Beta Capitalism: The Financialization and Minimum Viability of Food Delivery Labour
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation offers an ethnography of app-based food delivery couriers and management. The app-based last-mile delivery industry is one of the most distinctive developments in capitalism in the last decade. Drawing on twenty-one months of fieldwork, I argue that Fleatz, a composite app-based food delivery company operating in Berlin, represents a new iteration of capitalism in that the role of riders is not only, or even primarily, to create profits for the company through the surplus value of their labour. Instead, they are also subject to regimes of speculative data accumulation and of beta capitalism, an organizationally, politically, and financially volatile form of high-tech accumulation that emphasizes constant optimization, speed, and market growth, underpinned by a reliance on financial capital instead of profits to be economically viable. Subjecting rider labour to multiple forms of value accumulation results in a confusing, paradoxical, yet highly quantified work experience for riders and office workers alike, but the consequences are most serious for riders.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".