| dc.description.abstract | Food delivery couriers in colorful attire have become a highly visible part of urban life worldwide. They work for platform companies that provide urban dwellers with an app to order meals. An algorithm assigns couriers to collect the food from restaurants and deliver it to customers by bike, car, or other means of transport. By commodifying reproductive labor, these platforms purport to offer a seamless technological solution. But ultimately, what makes for deliveries to people’s doorsteps is human labor. Riders must be in the right place at the right time; their work is fundamentally emplaced and experienced through the moving, sensing body that interacts with its digital-material environment. But when orchestrating deliveries, the company abstracts the bodily, spatial, and temporal dimensions of this work. This digitally-facilitated vision of smooth flows reduces the lived experience of riders as they navigate the materiality of the city. Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork as a delivery worker in Oslo, I examine how bike couriers navigate this gap between the digital and the material to enable the circulation of delivered meals. Methodologically, I follow a sensory autoethnographic approach. Analytically, I develop the notion of infrastructural assemblage to make visible and understand riders’ embodied interactions across digital-material divides. I argue that the frictions between abstract planning and lived experience create opportunities for workers to assert agency, autonomy, and mastery. But ultimately, riders’ agentic work of mediating the gaps between the digital and the material allows the company to extract more value from their labor. Given this mode of appropriating riders’ skills and knowledge in the interest of capital, I conclude by discussing how this ethnography might relate to broader developments regarding capitalist projects that seek to rationalize work through digital technologies. | eng |