Digital Materialities and Algorithmic Management: From Infrastructural Power to Embodied Labour

 Digital labour is often seen as virtual and weightless. Yet as Büscher (2025), Surie (2020), as well as Timko and Melik (2021) show, digital systems are profoundly material. Algorithms move bodies, structure wages, and shape subjectivity. Across these sources, digital materiality emerges not as an abstract technological layer but as the infrastructural condition of platform capitalism, where data, prediction, and human effort are fused into a single field of governance. 

AI as Infrastructural Power

Büscher (2025) argues that artificial intelligence is now the core of platform capitalism. Rather than simply supporting economic processes, AI structures them. He describes AI as “statistics on steroids,” operating through predictive logic rather than evaluation of truth. 

Platforms no longer determine whether information is accurate, but whether it is profitable. In this system, truth becomes a probabilistic commodity, shaped by the priorities of private infrastructures. Büscher calls this the “crisis of truth,” not because people are misinformed but because truth itself has been subordinated to platform logics.

The implications extend into labour; if truth is reduced to prediction, then so is value. Knowledge, work, and visibility are governed by opaque algorithmic systems whose criteria lie outside the scope of democratic scrutiny.

Figure 1 - Algorithmic Management Reshaping Organisational Roles https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211020332

Algorithmic Governance as Labour Discipline

Surie’s (2020) ethnography of on-demand platforms in Bengaluru brings these abstract dynamics into everyday labour. She demonstrates how platforms function as techno-capitalist assemblages, comprising algorithms, corporate strategy, and a substitute for weak urban governance. 

Through algorithmic rate cards and fixed “base fees,” platforms eliminate the informal economies' traditional negotiations. One carpenter explains that customers can no longer use caste, neighbourhood, or migration status to bring him down, a temporary protection from discrimination. Yet, workers lose autonomy, mobility, and the ability to set their own value. 

Surie demonstrates that on-demand platforms fill “institutional voids,” extending into realms normally occupied by the state. In some cases, earnings are stabilised through platform-government agreements, blurring the line between public good and private extraction.

Figure 2 - Human-AI Interaction Feedback Shaping Social and Perceptual Judgements https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-02077-2

Embodied Materialities of the Lean Platform

Timko and Melik (2021) bring digital materiality down to the body. Their study of Deliveroo drivers in Nijmegen and Berlin shows how algorithmic management becomes embodied labour. Paid per drop, drivers absorb: physical risks, waiting time, maintenance costs, weather exposure, and machine upkeep.

The Rider app structures movement minute by minute. Drivers must remain “actively idling,” logged in and ready, turning uncertainty into labour. The algorithm becomes present through bodily fatigue from wet clothes and heavy bags. 

Yet riders also craft practices of endurance and resistance through WhatsApp networks for safety and support, distancing from company branding, microforms of solidarity and strategies to “read” the algorithm's rhythms. These forms of agency help workers survive the system, but also sustain the lean platform model by absorbing its instability. 

From Crisis of Truth to Crisis of Labour

Together, these sources show how digital infrastructures reorganise both knowledge and labour. Büscher’s “crisis of truth” reveals how platform power restructures cognition and visibility. Surie shows how algorithmic pricing reshapes social relations and substitutes for public institutions. Timko and Melik demonstrate how these infrastructures are physically endured through the driver's body. 

Across these studies, prediction fragments truth into personalised probabilities, wages into fluctuating algorithmic outputs, and labour into individualised responsibility. Workers navigate a system through intuition and community, but these acts ultimately keep the platform running. Freedom and flexibility become a part of the marketing, while dependence and precarity form material reality. 

Digital labour is not immaterial at all; it is motion, infrastructure and governance, where bodies and algorithms meet in the everyday reproduction of platform capitalism. 

Figure 3 - Platform Governance Structure Linking Customers, Workers, Merchants and Digital Apps https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392241236163

References

Figure 1 - Jarrahi, M. H., Newlands, G., Lee, M. K., Wolf, C. T., Kinder, E., & Sutherland, W. (2021). Algorithmic management in a work context. Big Data & Society, 8(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211020332 

Figure 2 - Glickman, M., Sharot, T. How human–AI feedback loops alter human perceptual, emotional and social judgements. Nat Hum Behav 9, 345–359 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-02077-2

Figure 3 - Cameron, L. D. (2024). The Making of the “Good Bad” Job: How Algorithmic Management Manufactures Consent Through Constant and Confined Choices. Administrative Science Quarterly, 69(2), 458-514. https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392241236163 

Büscher, B. (2025). Artificial Intelligence, Platform Capitalist Power, and the Impact of the Crisis of Truth on Ethnography.

Surie, A. (2020). On-Demand Platforms and Pricing: How Platforms Impact the Informal Urban Economy — Evidence from Bengaluru, India.

Timko, P. & van Melik, R. (2021). Being a Deliveroo Rider: Practices of Platform Labour in Nijmegen and Berlin.