ABSTRACT Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Parisian food delivery riders during 2018–2019, this article describes how these gig economy workers appropriate their own work to collectively resist the more restrictive dimensions of digital application control. These forms of resistance are often expressed as the refusal to ‘accept everything’. I show that domination is thus rejected by modelling a sense of labour respectability. These silenced resistances make it possible to recode an otherwise unpleasant job. Furthermore, I highlight how psychotropic substances appear to riders as a means of coping and escaping total capture. In a group composed mostly of men who claim a virile self-image, competition combines with peer solidarity in order to numb suffering while involuntary mystifying exploitation. Finally, I explore resistances against the State and the tax system, by introducing some riders who joined the Yellow Vests movement.