Abstract
This study investigates the interplay between algorithmic management, spatial surveillance, and worker resistance among app-based delivery workers and ride-hailing drivers in Metropolitan São Paulo, Brazil. Integrating quantitative trajectory mapping of 450 gig workers with eight months of digital ethnography and 38 semi-structured interviews, we examine how platform architectures enforce socio-spatial stratification and how workers actively subvert these mechanisms. Our findings reveal that platform systems operationalize spatial surveillance by enforcing asymmetric dynamic pricing, penalizing peripheral urban navigation, and codifying historic socioeconomic segregation into automated dispatch logic. However, far from remaining passive subjects of technological control, gig workers execute sophisticated counter-tactics of subversion. These micro-political strategies include location spoofing, strategic collective log-offs ("breques") to artificially induce surge pricing, and the creation of decentralized, real-time spatial warning networks across encrypted messaging platforms. We argue that these practices constitute an emergent form of "algorithmic counter-cartography," wherein marginalized urban laborers reappropriate surveillance infrastructure to reclaim spatial autonomy and counter wage erosion. By grounding platform capitalism within the historical urban landscape of the Global South, this article contributes to sociologies of labor, urban technology, and spatial justice, emphasizing that algorithmic control remains an incomplete and contested social relation.
