Domus Capitalismi: Abstract Spaces and Domesticated Subjectivities in Times of Covid-19

This chapter investigates the relation of digital labour and urban space production in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic and in the broader context of a capitalism crisis. From a theoretical and interpretative approach, our inquiry posits the Covid-19 social production of space as a lens to assess the dialectics of capitalist crises, which imply both how digital spatial remedies are powered by machinic fix capital and the contradictory positionality of domesticated subjectivities. We argue that the Covid-19 pandemic-induced circulatory crisis has prompted a compensatory response that has been described as digital spatial fix, which combines measures against the crisis as well as subsumptive phenomena mainly under capitalist forms such as digital abstract space and machinic fix capital. We will exemplify this by examining how the private residences of many workers are being subsumed as digital abstract space (i.e., a logistical space constituted by the synergic encounter between digital platforms and subjects that operate in machinic fashion) are shaped by multiple overlapping spheres of action, which makes them domesticated.