Hello and welcome to Navara FM. I'm your host, Eleanor Penny. Over the past decade,

app based services like Uber have played an ever greater part of life in UK cities.

More and more people are relying on gig work. Driving cars, delivering food,

putting up shelves, doing domestic work and sex work, all kinds of services are now sold

through apps and online platforms. The work is notorious for its shoddy pay and conditions,

and lots of this work is done by migrant workers and British people of colour.

According to writer and academic Dali Agabriel, this is no coincidence. Daya is a PhD researcher

at the London School of Economics, and she's also a co-host of Tisky Sour here in Navara Media.

Her research explores what she calls racial platform capitalism. The idea that race is

essential to the business models of Uber and other platforms like it. In other words,

the success of platforms is less about the innovations made in Silicon Valley and more about the

violence meted out at the border, the prison, and the benefits office. We talked about the

legacies of empire and how they are shaping the future of work. Dalia, hello, thank you so much

for joining us. Thank you for having me. The full title of your most recent paper is racial platform

capitalism, empire and the making of Uber in London. So I was wondering if you could talk to us

a little bit about what we mean when we say platform capitalism. The term platform capitalism

is coined by Nick Surnick, who wrote a book called that, and what he is referring to there

is essentially a networked economy. So we're talking about economic exchange that takes place

through and alongside digital infrastructures known as platforms. And so that can encompass so

many different things. It can encompass click work or crowd work. So examples of that would be

like the Amazon Mechanical Turk. It can refer to the kind of crowd work model where you have

data entry kind of tasks being done, you know, headquartered in the kind of typical

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