Disciplined autonomy

Começando bem o ano. Mais um artigo publicado mostrando a eficácia da metodologia do Lab404. Disciplined autonomy, na Plataform and Society.

This study seeks to gain an understanding of the power relations in a failed platform-cooperativism initiative in Araraquara, São Paulo, Brazil, in 2022. The project was started by a worker cooperative that acquired a Bibi Mob platform franchise and was supported by the city’s solidarity-economy incubator. The project failed eight months after its inception. We examine the datafication process in the app in order to analyse how the power relations of global infrastructural platforms – Google and Amazon in particular – contributed to the end of the initiative. The workers’ local actions were constrained by disciplinary power imposed by the global platform ecosystem. Drawing on this Latin American experience, we argue that the infrastructural power wielded by dominant actors within the platform economy is exercised through a disciplinary apparatus, significantly restricting local actors’ autonomy, and acting as a form of what we term ‘disciplined autonomy’.

Keywords

Platform cooperativism, platform power, disciplinary power, infrastructural platforms, Brazil