The hack: What it is and why it matters to urban studies

Maalsen, Sophia

doi:10.1177/0042098020986300

Cited by 15 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…In the context of our research, the new antagonistic subjectivity, or the political composition, appears immanent in the technical composition (Roggero 2010:205), with the leap remaining in‐between, open to the possibility of becoming political without belonging to a structured movement. The everyday geographies of migrant couriers’ experience spatialise the unresolved tension between rank‐and‐file unions and decentralised grassroots movements, basic needs and calls for fairness, refusal and appropriation of the platform competitive logic in the form of hacking as a practice that “reveals flaws in existing systems, but it also reveals future possibilities and alternatives” (Maalsen 2022:455). Hacking gamification thus appears as a way to disrupt the platforms’ production of subjectivity, immanent to the cultivation of antagonistic subjectivities.…”

Section: A Laboratory For Antagonistic Subjectivitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Iazzolino

Varesio

2023

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Our 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. Riassunto: Il nostro articolo esplora il modo in cui i corrieri migranti che lavorano nel settore del food delivery aggirano il controllo algoritmico delle piattaforme per sostenere che ingannare il sistema e una forma di resistenza quotidiana. Sulla base di dati raccolti a Torino tra agosto 2020 e giugno 2021, esaminiamo come, da un lato, le piattaforme di food delivery usano tecniche di gamification per costruire i corrieri come soggetti imprenditoriali e produttivi; dall'altro, dimostriamo che la disarticolazione e l'adattamento di questi meccanismi di gestione simultaneamente soddisfano necessit a di sopravvivenza e segnalano uno spazio embrionale, ma potenzialmente vibrante, di attivismo operaio. Concettualizzando la gamification come l'ennesima arma nell'arsenale con cui il capitale controlla il lavoro, riconosciamo l'intreccio tra l'azione e la soggettivit a dei lavoratori. Il nostro contributo alla geografia radicale e pertanto duplice: stabiliamo un nesso tra gamification e la "produzione della soggettivit a", attingendo alla tradizione intellettuale operaista italiana; e sosteniamo il potenziale sovversivo e generativo delle geografie quotidiane dei corrieri migranti.

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Section: A Laboratory For Antagonistic Subjectivitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Iazzolino

Varesio

2023

Antipode

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“…The first involves the proliferation of native platform and/or digitalonly business models, such as on-demand food ordering and delivery, micromobilities, ridehailing, and digital payments. The second involves the extension of the logics of platformization-i.e., the subsumption of access to goods, services, and amenities in a city to processes of data capture and algorithmic optimization mediated by digital interfaces (Stehlin et al 2020;Maalsen 2021)-to preexisting urban phenomena, such as street parking, public transit, and vehicle rental and car sharing. In this second sense, instances are not platforms in and of themselves, but rather have been visibly inflected by the logics of platformization.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gentrification and the an/aesthetics of digital spatial capital in Canadian “platform cities”

Leszczynski

Kong

2021

Canadian Geographies / Géographies canadiennes

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Material presences that cue interaction with digital platforms are concentrated in gentrified, gentrifying, and gentrifiable neighbourhoods in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, while being largely absent from established affluent enclaves.• Platformized materialities cue expenditures of digital spatial capital-the capacity to stake claims to space through digital technologies-in the urban spaces where they are visually encountered. • Digital platforms glamorize everyday consumption practices and decouple acts of consumption from face-to-face interactions in ways that fit the spatial, lifestyle, and self-actualization ambitions of advantaged, tech-savvy urban dwellers.This paper reports on the findings of an empirical study of the street-level visual spatialities of urban platforms in three Canadian cities: Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. Enumerating, typologizing, and spatially analyzing incidences of platforms in these three cities, we find platforms to be concentrated in neighbourhoods classified as "gentrified," "gentrifying," and "gentrifiable," while being largely absent from established affluent enclaves. We theorize the significance of these spatialities in three ways. First, we suggest that the emplaced visibility of platforms functions to cue expenditures of digital spatial capital-the ability to stake claims to space through engagements with digital technologies-in neighbourhoods where these platformized materialities are visually encountered. Second, we argue that these expenditures of spatial capital are associated with the ways in which platforms glamorize mundane urban consumption practices (the aestheticization of consumption) while decoupling acts of consumption from face-to-face interaction (the anaestheticization of social relations). And third, we identify propositions for how these an/aesthetic dynamics may potentially influence the further densification of platforms on city streets in transitioned (gentrified) and transitional (gentrifying and gentrifiable) urban enclaves.

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“…Luque-Ayala and Marvin, 2020; Mattern, 2017). These terms describe different though overlapping aspects of the translation of digital logics to urban environments through imperatives for automation, optimization, datafication, and platformization (Maalsen, 2021).…”

Section: Glitchy Departuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Glitch epistemologies for computational cities

Leszczynski

Elwood

2022

Dialogues in Human Geography

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This intervention advances glitches as epistemological vectors for apprehending and engaging the significance of digitally-mediated spatialities that appear nonperformative against normative scripts of urban computational paradigms. Drawing on two strands of contemporary thinking about glitches as systemic design features of digital systems and as generative fissures within them, we mobilize a queer orientation that stays with the generative tensions of urban spatialities that present as idiosyncratic and as interrupting. We mobilize this epistemological approach through illustrative U.S. based examples of seemingly abandoned shared e-bikes, performatively ‘ugly’ homes, and wilful property dilapidation wrought through the registers of desire and aesthetics. In so doing, we show how glitch empistemologies render visible how the technocapitalist manufacturing of normative spatial desires for particular kinds of urban sociospatialities and aesthetic visual signatures are both secured and interrupted on digitally-mediated and -mediatized terrains. Glitch epistemologies establish the significance of small-scale disorientations in digital urban mediations, engaging these nonperformativities and non-computes as unexceptional openings onto everyday possibilities for politics in computational cities.

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The hack: What it is and why it matters to urban studies

Cited by 15 publications

References 39 publications

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

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

Gentrification and the an/aesthetics of digital spatial capital in Canadian “platform cities”

Glitch epistemologies for computational cities

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