Abstract

Focusing on the gig-economy, this contribution looks at platforms as the key vectors of a process of informalisation of the economy and of hybridisation of working arrangements. In the capitalism of infrastructures informality has far from disappeared from the scene of contemporary, rather, it is increasingly becoming an integral factor of the «home-delivered world» society, through an increasing «informalisation» of formal labour and a refeudalisation of working conditions. From this perspective, on-demand platforms stand at the forefront of this process of informalisation. On one hand, they expand the borders of capitalist financial accumulation extracting value from activities historically at the margins of the market economy. On the other, platforms are strongly intertwined with the political informalisation of labour relations as well as with the exploitation of masses of workers in both the global North and South. Based on a multi-sited ethnography between Italy and Argentina on the platform-based last-mile logistics, this contribution empirically highlights the interconnection between formal and informal circuits of labour in platform work, revealing a baroque economy in which informal, illicit, solidaristic, and predatory behaviours are intertwined