Dmytro Kozak

The establishment of mini-production sites known as “dark kitchens” by Deliveroo, the largest food delivery platform in the UK, marks a shift in our understanding of platforms as asset-light entities that diffuse labor. This project treats the Deliveroo-run network of food production sites as an opening to reexamine the foundational principle of digital platforms, inquiring whether these developments indicate the tendency towards vertical integration. By connecting the conversations on the platform-driven market monopolization with an ethnographic study of the labor process at the level of a kitchen floor, this projects asks: How does the asset-light platform in pursuit of the market dominance gradually become an asset-owning monopoly in the making? And — What kind of labor regime does the platform produce in the reterritorialized workplaces? To answer these questions, I will conduct a twelve months of dark kitchen ethnography of the London-based Deliveroo Editions, conceived at three levels: the dark kitchens’ production floor, the managerial offices, and the platform’s executive offices. It develops an ethnographic methodology that collapses the artificial “market/workplace” divide, dominant in the platform studies, and connects the platform-driven market transformation with processes of labor reterritorialization and workplace restructuring.