Capitalisme pandémique, subsomption et espace numérique abstrait

We support the interpretative hypothesis that the Covid-19 pandemic involves both a spatial crisis and a spatial solution (Harvey, 2001), which combined create the conditions for a new 'gigification' of work supported by digital platforms, as well as the conditions for its resistance. Accordingly, in this paper we will examine the contradictory process of 'gigification' in relation to the establishment and violation of the boundaries of what we - interpreting Lefebvre's thought in the light of the pandemic - define as abstract digital space. The abstract digital space constitutes a social field of multiple encounters: a preponderant logistical locus for digital capitalism, an iper-industrial capitalist mode of production inhabited by self-directed and self-exploited subjectivities that partly adhere to the fallacious narrative of 'flexibility', a highly intrusive logic of digital connectivity, and finally a protocol approach to management that emphasises computational logic. In the context of the pandemic many knowledge workers have undergone a process of gigification and are emerging as the new operators of the abstract digital space. In order to make our argument, we focus particularly on the diffusion of so-called 'intelligent/remote' work that shows how, in the pandemic phase, abstract digital space expands in co-development with the subsumption of social (re-)production, resulting in a contradictory domestication