Being watched and being seen: Negotiating visibility in the NYC ride-hail circuit

Abstract

App-based, ride-hail drivers are a highly visible workforce, yet previous research has generally understood their visibility primarily in terms of surveillance. Using data from an ethnographic study of the New York City (NYC) ride-hail circuit, this article explores how drivers experience and negotiate their visibility. Findings reveal that constant monitoring on ride-hail apps feels oppressive to drivers, and it requires them to engage in significant unpaid labor in the form of reputation auditing. Nevertheless, drivers also find ways to “caption” surveillance outputs and thus shape their meanings. They engage in three strategies—juxtaposing existing metrics, expanding the field of vision, and requiring others to bear witness—to clarify, contextualize, and reclaim their visibility. The ability to reconfigure meanings of visibility, and specifically to navigate between the experience of being watched and that of being seen, represents an underexplored avenue of agency within studies of work surveillance.