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Two hours of feeling very uncomfortable.

Takeaway MovieRetrograde Life》It’s been more than 40 minutes since the opening, and there is no plot point. In front of me, a Facebook-like PPT mashup is played frame by frame. I am the only one in the entire theater, and the air conditioning is turned on very high. In a place like a theater, people are trapped in their chairs and cannot enter the world of the movie, so they will be particularly sensitive to the real world and environment.

whenXu ZhengWhen I played the role of a former factory employee and a new food delivery rider who was anxious about not being able to pay the mortgage due to delivering food, I also dug out a two-bedroom, one-living-room apartment with my curled toes in my Crocs.

01 

I spent two hours watching PPT

Whenever the plot can't move forward, dark filters, fragmented and exaggerated editing, and deliberate soundtracks like drums come on. Every once in a while, when the plot is about to break, the screen will rotate the rider's face shot.

When similar shots were repeated in the third short video collection of smiling faces, my discomfort rose to anger.——The ones laughing in the front are actors, and the ones not laughing in the back are the real delivery men.

If you are into literature and art, tell a good story first.

The beginning of "Camel Xiangzi" and the ending of "Return of the KingIn "Reverse Life", the audience only sees that the suffering of life is packaged into carved shit by chicken soup and melodrama. The dramatic conflicts and contradictions are replaced by the "difficulties" and "exploitation" among the lower class people.

The whole movie has no real plot, no distinct characters, only symbols. All the symbols related to employees of large factories and food delivery riders were put into a PPT.

The movie "Reverse Life" is a real insult to the rider community.

02

The lingering temperament of success

If the creator's out-of-touch God's perspective and messy drama structure are problems of professional ability, then the film's final value orientation sets the delivery group's goal of "becoming the king of singles", which is not just a technical problem, but a blatant failure.

During the few minutes when the nightclub was challenging the king of singles, the whole movie even exuded the temperament of success theory: earning over ten thousand yuan a month, having insurance, fighting on the charts, and becoming faster and stronger.Your suffering lies in the fact that you are not working hard enough, and that you do not have an open mind and the awareness to surpass speed.

——The whole movie is about letting go of success.

However, life is more sad than movies. During the hot topic of "Reverse Life" released, the mass conflict between riders and security guards was staged again. On August 13, according to the Hangzhou police, a takeaway rider of a food delivery platform knelt down after a conflict with the security guard of the park during the delivery process, which caused a gathering of people at the scene.

In the video of the conflict, someone pointed in the direction of the park security uniform and shouted: "You say the delivery man is a dog again?!" Who cursed first? In another video of a crowd, the crowd in delivery uniforms burst into an emotional and rhythmic shout of "Apologize, apologize. Apologize."

This scene in the real world is consistent with the scene of the golden armor on the big screen in the movie "Life in Advance": the large number of little yellows crushed the little blues, and little blue was no match at all.

03

Riders can't escape the system

In the movie, Xu Zheng plays a food delivery rider who develops a new algorithm app and becomes the fastest person in the system. But in the real world, if a rider wants to bypass the platform and build an independent delivery system, he will be banned.

From the perspective of the food delivery ecosystem, the riders are not “people” but part of the platform’s “transportation capacity”.All the delivery shortcuts summarized by the riders will eventually be summarized into regular time by the algorithm. The next time the algorithm-driven system will require the riders to be "faster" on the original basis.

There is no limit to algorithms, but flesh and blood cannot withstand the crushing of machines.

The essence of the group conflict between riders and security guards in Hangzhou is that the platform has requirements for delivery time. In order to deliver the system "faster", the riders will find shortcuts in offline scenarios and infringe on the rights of security guards. The conflict between these two groups has a long history, but the real problem is a paradox in the face of capital and income. It eventually became a mine buried in the delivery scene, adding burden to society every now and then.

Department of Sociology, Peking UniversityChen LongIn his study “Labor Order under Digital Control”, he published the following conclusions:The three elements of the capital control system (i.e. guiding workers' work, evaluating workers' performance, and rewarding and punishing workers) have undergone redistribution in the food delivery scenario: during the riders' work, the platform system is responsible for guiding the riders' work, the consumers are responsible for evaluating the riders' work, and ultimately the platform system is responsible for rewarding and punishing the riders.

After the redistribution of control, the object of labor-capital conflict shifted first.

04

Consumers have become scapegoats

Consumers seem to have gained the "absolute power" of supervision and evaluation, but they have unknowingly become the "scapegoats" of labor-management conflicts through the "manager" role played by the platform system.

Even more ironic is thatWhen consumers and riders complained to each other, the food delivery platform companies became the "mediators" of the conflicts between them.Because consumers will complain about riders to the company through the platform system, and riders can only complain to the company through the platform system.

The reason why the rider industry has attracted so much attention is that it is an industry that completely exposes the hidden labor process and production scenes to the public. Before the release of "Reverse Life", it was criticized for costing 200 million yuan and only 1.67 million yuan in pre-sales. After the release, it was promoted as a warm and touching theme, but it was quickly countered by the reputation of "consuming suffering".

This also fully demonstrates that the group of food delivery riders is too close to ordinary audiences and real life, and cannot tolerate any falsification, as any falsification will lead to distortion.

Today's audiences are not so easily fooled.

The professional scenes of riders are public, but the algorithm that turns people into machines is always a black box. Sociologist Chen Long also said in "Labor Order under "Digital Control": "It is not difficult to predict that the battle between "digital control" and rider autonomy will always end with "digital control" winning. Because the former has achieved "knowing yourself and the enemy, and fighting a hundred battles without danger" by collecting and analyzing the latter's data.

The process of "digital control" is also a process in which the rider's autonomy space is constantly eroded.

Finally, although the data used by the platform system to manage riders is objective, there is a profit orientation behind it. No matter how far technology advances, it still serves capital in essence. And the blind admiration of technological myths often makes people relax their vigilance against behind-the-scenes operations.

In recent years, conflicts have arisen over the last mile of food delivery. Increasing the dispatch fee and charging for high-rise stairs can solve the problem and ease the conflict. In communities where people need to walk, increasing the time can also optimize the user experience.

However, these mechanisms have been iterating in the food delivery system for so many years that the riders have been forced to ride on the street. When it comes to the part where capital concessions are needed, there is no more.This conflict itself was caused by the unreasonable mechanism of the platform, but in the end everyone will only remember the conflict between the two professions of security guard and food delivery rider.

05

The cruel truth behind the system

In May 2018, 34-year-old Pablo Avendano was hit and killed by a car while riding his bicycle in Philadelphia while working for Silicon Valley-funded food delivery app Caviar. Pablo's family and friends believe that "the gig economy killed Pablo."

As is customary among Silicon Valley startups, Caviar considered Avendano a contractor who was ineligible for the company’s health insurance and union protections, and his family would not be eligible for any benefits after his death.

In the book "The Elegy of Overwork" by British writer Jamie K. MacCallum, Pablo's friends recorded the whole process of raising funeral expenses online. His friends claimed on the GoFundMe website that when he died,“Working a gig economy job with material incentives to ride a bicycle in dangerous and inclement weather”.His best friend, Jorge Ciccarello-Maher, said Avendano had been riding for hours in bad weather the day he was hit.

When people see danger, Caviar, as a capital and delivery platform, sees opportunity.The day before, the company sent a text message full of emojis to its food delivery drivers to encourage them.

“When it rains, Caviar also receives orders like rain!

...Come and make money online!"

06

The missile perspective movie is a naked evil

Around the world, few riders actually make any money, no matter how long they work or how fast they ride.

Before 2014, Caviar's delivery drivers earned nearly $10 per delivery. Then the company switched to a different algorithm, and a 2018 JPMorgan Chase study found that over time and as the algorithm improved, Caviar's profits soared, but the company's delivery drivers' wages fell to far less than $10 per delivery.

The movie "Reverse Life" makes people feel offended and angry because although the main character of the story in the movie is a food delivery man, the creative perspective, in addition to a large number of distorted symbolic moving fragments, uses audio-visual language to break it apart and explain the platform, and points the source of the rider's predicament to the needs and services related to consumer rights. Avoiding the important and pushing the responsibility to consumers exposes the perspective and value positioning chosen by the creators - always focusing on algorithms, platforms, and even God.

In history, the most shocking and impactful war scenes were shot on missiles.

This is all the reason why I hate the takeaway movie "Retrograde Life".