Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Treré, Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight against Platform Power, Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press, 2024, 256 pp. ISBN: 978-0-262-54742-0.
Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Treré’s Algorithms of Resistance examines the everyday forms of resistance developed by users and workers in the face of the algorithmic power of digital platforms. While acknowledging that platforms have acquired increasingly asymmetrical power through data collection, classification, surveillance, and algorithmic decision-making, the authors challenge the view that people are merely passively governed by algorithms in this process. The book’s central question is what forms of agency and resistance people can develop in the face of the considerable technological and economic power held by platforms.
One of the book’s central concepts is “algorithmic agency.” Bonini and Treré define this as people’s reflexive capacity to influence the outcomes produced by algorithms according to their own needs. While algorithmic infrastructures shape people’s behaviour, people also learn how these systems work and attempt to use, circumvent, or transform them for their own purposes. At the same time, the authors avoid romanticizing these everyday practices by distinguishing between agency and power: the fact that users can influence algorithms does not mean that the structural power imbalance between them and the platforms has disappeared.
The book explores this approach across three domains: the gig economy, cultural production, and political activity. Particularly important from the perspective of workers’ control is the chapter “Gaming the Boss,” which focuses on the individual and collective practices developed by platform workers against algorithmic management, ranging from Uber and Lyft drivers to couriers working for food-delivery platforms such as Deliveroo. Fieldwork and interviews conducted in India, China, Mexico, Italy, and Spain show that workers develop various tactics to understand how algorithms operate, exploit gaps in the system to improve their income and working conditions, and share information with one another.
These everyday practices also create relationships through which mutual aid, solidarity, and collective organization can develop. In the example of Stefano, a Deliveroo courier introduced at the beginning of the book, the worker begins to understand the effects of algorithmic ratings and shift allocation on his working conditions through a WhatsApp group formed with other couriers. Workers use the group to share their knowledge about how the algorithm operates and learn from one another tactics for circumventing its control. Digital communication tools can thus become an infrastructure not only for platforms to manage workers, but also for workers to share information and build solidarity.
Bonini and Treré approach these practices as everyday forms of algorithmic resistance. They do not restrict resistance to overt strikes, protests, or organized political action, but also include more covert and everyday practices aimed at reducing the effects of algorithms, altering their operation, or using algorithmic systems for different purposes. From this perspective, algorithms can be both mechanisms of power that are resisted and, under certain circumstances, tools that can be appropriated for resistance: in the authors’ distinction, resistance to algorithms and resistance through algorithms need to be considered together.
From this perspective, Algorithms of Resistance is an important resource for understanding the relationship between algorithmic control over digital labour and workers’ everyday practices of resistance, solidarity, and collective organization. Without overlooking the opaque and highly asymmetrical character of platform power, the book demonstrates that this power never operates entirely without friction. The process extending from platform workers’ small-scale practices of understanding and influencing algorithms to forms of collective action provides an important basis for discussing the conditions under which worker agency and possibilities for democratic control can emerge in digital working environments.