Mediating the algorithm: Egyptian gig drivers’ folk theories and the cultural politics of urban mobility

This study examines how Egyptian inDrive driver-bloggers make platform work intelligible and actionable by producing YouTubed ‘vernacular theorization’, as discourse-in-action. Drawing on six Arabic-language YouTube videos, it analyses how drivers interpret and operationalize key interface cues—such as rider profile labels, ratings and trip history, ‘fair price’ prompts, counter-offer affordances, commission triggers and acceptance/refusal feedback—while navigating live work conditions. Integrating algorithmic folk theory with Mediated Discourse Analysis (MDA), the study approaches folk algorithms as vernacular theorizing practices enacted through mediated action in recurring sites of engagement (the phone screen, the moving car and the addressed audience). We identify two interrelated analytic dimensions through which drivers’ vernacular theorizing becomes consequential: tactical instructions, where drivers translate interface cues into repeatable decision routines (filtering riders, calibrating counter-offers, waiting strategically, and combining long and short trips within a shift) and moral evaluations, where they frame certain behaviours and pricing regimes as chaotic, impulsive or exhausting. Across these dimensions, drivers’ talk, interface interaction and embodied mobility are multimodally orchestrated into nexuses of practice. The drivers’ mediation functions as discourse-in-action that reconfigures what the algorithm does in practice, not simply what the algorithm means. The study, therefore, reads folk algorithms as locally situated responses to platformized precarity.