Digital Biopolitics
Exploring Customer-Product-Marketplace Relationships within Alibaba's Megastructure
Y. Duan (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
G Bracken – Mentor (TU Delft - Spatial Planning and Strategy)
Víctor Muñoz Sanz – Mentor (TU Delft - Urban Design)
A.E. Rout – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Building Knowledge)
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Abstract
With demand expansion and consumption stimulation as fundamental policies for economic growth, China's culture of consumerism has evolved into not only an economic strategy but also a dominant social ideology and a driving force of urban and regional development. In the era of accelerated platformisation, platform corporations exemplified by Alibaba have expanded their influence and established an oligopolistic platform economy that has already reshaped and continues to reshape the culture of consumerism by transforming consumption behaviors, habits, and values. As a result, the production of space and social relations is undergoing a radical transformation.
Building on this premise, this research adopts the Stack as its primary theoretical and design framework to investigate the computational system of the Alibaba corporation in China, with Shanghai serving as a case study. It examines how planetary-scale computation, as manifested through both physical and digital infrastructures, reconfigures geodesign systems across multiple scales, from the territorial allocation of productive resources and the structure and configuration of urban space to human-machine interaction. In doing so, it reveals how Alibaba digital biopolitics facilitates the restructuring of market environments and conditions human subjectivity.
In the design and strategic section, this research further addresses the ethical dimensions of biopolitics within the context of accelerated platformisation. It explores the potential of an affirmative digital biopolitics as a new paradigm, one that centers on the exploration of human futures. In this model, experience becomes a product for customers to consume in the pursuit of a better self, while platform technologies serve as mediating infrastructures that sustain the operational system and enable the enhancement of individual subjectivity. Based on this paradigm, the study speculates a utopian vision of alternative models of production and consumption within the Stack, and envisions future cultures of consumerism shaped by ethical computation and emancipatory spatial and interaction design that foreground situation construction.