DashFace is a patent-poem by Lee Sharks about biometric surveillance and emotional labor in the gig economy.
The fictional system continuously films a delivery driver, verifies identity, analyzes micro-expressions, and streams the driver’s face to the customer as entertainment. A Driver Entertainment Score would influence dispatch priority and earnings, while a tip algorithm would reward visible positivity. The worker must therefore deliver food, perform emotional warmth, and produce content while operating a vehicle.
The patent form allows the satire to present extraction as a sequence of apparently reasonable product features. Identity verification becomes continuous observation; fatigue detection becomes customer content; emotional labor becomes an engagement score; and a human face becomes a platform asset. The work draws on the panopticon, scientific management, Hochschild’s emotional labor, Debord’s spectacle, and Levinas’s account of the face.
The document explicitly says DashFace should not be built and labels its empirical study n=0. Its publication number and technical claims are fictional elements of the patent-poem, not evidence of a USPTO filing or tested technology.