‘Lived Capitalisation’: How Speculative Finance Shapes the Social and Financial Lives of ‘Gig’ Workers in Bengaluru, India

Abstract

This article examines how speculative investments in platform businesses generate acute financial risks and the threat of downward social mobility for platform-based cab drivers and food delivery workers in Bengaluru, India. Informed by ethnographic research, this article departs from predominant understandings of platform workers’ experiences at ‘the point of production’ and investigates ‘gig’ workers’ social and financial lives as mediated by platform capital. The concept of ‘lived capitalisation’ demonstrates how debt-fuelled platform business models produce worker dependency on platforms, drive workers to make unsustainable financial and social investments and result in income declines for workers, thus adversely impacting the social reproduction of worker households. This concept foregrounds the concrete – and gendered – effects of financialised business models that deepen workers’ dependence on debt, financial products and subjectivities to sustain everyday social reproduction. This article also advances understandings of ‘capitalisation’ and ‘assetisation’ by centring workers’ experiences of these financial logics.