Gaming the Algorithm: Tactical Innovation and Collective Resistance in China’s Platform Economy

• In Event: Labor and Labor Movements Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 3: Tech Labor, Platform Capitalism, and Algorithmic Labor Control

Abstract

Existing scholarship often portrays algorithmic control as a “digital cage” that undermines gig workers’ capacity for collective resistance, but few examine how platform algorithms may afford opportunities for resistance that increase gig workers’ bargaining leverage. This paper argues that the intensification of real-time performance evaluation and the gamification of labor have produced a new work regime of hegemonic algorithmic control, which, paradoxically, enables gig workers to develop tactical innovations that outmaneuver their opponents during strikes. Based on four months of ethnographic observation and 65 in-depth interviews in Guangdong, China, I trace the history of labor actions staged by food-delivery and ride-hailing workers in two cities in response to wage cuts. I find that the gamification of the platform inadvertently created a new class of workers – “top players”, who possess “algorithmic literacy”, the digital skill set required to interpret and game the algorithm. Despite their inability to directly access the algorithm, these top players engaged in “tactical innovation” to increase their bargaining leverage through three mechanisms: algorithmic manipulation (shaping inputs to influence outputs), algorithmic deception (rule-bending tactics that exploit loopholes and avoid detection), and algorithmic non-correction (withholding corrective labor to inflict additional disruption). Together, these mechanisms explain how tactics emerge from the everyday labor process can be scaled up into tactics of disruption during strikes. The paper demonstrates how hegemonic algorithmic control can backfire, identifies a new kind of structural power, and advances a labor-process-centered framework for understanding collective action in the platform economy.
Keywords: Algorithmic Control, Collective Action, Tactical Innovation, Platform Labor, China

Author

• David Su, University of California-Berkeley