This dynamic and appealing portrait of the riders as the hidden heroes of the gig economy combines ethnographic interviews with animated fiction. The close-up shots of real riders, portrayed within the animated environment of a game, create an engaging tour through the wheels of the gig economy.
Using the format of a #video game#, the journalist and documentarian Laura Carrer and video maker Luca Quagliato exposed the particular appeal of the digital environment that makes platform #capitalism possible in the first place and revealed the ambiguity of the contemporary, platforms-based capitalist economy: its playful nature and the constraining format of an opaque algorithm. Different from other critical accounts of the #gig economy#, the film won a Special mention by the Student jury at the 9th International festival of documentary film Visioni dal Mondo in Milan.
«A little bit rebel, a little bit knight»
Just like other changes introduced during the #Covid-19 pandemic, the delivery of food and other objects became part of our lives almost invisibly, and so also the people who make this possible by their work: the riders. Do you remember the people who deliver food to your office or home? Did you ever look straight into their eyes? Well, in the film Life is a Game, you do. It features 13 riders from Europe, Africa, and Latin America who work in Milan, Berlin, Barcelona, Athens, and Brussels.
Filmed in extreme close-ups, these smiling women and men, with tanned faces shaped by permanent exposure to sun, wind, and rain, do not hide that perception matters to them. «If I were to make a robbery, I would wear a rider’s clothing. They are completely invisible,» says one of them. Others remember with joy how their children perceive their work as heroic and adventurous, not «real work» at all.
«If I were to make a robbery, I would wear a rider’s clothing.»
Not a game
Yet, the job of a rider is a real job. A normal regular job, stripped of every protective measure the «normal, regular job» was associated with during the classical period of capitalism—no working hours, but also no lunch breaks, holidays, or sick leaves. There is no working place but also no safety measures and no colleagues to talk to. No boss but also no knowledge on what basis one will be given a task, if at all.
The economic handbooks describe the gig economy as an efficient response to businesses’ demands for flexibility, reduced employment costs, and access to specific expertise. Yet this does not explain why people, the workers, were ready to accept all this. Laura Carrer and Luca Quagliato tried to do so by pointing to the similarities with the format of video games. Along with the interviews, the film features emma, the avatar that runs the errands within a fictitious video game where the key features of the riders’ work are presented clearly: the interface, the mode of tasks-assignment, the dangers, time pressure («hurry up, the customers don’t like to wait») and low wages («congratulations, you won 1 $ bonus!»).
Using a game to underline that being a rider is not a game ensures a firm structure and enables addressing a whole set of contrasts associated with this new form of work: between job and play, close and distant view (riders follow their paths, but platforms are thus obtaining detailed maps of entire cities, for example), personal and political perspective (being seen as a hero by a son is nice, but the same heroic image is used by the employers to make riders work harder). It visualises the concept of post-Fordism, that is, unlike the classical period of capitalism, the line between #leisure and work has dissolved, so with digital technologies, media users have been exploited even when they play (using #social media# platforms for example, they provide data that is sold to other companies). In their book Empire, published at the beginning of this Century, Negri and Hard claimed that in the new political order of globalisation, the empire has expanded over any border. Life is a play shows that this expansion is ongoing. With digital platforms, the algorithms of exploitation entered the veins and nervous system of the raiders.
The heirs of Prometheus
Technologies have been an integral part of humanity ever since #Prometheus, who, according to the myth, stole the fire from Zeus. Lately, something has gone very wrong in the relationship between humans and #technology. A century ago, René Clair imagined a future in which the work would be done by machines while people would have time to enjoy music and spend time outdoors (À nous la liberté, 1931). Now, we are in a situation where technology in the form of the so-called #AI has taken over creativity and decision-making while humans have been performing the hard work in ever more dire conditions. In Life is a Game, Carrer and Quagliato revealed a small part of this sad reality, but they showed beyond any doubt that it is high time to ask, is this what we want from our technologies?
