Alex Rosenblat

Alex Rosenblat is a writer and ethnographic researcher whose work investigates how algorithmic systems reshape the experience of work and the structure of labor markets. She is best known for Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work, a 2018 book based on four years of fieldwork riding with and interviewing Uber drivers across the United States and Canada. The book is one of the most cited ethnographies of platform labor and helped define how researchers, journalists, and policymakers talk about algorithmic management.

Rosenblat earned her MA in sociology from Queen's University in Canada and her bachelor's degree from McGill University. She spent years as a researcher at Data & Society, the New York-based research institute focused on the social implications of automation, where her work on platform labor, surveillance, and ride-hailing economies was foundational to the institute's research program. She has also held research positions and fellowships at academic and policy organizations including the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

Her research method is direct ethnographic engagement. For Uberland she rode in over 5,000 miles of trips, interviewed drivers across two countries, and analyzed years of online forum communications among workers attempting to understand the algorithmic system that managed their labor. The book documents how an interface optimized for passenger convenience and operational efficiency creates a workplace in which workers are managed by code without the protections, predictability, or recourse historically associated with employment.

Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, The Guardian, and Harvard Business Review, among other outlets. Her continuing research focuses on the design and governance of platform-based work, the legal and policy responses to algorithmic management, and the broader question of what algorithmic mediation does to the experience of being a worker, a customer, or a citizen.

Alex Rosenblat's work grounds Individuals First. The treatise cites Uberland as evidence of how gig economy platforms, driven by algorithmic management, leave workers with "a profound sense of powerlessness and alienation," the cost of subordinating individual agency to system goals.

The principle's core directive, prioritizing individual agency above efficiency, profit, or convenience, has its empirical anchor in Rosenblat's documentation of what algorithmic management actually feels like to the people subject to it. Uberland is the most rigorous available ethnography of the phenomenon. Her work demonstrates that "efficiency" optimized at the system level can produce systematic loss of agency at the individual level, and that the system rarely sees, or is designed to see, that cost.