Abstract:

The development of the gig economy has added new technical significance to the political space theory of David Harvey et al. With the blessing of new technologies, capitalism has completed a unique expansion in time and space. Through the three major elements of capital, digital rules and bureaucratic management, it has been lodged in the technological system of the Internet era, forming a new system with greater scalability. The system can achieve instantaneous, wide-area labor search in low-lying space on a global scale, forming a “center-periphery” structure in economic geography. Meanwhile it uses formal space to freely squeeze labor’s time input, rewrites the time and space pattern of traditional labor, and forms a new type of space-time plunder.

Key words: the gig economy, space politics, materialization, algorithm