My Boss is an App

An Auto-ethnography on App-based Gig-economy

Abstract

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.