Fierce transparency and gentle confinement: how collaborative platforms control you
"In our society, to access goods and services, you need to have the codes, literally and figuratively. A QR code, a digicode, a password, a barcode or a magnetic card... "
Benjamin Benoit, University of PerpignanAgnès Mazars-Chapelon, University of MontpellierFabienne Villeseque-Dubus, University of Perpignan and Gérald Naro, University of Montpellier
This is the point made by Pascal Lardellier and Sonia Zannad in an article in The Conversation's "Objets cultes" series. If our parents have always known cultural or dress "codes", which vary according to latitude and reference society, today's codes are also digital and are imposed on everyone, everywhere. Fifty years after the invention of the barcode, QR codes have burst into our personal lives: from proof of vaccination against the coronavirus to show tickets and traffic permits during the Olympic and Paralympic Games, they have quickly become part of our daily lives.
Today, "having the codes" refers more broadly to the idea of a human existence that has tipped over into a world characterized by the omnipresence of personal data: administrative documents, online browsing, activities on social networks... All this collected data, which enables the tracking of individual behavior, is the lifeblood of commercial collaborative platforms, such as - to limit ourselves to the best-known - rental property sites Airbnb or car-sharing sites Blablacar, or independent driver applications.
They all boast of their collaborative dimension. But are they really?
Encouraged to behave
One characteristic of these platforms is that they are based on different systems of evaluation between users and service providers. The appeal of commercial platforms lies in their promise of transparency, enabling anyone to become the manager of their own offering, one day managing a property rental business, another day piloting a transport solution. We can become, relatively simply, entrepreneurs thanks to these collaborative solutions, and almost all of us get a glimpse of the quality of service when we put ourselves in the customer's shoes.
Nevertheless, individuals are also incentivized to act in line with the organization's expectations, since the evaluation system is designed by the organization itself. In the case of Airbnb, a host can become a "superhost" if he or she meets certain conditions and gives full satisfaction to guests, but also to the organization. The label then enables the host to be listed at the top of the list, unlike those who have not complied with the company's rules.
Similarly, at Blablacar, users rate service providers, assigning grades and leaving comments. As a driver, the higher your status, such as ambassador (verified contacts, profile photo, over 90% positive reviews and more than a year's service), the more likely you are to be chosen by passengers, who see it as proof of safety and a token of trust. This system tends to guarantee a certain conformism and homogeneity of behavior, since few people will try to break the rules of the game, at the risk of being excluded.
Algorithmic control
When we wanted to get in touch with Airbnb for interviews, our efforts proved fruitless, despite letters, e-mails, phone calls and a trip to the Paris headquarters, where the doors didn't open. On the other hand, as users, we open those of our personal data that are recorded, stored and processed for commercial purposes, admittedly with our consent. But what knowledge, let alone control, do we have over data that becomes invisible to the user?
One of the characteristics of these platforms is that they provide users with digital management control systems, which are operated via algorithms. These systems provide users, both suppliers and consumers, with a myriad of data designed to assist them in their decision-making. In a research article published in 2020, we showed that these systems could also guide, or even influence, the user's choices. For example, by encouraging the rental company to automate bookings, or by letting the system opt for "intelligent" pricing.
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If we take the emblematic case of Airbnb, numbers of visits and benchmarks with information from other equivalent accommodations are exchanged and mobilized in the company's steering system. This data feeds a series of features such as pricing, scheduling, automatic booking, status and customer reviews. In this way, the organization can steer the behavior of guests and, based on an asymmetry of information - because it knows more than users - influence their choices.
At the same time, hosts know that they are acting under the reassuring eye and framework provided by the platform. They have access to charts tracking their monthly and annual activity; they can observe incoming and outgoing payments; they also know the costs associated with renting out the property (cleaning, cancellations...) and have at their disposal monitoring indicators, price comparisons of similar accommodation in a nearby geographical area... so that the customer/user enters smoothly into a world where reality is constructed and controlled by algorithms.
Soft and comfortable
The user thus adheres to and conforms to a belief system that is not necessarily his own, but that of the platform. The collaborative openness of the sharing economy since the beginning of this century is combined with, to use the term coined by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, a "society of control" that extends into the private sphere of individual behavior. In the early 1990s, the philosopher had this premonitory intuition:
"The digital language of control is made up of numbers, which mark access to information, or rejection. We are no longer faced with the mass-individual couple. Individuals have become dividends, and masses, samples, data, markets or banks.
Before alerting us, he said:
"We are entering control societies that no longer operate by confinement, but by continuous monitoring and instant communication. [...] Faced with the coming forms of incessant control in open environments, it may be that the harshest forms of confinement will seem to belong to a delightful, benevolent past.
And yet, how soft and comfortable do contemporary confinements seem to us, so full are they of desires that are immediately expressed, immediately satisfied, or even anticipated! Consequently, we need to protect users and give them negotiating power. This is the role of the regulator and the politician, since it's a question of power and freedom, notions at the root of democracy.
Benjamin Benoit, Lecturer in management science (MRM-UPVD), University of PerpignanAgnès Mazars-Chapelon, Professor of Management Sciences, University of MontpellierFabienne Villeseque-Dubus, Professor of Management Sciences, University of Perpignan and Gérald Naro, Professor of Management Sciences, University of Montpellier
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.