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.

摘要

通过调解日常活动、社会互动和经济交易，数字平台在当代资本主义中发挥着越来越重要的作用。这些平台擅长从被认为生产力低下的资产和劳动力中提取价值。虽然关于平台资本主义和数字劳动力的新兴文献都集中在这些价值提取系统上，但很少有人关注平台如何承担主体形成和资本开发的项目。通过对作为 Deliveroo 的外卖工人的人进行理论化实证研究，我们展示了平台，特别是那些在城市地区提供服务的平台，如何鼓励甚至要求工人开发一种基于三种不正当美德的人力资本形式使他们更有生产力、更理想的工人：灵活性、活力和易读性。然后，我们分析了生命政治平台的运作和影响——我们指的是创建和管理生命政治治理机制的平台，以培养和积累人力和数据资本。