This article offers a critical account of technology-based urban economies within cognitive-affective capitalism, particularly of their socially extractive nature and the contradictions arising from related processes of value extraction. Drawing on the work of Hardt and Negri and other theorists of ‘extractivist’ capitalism, the article explores the way in which ‘the common’ has become the oil of today’s ‘platform metropolis’. In particular, it is pointed out that the platform metropolis is illustrative of conflicting common-seeking claims involving high-tech corporations, on the one hand, and precarised workers, on the other. With evidence obtained from qualitative field research conducted with the on-call workers employed in the food delivery service, the article shows how the contradiction between capital and labour in the platform metropolis paves the way to an interstitial politics of the common that illuminates the socially produced nature of technology-based urban economies as well as the wider relationship between capital and life in our biopolitical era.
AdnerR (2006)
Match your innovation strategy to your innovation ecosystem. Harvard Business Review,
April, 1–10.
2.
AhmedS (2010) The Promise of Happiness.
Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
3.
AudretschDBBelitskiM (2017)
Entrepreneurial ecosystems in cities: Establishing the framework conditions. The Journal of Technology Transfer42(5): 1030–1051.
4.
BenasayagMSchmitG (2003) Les Passions Tristes: Souffrance Psychique et Crise Sociale.
Paris:
La Découverte.
5.
BerlantL (2016)
The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space34(3): 393–419.
6.
BrévilleB (2017) Seattle, capital of the hipster boom. Le Monde diplomatique (English edition), November. Available at: https://mondediplo.com/2017/11/05seattle (accessed 1 February 2019).
7.
ButlerJ (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Violence and Mourning.
London:
Verso.
8.
ButlerAAthanasiouA (2013) Dispossession: The Performative in the Political.
Cambridge:
Polity.
9.
CaloARosenblatA (2017)
The taking economy: Uber, information, and power. Columbia Law Review17(6): 1623–1690.
10.
D’EramoM (2014)
UNESCOcide. New Left Review88: 47–53.
11.
DanseroETestaCToldoA (2014) Verso la smart city, partendo dal cibo. In: SantangeloMAruSPollioA (eds) Smart City: Ibridazioni, Innovazioni e Inerzie Nelle Città Contemporanee.
Rome:
Carocci, pp. 135–149.
12.
DaviesW (2015) The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being.
London:
Verso.
13.
De AngelisM (2007) The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital.
London:
Pluto Press.
14.
Di FeliciantonioC (2017)
The reactions of neighbourhoods to the eviction of squatters in Rome: An account of the making of precarious investor subjects. European Urban and Regional Studies24(4): 352–367.
15.
EconomakisGE (2003)
On absolute rent: Theoretical remarks on Marx’s analysis. Science & Society67(3): 339–348.
EnrightTRossiU (2018) Desiring the common in the post-crisis metropolis: Insurgencies, contradictions, appropriations. In: Id (eds) The Urban Political: Ambivalent Spaces of Late Neoliberalism.
New York:
Palgrave MacMillan, 45–64.
18.
EtzkowitzH (2008) The Triple Helix University-Industry-Government Innovation in Action.
New York:
Routledge.
19.
FloridaR (2012) The Rise of the Creative Class – Revisited.
New York:
Basic Books.
20.
FloridaR (2017) The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class and What We Can Do about It.
New York:
Basic Books.
21.
FloridaRAdlerPMellanderC (2017)
The city as an innovation machine. Regional Studies51(1): 86–96.
22.
FujitaMThisseJF (2013) Economics of Agglomeration: Cities, Industrial Location, and Globalization.
New York:
Cambridge University Press.
23.
GlaeserE (2011) Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier.
London:
MacMillan.
24.
GonzálezSOosterlynckSRibera-FumazR, et al. (2018)
Locating the global financial crisis: Variegated neoliberalization in four European cities. Territory, Politics, Governance6(4): 468–488.
HardtMNegriA (2009) Commonwealth.
Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
27.
HardtMNegriA (2017) Assembly.
Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
28.
HarveyD (1978)
The urban process under capitalism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research2(1–4): 101–131.
29.
HarveyD (2003) The New Imperialism.
Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
30.
HarveyD (2014) Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism.
Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
31.
HaskelJWestlakeS (2018) Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy.
Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
32.
HoffmannLFainsteinSJuddD (eds) (2011) Cities and Visitors: Regulating People, Markets, and City Space.
Malden, MA:
Blackwell.
33.
HuronA (2015)
Working with strangers in saturated space: Reclaiming and maintaining the urban commons. Antipode47(4): 963–979.
34.
HyraDS (2017) Race, Class, and Politics in the Capuccino City.
Chicago, IL:
The University of Chicago Press.
35.
JeffreyAMcFarlaneCVasudevanA (2012)
Rethinking enclosure: Space, subjectivity and the commons. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research44(4): 1247–1267.
36.
LazzaratoM (2004)
From capital-labour to capital-life. Ephemera4(3): 187–208.
37.
LazzaratoM (2014) Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity.
Los Angeles, CA:
Semiotext(e).
38.
KeynesJM (1936/2012) The General Interest of Employment, Interest and Money.
Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
39.
KruegerAO (1974)
The political economy of the rent-seeking society. The American Economic Review64(3): 291–303.
40.
MandelE (1975) Late Capitalism.
London:
New Left Books.
41.
Massumi B (2002) Parables for the Virtual. Durham. NC: Duke University Press.
42.
MartinottiG (1999) A city for whom? Transients and public life in the second-generation metropolis. In BeauregardRABody-GendrotS (eds) The Urban Moment: Cosmopolitan Essays on the Late-20th-century City.
London:
SAGE, pp. 155–185.
43.
MazzucatoM (2018) The Value of Everything. Making and Taking in the Global Economy.
London:
Allen Lane.
44.
MezzadraSNeilsonB (2017)
On the multiple frontiers of extraction: Excavating contemporary capitalism. Cultural Studies31(2–3): 185–204.
45.
MorozovE (2013) To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems That Don’t Exist.
London:
Allen Lane.
NegriA (2017) Marx and Foucault: Essays.
Cambridge:
Polity.
48.
ParkerGGVan AlstyneMWChoudarySP (2016) Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy – and How to Make Them Work for You.
New York:
Newton.
49.
Peck J (2016) Economic rationality meets celebrity urbanology: Exploring Edward Glaeser’s city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40(1): 1–30.
50.
PovinelliE (2011) Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism.
Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
51.
ReadJ (2009)
A genealogy of homo-economicus: Neoliberalism and the production of subjectivity. Foucault Studies6: 25–36.
52.
RossA (2016) The Industries of the Future.
New York:
Simon & Schuster.
53.
RossiU (2017) Cities in Global Capitalism.
Cambridge:
Polity.
54.
RossiUDi BellaA (2017)
Start-up urbanism: New York, Rio de Janeiro and the global urbanization of technology-based economies. Environment and Planning A49(5): 999–1018.
55.
RotaFSSaloneC (2014)
Place-making processes in unconventional cultural practices. The case of Turin’s contemporary art festival Paratissima. Cities40(Part A): 90–98.
56.
ScholzT (2017) Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy.
Cambridge:
Polity Press.
57.
ShaikhA (2016) Capitalism. Competition, Conflict, Crises.
Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
58.
SmithA (1977) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
Chicago, IL:
The University of Chicago Press (or. ed. 1776).
59.
SmithN (1979)
Toward a theory of gentrification. A back to the city movement by capital, not people. Journal of the American Planning Association45(4): 538–548.
TolaMRossiU (2019) The common. Antipode (50th anniversary special issue), 2019: 259–263.
67.
VercelloneC (2010) The crisis of the law of value and the becoming-rent of profit. In: FumagalliAMezzadraS (eds) Crisis in the Global Economy.
Los Angeles, CA:
Semiotext(e), pp. 85–118.
68.
VirnoP (2015)
L’usage de la vie. Multitudes58: 143–158.
WrightEO (2010) Envisioning Real Utopias.
London:
Verso.
71.
ZukinSLindemanSHursonL (2017)
The omnivore’s neighborhood? Online restaurant reviews, race, and gentrification. The Journal of Consumer Culture17(3): 459–479.
