CARE PLATFORM AND PERVERSE INCLUSION: VULNERABILITY AND DIGITAL MEDIATION

VULNERABILIDADE E MEDIAÇÃO DIGITAL

Abstract

This article analyzes how digital care platforms reconfigure the conditions of work organization and service provision, shifting the effects of dynamics structured at the organizational level onto the individuals involved. The study aims to analyze how digital care platforms organize the relationships between work and service to produce specific forms of inclusion that reconfigure and deepen the vulnerability of the subjects involved. Using an autoethnographic approach based on the use of a caregiver-matching platform, systematic records of interactions were produced and subsequently analyzed through an interpretive lens. The results highlight the interplay of five central dimensions: the fragmentation of care, informational opacity, the organizational production of scarcity, algorithmic surveillance, and organizational abdication of responsibility. These dimensions structure an arrangement in which discontinuity, informational asymmetry, instability, and the shifting of responsibilities become recurring conditions of the experience. By drawing on literature regarding platformization, the ethics of care, and critical social psychology, the study argues that these dynamics constitute fundamental modes of platform operation rather than mere side effects. Drawing on the concept of "perverse inclusion," the article argues that the integration of caregivers and clients occurs under conditions that maintain and reorganize their vulnerability. It contributes to critical information studies by highlighting the centrality of the organizational production of vulnerability to understanding contemporary forms of digital mediation.