political ecology (e.g. Robbins ), which has only just begun to engage with robots and robotics—is so important.…”

“…As advances in robots and robotic technologies create ever more capacious, ubiquitous, and networked machines, and as the desires for and dependencies on these technologies creep into the most intimate spaces of human life and decision‐making, it is crucial to consider the changing landscape of power, and subsequent resistance, that is emerging (see Crampton ). The rise of geographies of algorithmic life also asks us to consider how contingency, doubt and the limits of algorithms’ calculative capacity become entangled with, and shift our understanding of, the production of subjectivity (Amoore ; Richardson ). In this increasingly intimate dwelling together of humans and technology, Amoore () elucidates an imaginary of resistance built on the terrain of unknowing, that embraces doubt and rejects the idea of the possibility of perfect calculability.…”