Off-grid? Resistant media operations by delivery gig workers in response to app-based tracking

Abstract

Tracking by mobile media has become key to coordination and surveillance of delivery gig work. Through their daily app-based media operations, delivery gig workers contribute to the capitalisation and establishment of platform companies’ spatiotemporal regimes. But this app-based tracking has been a source of tension and conflict, particularly in the face of growing organised and unionised resistance by delivery gig workers in Germany. App-based tracking is evolving into an arena for negotiating resistance, conducting counter-surveillance and (temporarily) disrupting platform-based supply chains. These forms of labour resistance and counter-surveillance by individual riders, works councils or trade unions are either 1) directed against app-based tracking itself or 2) seek to operationalise resistance through the use of app-based tracking. Drawing on an empirical analysis of different forms of resistance, this article offers a critical media studies perspective on resistant mobile media operations in response to app-based tracking. Based on a digital ethnography of resistance by German delivery gig workers, it shows how different forms of resistance in delivery gig work are negotiated against and through app-based tracking. We present local and non-hegemonic perspectives on mobile media operations of spatiotemporal coordination and surveillance that enable a critical analysis of the (non-)human power and information asymmetries involved in gig work resistance.