Biopolitical platforms: the perverse virtues of digital labour

ABSTRACT

By mediating everyday activities, social interactions, and economic transactions, digital platforms play an increasingly dominant role in contemporary capitalism. These platforms have excelled at extracting value from assets and labour that have been deemed un(der)productive. While the burgeoning literature on platform capitalism and digital labour has focused on these systems of value extraction, there has been much less attention on how platforms have also undertaken a project of subject formation and thereby capital development. By theorising empirical research with people who work as food delivery workers for Deliveroo, we show how platforms, specifically those that provide services in urban places, encourage, even require, workers to develop a form of human capital based on three perverse virtues that make them more productive, more desirable workers: flexibility, vitality, and legibility. We then analyse the operations and implications of biopolitical platforms—by which we mean platforms that create and administer a biopolitical governance regime in order to cultivate and accumulate capital, both human and data.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital platforms
• digital labour
• human capital
• biopolitics
• deliveroo

Acknowledgments

A draft of this paper was presented at a workshop on ‘The Assetization of Work’ hosted by the Political Economy Department at the University of Sydney. We thank the organisers and participants for their valuable comments. Many thanks also to the anonymous reviewers and journal editors for their helpful feedback improving the paper and shepherding it to publication.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This quote was first encountered as the epigraph of Morgan Adamson’s (2009, p. 272) excellent study of how the concept of human capital was disseminated in economic thought via ‘methods of valuation and measure of human life by capital.’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karen Gregory

Karen Gregory is a Senior Lecturer in the department of sociology at the University of Edinburgh. She is the Programme Director of the MSc in Digital Society and co-editor of Digital Sociologies (Policy Press 2016).

Jathan Sadowski

Jathan Sadowski is a research fellow in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University. His work focuses on the political economy of technology. He is the author of the book Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World (The MIT Press, 2020).