KAPITALISME PLATFORM DAN PENOPTIKON DIGITAL: ETNOGRAFI ATAS PENGALAMAN PENGEMUDI PEREMPUAN RIDE-HAILING DI MAKASSAR

Abstract

This study is grounded in the everyday lives of women drivers working for Gojek and Grab in Makassar, Indonesia, and seeks to understand how platform capitalism is lived, felt, and negotiated in daily work practices. Focusing on algorithmic management and partnership status, the study examines how digital power relations shape labor subjectivities, affective experiences, and gendered vulnerabilities within the urban digital economy, particularly amid persistent narratives of work flexibility. Adopting a post-structuralist feminist ethnographic approach, the research draws on in-depth unstructured interviews with six women drivers alongside reflexive observation of their daily work rhythms across the city. This ethnographic lens enables close attention to stories, emotions, and everyday tactics that are often overlooked in macro-level policy or political economy analyses. The findings show that algorithms operate as a digital panopticon, governing work through rating systems, task allocation, and opaque automated sanctions, producing a continuous sense of being monitored. Partnership status is initially interpreted by drivers as a promise of autonomy, yet in practice it normalizes the transfer of economic and social risks onto individuals. For women, algorithmic control is layered with emotional labor demands, customer rating biases, and heightened risks in public space. Work flexibility is experienced as illusory, as decisions made for family care or personal safety frequently result in reduced access to work. Nevertheless, women drivers develop micro-resistances through informal solidarity, algorithmic literacy, and ongoing negotiations of time and space. The study underscores that platform labor is not gender-neutral and calls for labor policy interventions grounded in women’s lived experiences.