Creole Platforms

This book examines how platform workers create informal digital governance in conditions of regulatory uncertainty and urban informality. Centred on Drivers Club Bogotá, a community of ride-hailing drivers in Colombia, it analyses how WhatsApp, Zello and Facebook are creatively repurposed into a socio-technical assemblage for dispatch coordination, safety management, rule-making, conflict resolution and collective knowledge sharing to operate beyond the reach of both corporate control and state regulation. These hybrid formations are neither corporate platforms nor platform cooperatives, but community-governed systems built from accessible consumer technologies and pre-existing social networks.

Bringing together platform studies, digital sociology, urban studies and science and technology studies, Creole Platforms traces how platform governance emerges from below in Bogotá and compares these dynamics with platform adaptation in Nairobi, Kenya and Jakarta, Indonesia. The analysis highlights digital hybridisation, epistemic infrastructure and urban informality as central to understanding platform economies in the Global South. It also considers the policy implications of hybrid platform governance and connects the findings to wider debates on AI governance and community-based knowledge systems.