Marco’s alarm was a notification from the app that managed his life, and today it said: YOUR DELIVERY WINDOW IS 6:00 AM TO 2:00 PM. DECLINING REDUCES YOUR RELIABILITY SCORE.
He got up. He’d been a graphic designer, once. Now he drove for the platform. The platform set his route, his breaks, his speed, his earnings. It rated him after every delivery. A 4.2 meant he ate. A 3.8 meant fewer shifts. A 3.5 meant the algorithm stopped seeing him.
His apartment was what the platform called “coliving” and his mother called a closet. The rent was auto-deducted. The remaining income covered food, transport, and a subscription to the entertainment service owned by the same company that owned the delivery platform that owned the coliving that owned, in some practical sense, Marco.
He delivered packages to a neighborhood where houses had gardens. He delivered supplements to a man whose front door opened automatically and whose house appeared to contain no humans, only devices. He delivered a birthday present to a child whose mother was too busy—doing what? Working for another app, probably—to pick it up herself.
At 1:47 p.m. the app told him his window was over. It had calculated his earnings: €47.20. Fuel: €11. Platform fee: €9.40. Net: €26.80. It congratulated him on a 4.4 rating and offered him an evening shift at a 3% bonus. He accepted, because the algorithm knew he would, because the algorithm knew everything about the gap between his income and his rent and exactly how much pressure to apply.
In the evening, he saw a news story about the platform’s quarterly earnings. Fourteen billion euros. A record. The CEO, speaking from a yacht that was technically a floating office, talked about “empowering independent contractors.” Marco looked at the word “independent” for a long time.
He set his alarm for 5:30. The notification was already waiting.