HUMAN ⇄ GHOST : Food Delivery Drivers As Locals, Strangers, And Wanderers
⼈ ⇄ 幽灵：作为本地人，异乡人和游荡者的外卖员们

Earlier industrial transformation and the epidemic have made more and more people become gig workers.

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I interviewed some food delivery drivers from the Ubereats,. Their differences in race and immigration status have led to their polarized feelings about the job.

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For local people of Chicago who work as Ubereats drivers, they consider this job as “*ghost work”, without social interaction: working all day and contacting real people for less than 5 minutes. The lack of social regularity and community makes people feel like a machine or a small parameter that keeps beating in the algorithm.

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For the new Chinese immigrants, they are “ *strangers”, living in language and cultural barriers. Such ghost work, a job not required of speaking English, provides them with a shelter, becoming a strategy of living in the United States but away from American culture. On some non-algorithm-driven Chinese food delivery platforms, interesting acquaintance societies have been constructed.

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Finally, I met a new immigrant from Bulgaria, he is now an Ubereats driver in London. He considers this as a job geographically unconstrained, allowing him to completely become a liquid individual, floating around the world. He recently decided to live in an RV and work as a delivery worker in different places, so as to travel around the UK and the world.

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I hope that this work can provide multiple opinions of the gig platform from a global perspective, and I also ask, what kind of new possibilities now we have with the ghost work characterized by high mobility?

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*Ghost work, from Ghost Work, Book by Mary L. Gray

*stranger, from The Stranger, Georg Simmel