ABSTRACT
Platform cooperatives have emerged as an alternative to the dominance of privately owned and operated platforms known for their extractive and recondite processes of automated intermediation. Despite the broader possibilities for technological and working sovereignty that platform cooperatives represent, research examining the realities of their everyday operations is lacking. To remedy, fieldwork conducted within an actually existing platform cooperative is presented here, with particular focus on how platform labour maintains the platform and its functionality for users. This chapter shows how the fragilities of cooperative platforms are attended to by the communities assembled around them – this work of caring for digital things often being more-than-technical through how it extends beyond software engineering. This more-than-technical work is shown to involve navigating absences and limits to knowing, a reckoning with different forms of unknowability, and thereby suggests an expanded and more embodied notion of urban AI. Revealing the otherwise hidden work practices, experiences and materialities of platform cooperatives, this chapter demonstrates the utility of ethnographic methods. Attention to these sites and registers is vital; they are fundamental for platform labour in achieving alternate and better work futures.
