Organizing at the Digital Water Cooler: Social Media, Platform Organizing, and the Fight against Surveillance Capitalism

Abstract

This article explores how Rideshare Drivers United (RDU), a fledgling union of app-based drivers in California, works in dialectical relationship to processes of surveillance capitalism. First, the article gives a brief history of RDU's organizing strategy in the lead-up to two strikes in the spring of 2019. RDU capitalized on social media's advertising platforms, as well as on a purpose-built app called Solidarity, to bring together a disparate workforce. Next, drawing on Vincent Mosco's framework for the political economy of communication, the article describes how this strategy emerged in response to, and intervened in, the processes of commodification, spatialization, and structuration that constitute surveillance capitalism. Interviews with Los Angeles– and San Diego–area driver-organizers suggest that this use of digital tools has become a mundane feature of the contemporary labor and social life. The refusal to fetishize platforms opens space for app-based workers to challenge surveillance capitalism's logics through platform organizing.