If the urban was arguably that which could tie together the loose ends of biological and political life, the platform emerged as its leech, feeding off its many leaks and slippages. Yet through the proliferation of mobile sensing technologies, the body is no longer the sole site for the machinic workings of capital, but rather its secretions, which provide a fertile realm for surplus extraction.

Take the Bowel Mover Pro, an app that allows for the personal tracking of bowel movements, including regularity, texture ('soft' or 'normal'), in relation to other bodily indicators, such as stress levels, and diet habits, ‘how many cups of water you've had and whether your meals were gluten-free.'[1] The attention devoted to the monitorisation of bodily discard, both as a form of economic regulator and as a technology of the self, is aligned with a long tradition of what one could term an 'ethopoetics' of shit.[2]

Going Underground

A rough periodisation of western discourses that attribute value to human excrement reveals a rupture coinciding with the advent of modern sewerage in the 19th century, a technology which can be credited with reducing the risk of disease in urban environments, in particular cholera epidemics. But while articulating a new relation between the body and the metropolis, the removal of excrement from public space also came to disrupt its metabolic workings.[3]

Before metropolitan sewers were invented, night-soil as it was called was collected from individual homes, and traded as a valuable commodity: when leached, it was a source of fertilizer for agriculture, and also an explosive component for making gunpowder. In fact, the main concern with the separation of human dejects from running waters in sewerage was not keeping the water clean, but rather that its dilution would reduce the value of excrement. To circumvent this issue, some of the earliest sewer projects functioned in similar ways to transport tunnels, with a section large enough to accommodate the transit of horse carts, and thus allow for the continuation of the work of night-soil collectors, but from then on as a form of underground labour.

Circular Reproduction

In 1845, Edwin Chadwick, a disciple of Bentham, envisioned that the waste from London’s sewage would become the most economic fertilizer for any crop or soil within a radius of twelve miles: 'We complete the circle and realise the Egyptian type of eternity by bringing as it were the serpent’s tail into the serpent’s mouth'.[4] His words were not the product of coprophagic hallucination (alone), but rather part of a wider problematisation of human waste which was taking place at the time. An exponent can be found in the 'Circulus’ theory by Pierre Leroux, a French Utopian Socialist who proposed that ‘each would religiously gather his dung to give it to the state, that is to say the tax collector, in place of a tax.'[5] While exiled in London in the early 1850’s, Leroux expanded on his views on scatological self-sufficiency, while observing what he considered a waste of a valuable resource:

‘What a stupid city! (…) one only needs to see this swarm of poor people to understand what wealth [lies in] a city’s manure. (…) I went to buy an old iron mortar, then I went to collect sand from the banks of the Thames at the Vauxhall Bridge.’’ [Leroux ground the sand with ashes and pieces of brick into a fine] ‘mineral-vegetable powder. I mixed this powder with my urine and my excrement. … the excremental material that a man produces in one day is enough to create twenty-five pounds of vegetable soil. (…) I had demonstrated that MAN IS THE RE-PRODUCER OF HIS OWN SUBSISTENCE. (…) Every one of these unfortunate people . . . could live by his own manure.'[6]

For Leroux, the end to human poverty did not lie in the advances of technology nor in the redistribution of capital, but rather in the self-sufficiency of the individual as a consumer-producer of its own resources. This endogenous process 'absolved the poor man of the need to labour; nature’s cycle alone would provide for each person’s needs.'[7]

In similar terms to the 'self-regulated entrepreneurship' proposed by platform economies, what Leroux discovered was the possibility to end waged labour.[8]