Ubercapitalism Gary Hall Coventry University www.garyhall.info

previously ‘only businesses could be trusted, or people in your local community. Now, that trust has been democratized - any person can act like a brand.... It means that people all over a city, in 60 seconds, can become microentrepreneurs.’ Brian Chesky Airbnb CEO

Foucault writes of the neoliberal ‘homo oeconomicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings’ Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) p.226

‘an affirmative biopolitics, one that is not defined negatively with respect to the dispositifs of modern power/knowledge but is rather situated along the line of tension that traverses and displaces them’ Roberto Esposito, The Third Person: Politics of Life and Philosophy of the Impersonal (London: Polity, 2012) p.18

♯1. Force Regulators to Change the Law

♯2. Become a Microdatapreneur

♯3. Establish a Data Sharing Community

♯4. Persuade Higher Education Institutions and Others to Join

♯5. Learn from Academia.edu

(figures correct as of 05.12.2015) ‘… you've raised [$17.7] million dollars from investors so far… What is the company's business model?’ ‘The goal is to provide trending research data to R&D institutions that can improve the quality of their decisions by 10-20%... There is also an opportunity to make a large economic impact. Around $1 trillion a year is spent on R&D globally: about $200 billion in the academic sector, and about $800 billion in the private sector (pharmaceutical companies, and other R&D companies).’ Richard Price, Academia.edu CEO 29,253,568 academics have signed up to Academia.edu, adding 8,137,424 papers (figures correct as of 05.12.2015)

♯6. Use Peer Production Licences

♯7. Build a Centralised Counter-Platform

♯8. Create a Multipolar Platform Cooperative World

Chantal Mouffe, ‘Which Democracy for a Multipolar Agonistic World?’, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2015)

‘a home rental platform [that] could be used to steward … resources that … belong in the realm of a city-managed commons... Imagine that 20 or more large cities collaborate to develop software (“Munibnb”) with all the functionality of Airbnb, and then mandate that all short-term rentals be arranged through the municipal platform. … Airbnb couldn’t compete, because use of Airbnb would be illegal (as it already commonly is under land-use laws that prohibit the operation of hotels in most residential areas) …. [In this way] fees normally collected by Airbnb could stay with hosts or go to the city. Why should we watch millions of traveller dollars leak from our cities into the hands of wealthy corporate shareholders?’ (Jannelle Orsi, ‘Three Ways to Put Tech Platforms Into the Commons’, The Nation, May 27, 2015)

“What is a community. It is neither a macro-organism nor a big family “What is a community? It is neither a macro-organism nor a big family... To be with, to be together, and even to be ‘united’ are precisely not to be‘one’. Of communities that are at one with themselves, there are only dead ones.” Jean-Luc Nancy A Finite Thinking (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003) p.285.