The common-seekers: Capturing and reclaiming value in the platform metropolis

Abstract

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.