Dying on Airbnb: Digital infrastructures and deadly spaces

Abstract

This paper uses two deaths on the accommodation platform Airbnb to consider how the spatial understandings of digital infrastructures can have consequences for mortality. The platform internalizes each home or room as a Listing, a template of variables minimally describing space as a unit of accommodation. This universal schema facilitates both compatibility and scalability. But this generic understanding ignores both the unpredictable agency of matter and the significance of a space’s sociocultural past. Thus, while acknowledging the force exerted by digital infrastructures in reconfiguring the political economies of space at a global level, this Perspective paper argues that space is not adequately apprehended unless its material and historical aspects are accounted for. The paper concludes by returning to mortality in a broad sense, questioning whether digital infrastructures support or inhibit our capacities for living.

Keywords:

• Airbnb
• death
• digital infrastructures
• mortality
• platforms
• space

Notes

1 According to Rossiter (2016, 185): “Template cultures have become today’s iron cage of reason. They are an unknown default whose genealogy is not without power in placing limits on expression in seemingly invisible ways.” Templates are also referenced more indirectly in an earlier section on standards are “coded vanilla”: “algorithmic architectures designed to orchestrate protocological equivalence and thus connection between software applications and workplace routines.”

2 For a handful of examples, see: Baker (2013), Liang (2017), Parks (2017), Scott et al. (2017), Wren (2016), Zhu and Kim (2016).

3 As of 2022, Airbnb reports that it has 6 million active listings worldwide (Airbnb 2022).

4 Unlike the death in Austin, this one in Taipei City received very little media coverage, perhaps due to its location outside the United States. The incident actually received the most exposure secondarily, from Zak Stone’s article on his father’s death, as well as the Wired article by reporter Brad Stone (2017) drawn upon in the last section. Primary sources include the China Post article already cited and an even smaller article available in Chinese only and posted on Apple Daily (Zhang 2013).

5 Here I’m drawing upon case-studies from my PhD thesis (Munn 2019). These include, respectively, Palantir’s facilitation of immigration and deportation by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Palantir’s racially biased deployment by the Los Angeles Police Department, and issues of violence and sexual abuse on the Uber ride-share platform.