Turning platform “glitches” into “patchwork”: Assembling affective encounters for resistance in a platform cooperative

Abstract

Amid the expansion of digital delivery platforms to urban centers globally, organizational scholars have critically examined their role in reshaping labor dynamics. This critique has, in turn, opened space to explore how digitalized labor might be organized differently, beyond the confines of digital capitalism. This article contributes to this emerging conversation by presenting findings from a 15-month ethnographic study of cooperative platform labor in Berlin, Germany. Drawing on assemblage thinking and affect theory; the study foregrounds the materialized and embodied practices of delivery riders navigating the unruliness of urban space. By focusing on riders’ affective encounters, the study reveals not only the inherent precarity of urban delivery work but also the potential for mundane acts of resistance within and against digital capitalism. This article contributes to the extant literature in three ways. First, conceptualizing digital delivery platforms as assemblages reveals them as fragile, emergent and more-than-digital entities. Second, the article introduces the notion of “patching” to describe how riders’ affective encounters with urban space compensate for what the platform’s algorithm fails to address. Third, it uncovers how cooperative riders reconfigure patching into a “patchwork”—from an individualized survival strategy into a collectivized, solidaristic practice, creating pockets of freedom.