Technologies of control, algorithmic governance, and the production of meanings of work: the interface of the Workana platform
Abstract
The interfaces of labor platforms are business-oriented sociotechnical architectures that encode corporate meanings and interests, shape users’ work experience, determine their interaction with each other and with clients, and implement forms of management and discipline through algorithmic control and gamification. In this article, we analyze the case of Workana, an Argentine-owned freelance and remote work platform. Elements such as how the platform is visually presented to users through design, the structuring of user profiles, and the project posting tools —all backed by the opaque documentation of the Terms and Conditions and Site Policies— contribute to reproducing the logics of autonomy, competition, meritocracy, and hyper-individualization characteristic of platform capitalism.
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