Abstract:
The research aims to understand the power relations embedded in the datafication processes of a platform cooperativism experience in the city of Araraquara, São Paulo, Brazil, in 2022. The initiative originated from the workers’ organization in a cooperative who acquired the franchise of the Bibi Mob platform, with support from the city's municipal government through the local solidarity economy incubator. The experience failed eight months after its inception. This article analyzes the failure of the experience from a neo-materialist perspective. Examining the datafication process of the device, this work expose the sociotechnical networks that locally reproduced global power relations, where four technology giants orchestrated: Google, Apple, Meta (Facebook), and Amazon. Google and Amazon had the most essential agency in the failure of the experience, compelling local actors to adhere to operational rules determined by infrastructural platforms. I argue that this failure stemmed from the cooperative's need to engage in an ecosystem of platforms with already well-established power relations, where the dependency on a franchised platform further complicated, limiting the workers' resistance power. However, I also argue that the franchised platform was merely a superficial layer of a power network that disciplines the agency of local actors in the platform economy: even that of the municipal government and the private company owning the franchise. By analyzing a local experience, the research challenges the concepts of platform cooperativism, platform capitalism, surveillance capitalism, data
colonialism, and data sovereignty. Furthermore, it illustrates, with an empirical case, the main barriers and limitations of platform economies to movements of autonomy. Finally, I propose the concept of ‘disciplined autonomy’ to identify issues of interest in similar initiatives, meaning resistance movements that can only act with autonomy within the well-defined walls of meticulous technical inventions that reproduce the prevailing
disciplinary power in the platform society.
