The politics of deautomation: Being disaffected by platform capitalism

Abstract

Being affected in on-demand platform urbanism is a primary site of politics, not an aftereffect that happens once capitalism has had its way. To make this argument, this article begins by expanding automation from its conventional technical purview to better appreciate its overlooked embodied dimensions. Accordingly, through the examples of on-demand mobility and delivery platforms, I explain how automation can be understood as a specific structure of feeling immanent to on-demand platform urbanism that is transforming city life and creating distinctive subjectivities. This article takes as its empirical focus the unravelling of these embodied dimensions of automation, which has been exacerbated by the gradual rollback of COVID-19 restrictions in Melbourne. My argument is that a felt sense of disaffection by both workers and consumers is effectively deautomating this form of on-demand platform capitalism. The article concludes that disaffection in this context has a potentially recuperative dimension, opening up alternative urban futures that were previously unthinkable.