Life is (Not) a Game: Racial Platform Capitalism, Exploitation Practices and Forms of Rider Mobilization in Milan

This article offers an analysis of the forms of exploitation that affect the work of migrant riders in the food delivery sector in Milan, giving particular attention to the phenomenon of digital gangmastering. Through a case study, it investigates the relationship between digital capitalism, racialization, and urban segregation, highlighting how digital platforms rely on a logic of “predatory inclusion” that simultaneously mobilises and entraps vulnerable migrant subjectivities. The article shows how algorithmic management of labour, seemingly neutral, reproduces racialized hierarchies and relations of domination, fostering a pervasive form of discipline rooted in legal and social precarity. The work of riders - often recruited from reception centres and lacking contractual protection - emerges as a form of “infrastructural labour”: essential yet invisible, sustaining urban life at the cost of the workers' physical and psychological exhaustion. Our analysis also reveals the link between labour exploitation and social isolation, showing how housing marginalisation and unequal access to services reinforce symbolic and material boundaries of exclusion. Nevertheless, urban space also becomes a site of resistance and collective organisation, albeit with differentiated rhythms and modalities.