Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editors’ Preface: Organizations and Activism
- Preface
- 1 Introducing Mobile Power and Guerrilla Politics
- 2 Mobile Power
- 3 The Spread of Viral Politics
- 4 Infectious Domination, Contagious Revolutions
- 5 Guerrilla Democracy
- 6 Radical (Im)materialism
- 7 Organic Leadership for Liquid Times
- 8 Mobile Organizing in the 21st Century
- References
- Index
6 - Radical (Im)materialism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 April 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editors’ Preface: Organizations and Activism
- Preface
- 1 Introducing Mobile Power and Guerrilla Politics
- 2 Mobile Power
- 3 The Spread of Viral Politics
- 4 Infectious Domination, Contagious Revolutions
- 5 Guerrilla Democracy
- 6 Radical (Im)materialism
- 7 Organic Leadership for Liquid Times
- 8 Mobile Organizing in the 21st Century
- References
- Index
Summary
Are smartphones tools of oppression or resources for mobile resistance? This question is perhaps especially relevant for a rising new class of precarious workers who rely on ‘smart’ platforms for their employment and livelihood. Workers at Deliveroo, for instance, need to have access to smartphones in order to sign up to the platform. This means that all the workers have access to the means for mobile organizing. At first, some platforms, like Deliveroo, encouraged workers to join or start WhatsApp groups to keep in contact about shift patterns and changes to the platform. Where these were set up, it is very easy for workers to branch a new conversation out, excluding managers. In other cases, workers start WhatsApp groups to share knowledge about their work, routes, accidents, traffic and so on.
As Woodcock (2017) has found at Deliveroo, the ‘action was organised primarily on WhatsApp, building on pre-existing networks, some of which were formed at the meeting points assigned in each area by Deliveroo. What followed was a lively campaign which was widely circulated on social media’. Furthermore, “on WhatsApp groups used by delivery riders in the UK, workers post jokes and memes to pass some of the idle time while waiting for work, but also share tips on how to increase earnings’. Likewise, when waitstaff at the restaurant chain TGI Fridays were told that the company was reducing the amount of money they took home from credit card tips, workers began to organize against the change through the very digital networks initiated and originally encouraged by the company. Such communication soon branched into mass and localized WhatsApp groups. This may sound inconsequential, yet it indicates how through such mobile-based social struggle, individuals can concretely challenge their alienation as capitalist workers. ‘In all cases, what we are seeing is people refusing to accept the idea that they are atomized workers, and refusing to accept the idea that connectivity only runs vertically rather than horizontally’, Woodcock and Graham (2019, p 133) observe: ‘Even if workers like drivers and domestic workers rarely if ever see each other, they can start to collectively challenge ways of structuring the work processes that they are enrolled in’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Guerrilla DemocracyMobile Power and Revolution in the 21st Century, pp. 155 - 188Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2021