It is calculated to be the smallest amount to allow you to roll over your loans and go into more debt to grow more birds for them.

At its root, "chickenization" is about de-risking, cloaked in the language of entrepreneurship. Chicken farmers assume all the risk for the poultry packers, but they're told that they're their own bosses.

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The only way in which a chicken farmer resembles an entrepreneur is that they have to bear all the risk of failure - without having any upside for success. Packers can (and do) secretly decide to experiment at farmers' expense, ordering some of their farmers to vary their feeding, light and veterinary routines to see if they can eke new efficiencies out of the process.

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If that works, the surplus is reaped by the packer. If that fails, the losses are borne by the farmer, who is never told that they were funding an experiment.

Amazon makes extensive use of chickenization in its many commercial arrangements, tightly defining the working conditions of many "self-employed" workers, like the clickwork "turkers" who power the Mechanical Turk service.

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But the most chickenized of all the people in Amazon's network of cutouts and arm's-length arrangements are the "entrepreneurs" who are lured into starting a "Delivery Service Platform" (DSP) business.

To start a DSP, you borrow lots of money to buy vans that you outfit to Amazon's exacting specifications, filling them with interior and exterior sensors and cameras, painting them with Amazon livery.

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You kit them out with shelving and other infrastructure to Amazon's exacting specification. Then, you hire workers - giving Amazon a veto over who you hire - and you train them - using Amazon's training materials. You sign them up for Amazon's platforms, which monitor and rank those workers, and then you get paid either $0.10 per parcel, or maybe $0.50 per parcel, or sometimes $0.00 per parcel, all at Amazon's sole discretion.

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That's a pretty chickenized arrangement. But what about reverse centaurs?

In automation theory, a "centaur" is someone who is assisted by some automation system (they are a fragile human head being assisted by a tireless machine). Therefore, a *reverse* centaur is a person who has been conscripted to serve as a peripheral for a machine, a human body surmounted and directed by a brute and uncaring head that not only uses them, but uses them *up*.

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The drivers that DSPs hire are reverse centaurs. Using various forms of automation, Amazon drives these workers to work at a dangerous, humiliating and unsustainable pace, setting and enforcing not just quotas, but also scripting where drivers' eyes must be pointed, how they must accelerate and decelerate, what routes they take, and more.

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These edicts are enforced by the in-van and on-body automation systems that direct and discipline workers, tools that labor activists call "electronic whips":

crackedlabs.org/en/data-work/p…

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Surveillance and Algorithmic Control in the Call Center

A case study on contact and service center software, automated management and outsourced work

^{Cracked Labs}

The chickenized owners of DSPs *must* enforce the edicts Amazon brings down on their reverse centaur workers - Amazon can terminate any DSP, at any time, for any reason or no reason, stranding an "independent entrepreneur" with heavily mortgaged rolling stock that can only be used to deliver Amazon packages...

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...Long term leases on garages and parking lots, liability for driver accidents caused by automation systems that punish drivers for e.g. braking suddenly if someone steps into the road, and massive loans.

So when Amazon directs a DSP to fire or discipline a worker, that worker is in trouble. Amazon has hybridized chickenization and reverse centaurism, creating a chickenized reverse centaur, a new kind of labor travesty never seen before.

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In "Driven Down," a new report from the DAIR Institute, authors Adrienne Williams, Alex Hanna and Sandra Barcenas draw on interviews with DSP drivers and Williams's own experience driving for Amazon to document the state of the Chickenized Reverse Centaur. It's not good:

dair-institute.org/projects/dr…

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Worker Surveillance and Wage Theft

How algorithmic management and workplace surveillance allows corporations to steal wages, intensify poor working conditions, and evade responsibility.

^{DAIR (Distributed AI Research Institute)}

"Driven Down" vividly describes - often in drivers' own words - how the life of a chickenized reverse centaur is one of wage theft, privacy invasions, humilation and on-the-job physical risks, for drivers and the communities they drive in.

DSP drivers interact with multiple automation systems - at least *nine* apps that monitor, score and discipline them.

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These apps are supposed to run on employer-supplied phones, but these phones are frequently broken, and drivers face severe punishment if these apps aren't all running during their shifts.

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As a result, drivers routinely install these apps on their own phones, and must give them broad, far-reaching permissions, such that drivers' own phones are surveilling them for Amazon 24/7, whether or not they're on the clock. It's not just DSP owners who are chickenized - it's also drivers, footing the bill for their own electronic whips.

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First and foremost, these apps tell the drivers where to go and how to get there. Drivers are dispatched to hundreds of stops per day, on a computer-generated route that is not vetted or sanity-checked by a human before it is non-negotiably handed to a driver. Famously, plotting an efficient route among many points is one of the most insoluble computing problems, the so-called "traveling salesman" problem:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelli…

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Travelling salesman problem - Wikipedia

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

But it turns out that there *is* an optimal solution to the traveling salesman problem: get a computer to make a bizarre and dangerous approximation of the optimal route, and then blame and fine workers when it doesn't work. This doesn't optimize the route, but it does shift all the costs of a suboptimal route to workers.

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Crucially, Amazon trusts its computer-generated routes, based on map data, over the word of drivers. For example, drivers are often directed to make "group stops" - where the driver parks the van and then delivers to multiple addresses at once (for example, at an apartment complex or office block). Amazon's mapping service assumes that addresses that are in the same complex or development are close together, even when they are *very* distant.

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If a driver dares to move and re-park their van to deliver parcels to distant addresses, the app punishes them for making an unauthorized positional adjustment. If a driver attempts to deliver all the parcels *without* moving the van, they are penalized for taking too long. Even if drivers report the mapping error, it persists, resulting in strings of infractions, day after day.

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When drivers fail to make quota, the DSP's per-parcel payout is reduced. DSPs whose drivers perfectly obey the (irrational, impossible) orders of Amazon's apps get $0.50 per parcel delivered. If drivers fall short of the apps' expectations, the per parcel-rate can fall to $0.10, or, in some cases, zero.

This provides a powerful incentive to DSPs to pressure drivers to engage in unsafe practices if the alternative would displease the app.

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Drivers are penalized for sudden braking and swerving, for example, but are also penalized for missing quota, which puts drivers in the impossible position of having to drive as quickly as possible but also not to swerve or brake if a sudden traffic hazard pops up. In one absurd tale, a driver describes how they were shifted to an electric van that did regenerative braking when they released the accelerator.

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The app expected drivers to slow down by releasing the accelerator, not by touching the brakes, but this meant that the van's brake lights never switched on. When a driver slowed at a yellow light, they were badly rear-ended by a following UPS truck, whose driver had assumed the Amazon DSP driver was going to rush the light (because the van's brake lights didn't light up).

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