Digital platforms as Ideological State Apparatus

precarious work and legal subjectivity in neoliberal society

Abstract

The dissemination of precarious work and the development of information technology in the specific social arrangement that characterizes contemporary capitalism raises a discussion about the role of digital platforms in the process of reproduction of the specific exploitation relations of this historical moment. Taking as a starting point the conceptions of Evgeni Pashukanis and Louis Althusser and attempting an approach to the Foucauldian reflections of Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, this article proposes to understand digital platforms as an Ideological State Apparatus that performs a regional ideology centered on the entrepreneurial subject (ideology of self-entrepreneurship). It follows that the ideological apparatus of digital platforms acts in the reproduction of the relations of exploitation characteristic of neoliberal society through the constitution of a form of subjectivity that actively promotes its subjection under the imaginary experience of a relation between the entrepreneur and his own “human capital”.