From Optimization to Subversion : Sociotechnical Expressions of Agency in Platform Labor in Indonesia and the Philippines

This paper examines how ride-hailing and delivery workers in Indonesia and the Philippines, as active technology actors, navigate and contest digital infrastructures that govern their labor. In contexts marked by platform dependency and labor insecurity, we move beyond discrete accounts of compliance and resistance to argue that worker agency lies in the capacity to move fluidly along a continuum of optimization and subversion practices. Drawing on 142 worker interviews, we find that these practices are embedded in the shifting dynamics of permissibility on platforms, workers’ familiarity with their apps, and the everyday ethical positioning of workers who continually balance the need to maintain access to the platform with efforts to improve pay and conditions. This dynamic exposes a paradox: platforms rely on workers’ ingenuity to patch systemic gaps and sustain operations even as they attempt to constrain it. By allowing oscillation between optimization and subversion, platforms defuse frustration, manage precarity, and secure their own endurance. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates how survival-driven adaptations both express worker agency and coshape platform capitalism from below—showing that platform arrangements are engineered from above yet are continually sustained, challenged, and reshaped through workers’ everyday practice.