On a double-depth sofa with an advanced three-layer upholstery for maximum comfort, we spread out in a semi-reclining position, with our legs dangling from the chaise-longue attached to it. Thus, the lounge seating object appears as a sofa, but allows for a comfortable stretch, like a bed in a luxury hotel. We stare at a sixty-inch LED screen in front of us, on which reality shows and realistic commercials flicker alternately, while holding a six-inch screen, on which we eagerly follow the progress of the delivery man who brings dinner to our doorstep. This time we chose Thai-Vietnamese food. We have never been to Thailand, nor to Vietnam, but we like to vary our food. The delivery man is terribly slow in his progress along the app’s map, while we fantasize about the sharp and rapid movement in which the paper bag will pass from his hand to ours. Oh then, we will take out the plastic boxes of various shapes and sizes, spread them all out on the living room table and enjoy the flavors of the world, while scrolling through the feed without really watching the videos themselves. That’s abundance.
- The Courier
In the beginning, there were forerunners, named after the main action they were required to perform: running. Running was a means to an end: delivering mail, goods, or a message to a specific person on behalf of another person or organization. The forerunner carried various news: victory, defeat, the conquest of additional territory, or a new tax regulation from the king. The action – running – has since changed to riding a scooter or an electric bicycle, but the goal is the same: a courier on a mission on behalf of a sender. What is the gospel that contemporary couriers deliver?
“Nothing in the world travels faster than Persian messengers. … Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor the darkness of night will prevent these messengers from quickly completing the task entrusted to them.“[1]
The contemporary messenger mediates between Man and his desires: taking care of all our needs, while we are confined to our homes and wandering around on our toes instead of our feet. The ‘blueish’ presence of these messengers on their electric bikes has become a Tel Avivian spectacle in recent years. At certain times of the day, it is rarer to spot a pedestrian, or a vehicle, rather than a delivery-man with a large cooler tied to the back of his tiny vehicle.
- The Sender
The world we grew up on, up until the 21st century, was based on a capitalist agenda with the winning formula 8-8-8: eight hours of sleep, eight hours of work, and eight hours of leisure. The hours of leisure were also used to move the wheels of the economy. Through participation in consumer activities (the favorite pastime of every teenage girl, according to American producers, was spending time at the mall), or through staring at the tribal bonfire – television – people were exposed to advertisements that encourage consumerism. Today, none of these pillars exist as they did at the end of the twentieth century. Television channels have been replaced by streaming services; stores have been replaced by online shopping sites, and the workday and fixed wages have been replaced by ’employment flexibility’.
“With Wolt, you can make deliveries when, where and however it suits you – the decisions are in your hands! No obligation, no prior experience required – it’s really easy to start earning money!“, announces the recruitment page of the Wolt website. In exchange for that employment flexibility, Wolt couriers – defined as ‘independent contractors’– are required to file income tax returns, they are not entitled to any social rights, such as pensions, sick leave, convalescence, severance pay or overtime, and the employer can announce the termination of employment without any prior notice.
A representative of Wolt company testified before the court in 2022 that about ten thousand couriers are signed up on the platform. The average Wolt courier works about 48 hours a month, and makes an average of 2.5 deliveries per hour. The average salary is 69 Shekels per hour.
“To be your own boss,” is what Wolt promises its couriers. The company refers to them as ‘colleagues’[2] in a ‘collaborative community’, which is the ‘platform.’ The platform’s role is to connect the customer (the one who is at home, confirming an order) with the requested service (a burger at 1 a.m.), through the service provider (a courier on an electric bike). In exchange for the connection, the platform supposedly charges a modest fee from both the service provider and the service recipient.[3]
From the moment you press the button on your phone, confirming you truly want a burger at 1 a.m., the algorithm of the platform seeks a colleague, who is near the restaurant. The colleagues receive a message that they are requested to arrive at the restaurant as soon as possible, and after picking up the burger you have ordered, the platform navigates them through the streets of the city to the destination – your apartment.
The platform’s algorithm determines which one of the workers will do the job; the algorithm provides instructions to the worker, and it is also what determines their salary according to a complicated and non-transparent formula. It is not a job without a boss, but it is rather working for a robo-boss: an invisible and all-knowing algorithm that treats the colleagues as replaceable robots. In charge of the invisible and all-knowing robots is an actual person – a capitalist or a digital entrepreneur, who distributes the platform between different countries, taking into account legislative and tax considerations.[4]
The algorithmic form of employment creates the most significant gap in the terms of employment of couriers, whether it’s the blue Wolt, the orange Tenbis, or the yellow Mishlocha. While the collaborative language (‘colleagues’, ‘community’) seeks to eliminate the hierarchy between employer and employee, seemingly creating a symmetry between them as ‘platform users’, there is actually a large asymmetry of information, deriving from the knowledge that the algorithm (= the company) has regarding the work environment, the number of employees, and to what extent this information is available to the average courier (not at all).[5]
3. The Exit Point
In New York, when you pass by the rows of buildings in the afternoon, you immediately recognize the pyramid: a stack of various cardboard boxes, taller than the average person, from Amazon, Target, Walmart, or some kind of fashion company. At the end of each workday, on the way back from work, you stop in front of the same giant pyramid and collect the goods you ordered a day or maybe just two hours before. Only tourists visit the actual stores. The volume of the box does not indicate its contents. A jar of jam from Walmart purchased on sale will be wrapped in two layers of plastic and topped with another generous layer of bubble-wrap. Since the chosen box is larger than the dimensions of the jar, the skilled worker will fill the space between the two with brown paper. This basic packaging should allow the jar to arrive safely in less than 24 hours from the giant Fulfillment Centers on the outskirts of the city to your doorstep.
What we refer to as a ‘big city’ is not only the outcome of the number of people who reside under a particular municipal authority (as evidence, many Chinese dormitories house more people than New York City), but rather a result of the quantity of encounters between people who live under that municipal authority. A vibrant big city will produce a large number of encounters – both planned and unplanned – through the existence of cultural, commercial, entertainment, leisure and dining venues for people who live within a certain radius to participate in, and to leave their homes for this cause.
In recent years, in Tel Aviv, like in other large cities around the world, tiny logistics centers, nestled within the city streets, began to emerge. From the outside, it may appear as a store, and it was a store until a moment ago, but now it is a small warehouse to which a constant stream of couriers on electric bicycles moves. These are dark stores.
Not long ago, there was a store whose products were manufactured in a nearby factory, which included a storage space in the back and a display in the front. Shoppers could enter it, pay with their money and leave with some kind of merchandise in their hands. Nowadays, urban commerce has changed beyond recognition: the store’s products are manufactured at the other end of the globe, displayed on a website and stored in a tiny logistic center which is accessible only to couriers. Shoppers press a button, and the merchandise arrives at their doorstep within fifteen minutes, two hours, or a day. Dark stores are the ones to enable this rapid delivery of merchandise.
If commerce is what encourages random encounters between people who live in the same area, without commerce – people cannot meet. The urban space will be neglected and abandoned to populations who have no choice but to wander the streets: homeless people, drug addicts, prostitutes and small criminals.
Similar processes of abandoning urban streets in favor of the comfort of spacious homes occurred in the 1950’s and 1960’s in the United States, in the Rust Belt cities – a phenomenon that was called the White Flight. The consequences in cities, such as Detroit or Baltimore are still felt to this day. Once there are no passersby on the street, there is no sense of safety. And since there is no sense of safety, there are no passersby. And despite the many attempts by both municipalities to illuminate and awaken their dystopian streets, they have not yet succeeded.
In this scenario, the presence of couriers on electric bicycles who flutter between tiny logistic centers around the city will be even more widespread: if it is dangerous to go out, it’s better to order a delivery. And if you order a delivery instead of going out into the street, the streets become emptier and therefore more dangerous. And so, as delivery platforms thrive, they will thrive even more, since they create processes that are difficult, and almost impossible to stop.
4. The Delivery
“I looked up again, and there before me were four chariots coming out from between two mountains—mountains of bronze. The first chariot had red horses, the second black, the third white, and the fourth dappled—all of them powerful. I asked the angel who was speaking to me, “What are these, my lord?” The angel answered me, “These are the four spirits of heaven”.”
The prophecy described in the book of Zechariah is expanded in the vision of John into a detailed image of four messengers on horses, who carry the news of the upcoming Apocalypse – the first period in the long process of the Eschaton.
The meaning of the term apocalypse is the end of humanity. This does not necessarily imply the life or death of the human beings who make up humanity, but rather the end of the way they live. Humanity is more than the sum of all the human beings within it. Humanity is the social structures that human beings have created in society, culture, economics and politics. These social structures are facing drastic change. In contrast to the vision of Zechariah and John, the messengers who apprise the Apocalypse do not ride horses, they ride electric bicycles.
Similar to the sender of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse – an invisible and all-knowing divine entity, the Wolt couriers are sent on their mission by an invisible and all-knowing algorithm. However, unlike the divine being, behind the algorithm stands a human being – a wealthy man – who sees the profit line of the approaching apocalypse.
In Pixar’s 2008 science fiction animated film Wall-E, set in the 29th century, future humans are depicted as fat, hedonistic and lazy creatures, who spend their days reclining in ergonomic armchairs, consuming their food through straws from large plastic cups, while staring at a floating screen that provides them with ‘content’, 24/7. The future humanity in this film has adapted to a life of comfort, and abandoned the need for activity, work, or social connections. It has become addicted to endless entertainment and consumerism. This is not very far from contemporary reality.
The multiple actions performed by different humans (ordering products to their doorstep) sterilizes and dismantles the public space of its meaning and reason for existence. Without a public space where people actually meet each other, the direct connection between humans is reduced. The meetings take place online on various platforms, intended to create alleged human contact (WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter). This is actually part of the disintegration of human society as we know it, and accordingly, the loss of what we grasp of humanity. This is the message that the messengers of the blue-collar Wolt carry.
[1] Herodotus, The Histories, Book 8, chapter 98, approx. 430 BC.
[2] Sivan Klingbail, A Request to a Lawsuit Against Wold: Denies the Couriers their Status, De Marker, 20th of August, 2020
[3] Lawyer Daniel Ansky, The Case of Wolt Couriers,Orita Journal, a professional magazine for managers, salary and funds, February 21st, 2021
[4] There.
[5] Alex Rosenblat and Luke Stark, Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries: A Case Study of Uber’s Drivers, International journal of communication, 2015
[6] The contemporary term is ‘fulfillment house’.
[7] Dani Bar On, A 15 Minute Delivery? How? I Inflatrated Yango Deli, Haaretz newspaper, February 23st, 2022
[8] The White Flight is a term that describes the processes of suburbanization in the 1950s and 1960s in industrial cities, mostly in the Midwest of the United States. The American dream for the middle class, that was established after World War II, included a house with a garden and a car. The American government’s investment in building freeways allowed for easy and fast travel between the suburbs and city centers, and led to the migration of powerful populations – mostly white – from city centers to the suburbs. The populations that remained in the city centers were the poorer strata of American society, many of them African-American. The abandonment of the powerful populations created a chain reaction that resulted in decreased value of urban real estate, the abandonment of houses and streets controlled by gangs.
[9] Zechariah 6: 1-5