Angry and "productive": engagement in gamified precarious work

We examine the affective engagement of workers in app-mediated food delivery who continue working while explicitly describing the work as harming them financially, emotionally, and bodily, while using the language of betrayed intimacy. Using a mixed-methods design that combines manual coding with eight validated computational instruments and a study-specific linguistic analysis across two corpora-1,385 Glassdoor employer reviews and 1,075 Reddit posts-we identify a sizable minority (n = 338, 34.4% of current-employee reviews) of conflicted but persisting workers. On the extended Moral Foundations Dictionary, fairness and authority cross from positive valence in Group A into violation in Group B, while loyalty-the foundation that would have to invert for the bond to break-remains positively valenced in both groups despite a significant decline. These workers avoid saying "I" to shield themselves from the reality of working without sufficient compensation or at a loss; supplicate companies to pay enough so they could continue working; and articulate the platform's design as betrayal and violation ("abuse machine"). On Reddit, workers describe themselves as addicted (11.5% of posts), report hiding their app use from family, and describe the job design with casino, Pavlov, and Skinner metaphors. We interpret this emotional profile through Patrick Carnes's framework of the betrayal bond as bonded participation: affective engagement that the gamified iteration of precarious work appears to elicit and sustain. Building upon Shoshana Zuboff's concept of behavioral surplus, we argue that workers' outrage, compulsion, and shame are the affective surplus that the platforms convert into continuous productivity, marking a new frontier in the precarization of work.