I have argued that the spatial dialectic offers another approach to explore the technological and cultural changes represented by the idea of 'platform urbanism'. Instead of a nominalism which fixates on technological particularities and eschews the total process, a dialectical critique of space can recover an image of the city which maps the capitalist mode of production. To that end, the analysis of culture is still significant, particularly when we recognise how the economy of cities appears to be in a state of reversion. Culture today is reverting to its earliest meaning – the improvement of land for the cultivation of crops – but what has changed is the object of cultivation. The conversion of land into capital today mediates a global search for new ways to subject urban ensembles of social relations to a never-ending dependence on capital.

Here we can see a kind of urban regeneration (which is to say spatial transformation) of the formula of absolute rent along two axes. The first is that the state apparatus secures the growth of class monopoly power by selling fractions of its monopoly over not just land but the way the imaginary relationship of subjects to their real conditions of their existence is governed. And if this Althusserian formulation appears a little prolix, then the principle was articulated once again with brutal economy by Thatcher not long after taking power: 'If you change the approach, you really are after the heart and soul of the nation. Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.'[1] Which is merely to say that the practices of privatisation – of public land, education, healthcare and so forth, all widely documented features of a global 'land grab' in the neoliberal era – are intended not only to place public wealth in private hands but to change the way individuals perceive their subjective relationship to society.

The second is that the fundamental matter which the cultural logic of absolute rent acts upon is not landed property, but the relationship of the self to itself. Going back to John Locke this has always been the first principle of governance; the fundamental ground of liberal government was the protection of private ownership, grounded in the private sense of personhood. But whereas in the liberal era possessive individualism represented merely the formal basis of the relationship between the political and economic systems, in neoliberalism the self is perceived as the real human basis of capital. Following the ideology of Thatcherism, we might say the workings of the psychic apparatus – the system of subjectivity which manages the identity between the image 'I' have of myself and the image which circulates in society and which I am called upon to recognise as my self – has been restructured into a public-private partnership, opening up new opportunities for platforms which appear to support the individual's need for socio-spatial proximity, recognition and intimacy. It is this individual need for contact – a need which, as Judith Butler writes, is as socially necessary as the love necessary for a child's existence – that becomes the fundamental source of value which capital seeks to enclose. [2]

Thus, the fundamental 'crop' that real estate seeks to cultivate is a subject whose human capital is valued according to an ability to convert its psychic life into a parcel of individuality ripe for public offering. From this perspective, once we recognise that capital manifests the absolute realisation of what Marx and Engels called the impulse to 'nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere',[3] then the cultural question of platform urbanism is cast in a different light. If the threshold of modernity was defined by the search for a cognitive solution to the environmental management of the social multiplicity, the significance of 'the platform' is not that technology companies succeeded where architecture failed. Rather, the service architecture provided to the territorial, technological and institutional systems of capital accumulation (expressed in the systems of absolute rent) lost its monopoly. Or, to put it in the terms of this discussion, the architectural profession suddenly discovered that the building was only one platform among others that enabled the collection of rent.

The recoil of architecture from the urban question of what kind of future society wishes to inhabit can also be seen in this light. As Lefebvre said, this architectural shift was the effect of some structural cause which would only later become transparent. What I have tried to suggest here is that the system of absolute rent has regenerated, mutated and proliferated. The 'platform economy' is the new name for an old operating system, a system which seeks to domesticate the entire ensemble of social relations in a global system of abuse.