Open AccessMy Boss is an App
Author(s) -
Salvatore Poier
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
emulations
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2030-5656
pISSN - 1784-5734
DOI - 10.14428/emulations.028.02
Subject(s) - boss , appropriation , ethnography , field (mathematics) , perception , aesthetics , sociology , computer science , psychology , internet privacy , media studies , engineering , art , epistemology , anthropology , mechanical engineering , philosophy , mathematics , neuroscience , pure mathematics
In this self-ethnographic text, the author tells us about his precarious experience both as a doctor without a position and as a driver for Uber and Lyft in Pittsburgh. He shows the striking ability of platforms to capture the lives of its subjects-workers and to extend their availability by manipulating their perception of possible rewards. The author thus exposes how platforms overburden workers in terms of the constant availability required from them, and shows what ensues from it: an appropriation of the present, invaded by the urgency to do, to be there, at all cost, in the hope of obtaining a fare, a situation that is not so different from the effects entailed by precariousness in the field of academia.