What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
Every lecture the course claims to run gets a page and a teaching-team
reference. A course decides how many lectures it needs; one of them carries a
real deck. related: connects lectures to the sessions and assessments they
feed.
The algorithm has a boss too
What "algorithmic management" means as a term of art, and how the next eleven weeks are shaped around one industry's version of it
Week 1
The mechanics of dispatch
Inside the three models that actually run a delivery platform — ETA prediction, order batching, and rating thresholds
Week 2
Trapped in the System — the case that named the problem
Close reading of the 2020 Renwu magazine feature that gave "trapped in the system" its name, and what changed after it went viral
Week 3
Algorithmic control theory
Two competing accounts of how software disciplines a workforce — surveillance and gamification — and where each one actually fits
Week 4
Worker resistance
How riders route around the system that routes them — GPS spoofing, order refusal patterns, and WeChat groups that coordinate informal slowdowns
Week 5
Platform economics
The subsidy-war years, and why venture-funded growth makes labour cost the one line item everyone treats as adjustable
Week 6
The legal classification problem
Employee or contractor — the one legal question that quietly determines almost everything else this course has covered
Week 7
Australia, before the reform
Uber Eats, DoorDash and Menulog under the old rules, and the shape of the gap the 2024 reform was written to close
Week 8
The Closing Loopholes reforms
Australia's 2024 "employee-like worker" minimum standards, and what power they actually give the Fair Work Commission
Week 9
A typology of three regimes
Adding the EU's Platform Work Directive as a third case, and building a typology across China, Australia and the EU
Week 10
Design justice
A method for the capstone — designing dispatch systems with the people who bear their risk, instead of for them
Week 11
Capstone studio
Work time and peer defence rehearsal for the redesign brief, and a look back at how the semester's opening claim held up
Week 12