Opinion | The Shared Feeling of Being Harvested by the Future - The New York Times

Ms. Liu is the author of “The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom & Connection on the Chinese Internet.” Within an hour of landing in Shanghai, I was sitting in the back of a Didi cab while the driver pleaded with me to game the company’s algorithm. Didi is the “Uber of China” and has a ubiquitous footprint in the country, dispatching tens of millions of rides per day. Could I cancel the ride and pay him directly through WeChat? There was an oversupply of drivers competing for too few fares, he explained. After dropping me off, he would be sent straight back to the airport, where he would have to wait for hours for another pickup. If I canceled, he could take a place near the front of the line. “I hope you understand,” he said. “I’ve got an older and a younger generation to support.” The driver’s plight reminded me of the DoorDash workers in the United States whose earnings are controlled by optimized dispatch systems, or the Amazon Flex workers who compete for scarce delivery blocks,

Ms. Liu is the author of “The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom & Connection on the Chinese Internet.” Within an hour of landing in Shanghai, I was sitting in the back of a Didi cab while the driver pleaded with me to game the company’s algorithm. Didi is the “Uber of China” and has a ubiquitous footprint in the country, dispatching tens of millions of rides per day. Could I cancel the ride and pay him directly through WeChat? There was an oversupply of drivers competing for too few fares, he explained. After dropping me off, he would be sent straight back to the airport, where he would have