Airbnb and the paradox of the body: The biopolitical management of hosts in four tourist towns in New Zealand

The sharing economy

Earlier forms of the sharing economy arose through not-for-profit sharing platforms such as Couchsurfing (Kuhzady et al., 2020). However, the term ‘sharing economy’ gained popularity around 2008, the year of the global financial crisis (GFC) and came to represent peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms that are for-profit organizations (Schor and Attwood-Charles, 2017). The term ‘sharing economy’ is typically associated with the platform capitalist organizations Airbnb and Uber. The first platform specializes in ‘home-sharing’ and the second in ‘car-sharing’ These companies are two of the most visible organizations associated with the sharing economy because of their incremental growth and proliferation across territories, coupled with a meteoric increase in market value of the companies themselves (Morozov, 2015).

The sharing economy is so named because of its claim to utilize ‘unproductive capacities’ of so-called ‘idle’ or under-utilized goods (Botsman, 2015; Cammaerts, 2011; Richardson, 2015; Schor and Attwood-Charles, 2017; Slee, 2015). The basic idea is that people can – indeed the messaging suggests, morally should – monetize their ‘idle’ goods and services when they are not being used by the owners. The particular form of the sharing economy has a number of different titles: gig economy, peer-to-peer economy and collaborative consumption (Stabrowski, 2017). Each term draws on a notion of sociality. Nicholas John (2017) contends that the term ‘sharing’ is deeply embedded in emotion and thus engages a set of values. It is the contradiction between various discursive shifts in meaning around what constitutes ‘value’ that gives rise to at least some of the academic debates on the sharing economy. For example, Andersson Cederholm and Hultman (2010) suggest that homestay hosts dissociate themselves from a market ethos by reframing their hospitality ethos as an economic value in order to make sense of their emotional labour.

The term ‘sharing economy’ itself is contradictory because the notion of sharing suggests an exchange without expectations of economic gain, but the commonly held notion of economy invokes ideas of monetary exchange (Leoni and Parker, 2018). Regardless, the idea of the sharing economy has come to denote a particular set of business practices that describe a particular form of capitalism, based on the use of digital infrastructures. That is, a key characteristic of the sharing economy is the utilization of digital space to facilitate the transaction of these so-called ‘unproductive capacities’ (Slee, 2015; Stabrowski, 2017). Arguably, however, in the case of Airbnb it is the nature of a damaged post-GFC economy that propels people to commodify their private spaces, rather than any particular desire to participate in a sharing economy. Set against a background of precarity particular to tourist towns, such as seasonal workflows, part-time employment and precarious hospitality work, the attractiveness of additional earning capacity through existing goods is attractive to residents of small tourist towns. In such a scenario, the biopolitical rhetoric employed by Airbnb induces hosts to practise a self-discipline that aligns with the demands of the platform. Moreover, the biopolitical discourse employed by Airbnb enables hosts to make sense of, and therefore justify, their engagement with the platform.

Sharing economy and digital technologies: Web 2.0

The rise of the sharing economy is concurrent with a wider use of digital capabilities that include the incorporation of personal features not previously seen on early peer-to-peer platforms (Ert et al., 2016). The increase in the use of personal features has been enabled by the introduction of Web 2.0, which built on the previous version to enable users to generate and publish content on websites (Guttentag, 2015). Social media websites such as Facebook and Instagram are widely known for their user functionality and interactions, but other platform capitalist organizations also employ Web 2.0 in various ways. Airbnb utilizes this technology to allow hosts to upload their own content in the form of photos and promotional material, and reviews and forum posts. Additionally, and importantly, Web 2.0 functionality allows Airbnb hosts to interact with guests through the platform. It is through this mechanism that Airbnb can specifically target messaging to individual hosts based on algorithmic analysis of their performance and feedback generated through the rating system.

The ability to upload personally created content has given rise to technologies that enable a sense of trust to be established between parties that otherwise have no physical or geographical points of reference from which to establish such a sense by traditional means. These technologies have contributed to the general acceptance of peer-to-peer platforms; particularly those such as Airbnb (Ert et al., 2016; Guttentag, 2015). Digitally mediated reputational systems, in which trust acts as a form of currency among strangers, are important elements in digital platforms because they enable users to evaluate risk in economic transactions based on the aggregation of individual reviews within a collective body (Gandini, 2016). In the case of Airbnb, notions of trust are central to the platform’s business model because interactions take place in personal spaces such as the Airbnb hosts’ homes.

Reputational mechanisms such as Airbnb’s rating system establish trust between strangers by a series of related processes. These are the verification of identity processes for both hosts and guests, photos of hosts and their spaces, and by the rating system itself, in which both parties rate each other on a number of specific metrics. The role of these processes is demonstrably effective: positive, smiling photos of Airbnb hosts have been shown to have a causal effect on occupancy and web traffic (Fagerstrøm et al., 2017). Similarly, Ert et al. (2016) show that guests’ booking decisions are influenced by hosts’ photos and information. However, these findings are contested by other authors. For example, Martinez et al. (2017) conducted research into the effect of sentiment in hosts’ listing descriptions of their Airbnb and found no discernible impact on occupancy rates. Regardless, the important point to note is that hosts themselves consider the rating system to be integral to the success of their Airbnb operation. As a result, they are highly motivated to modify their behaviours to enhance their rating scores, while simultaneously minimizing behaviours that may attract negative ratings.

Research background

This article is based on a qualitative doctoral research project conducted in four regional tourist locations in New Zealand: Paihia, Whitianga, Picton and Wanaka. These locations are small towns of between 1700 and 6500 residents that have all experienced significant increases of Airbnb businesses since 2018. For example, Whitianga is the major tourist town of the Coromandel Peninsula region. This area experienced an estimated 61% rise in Airbnb guest nights over the course of one year (Thames-Coromandel District Council, 2018).

Twenty-eight Airbnb hosts who live in their Airbnb property were interviewed for this research in 2018. The selection criteria for hosts assumed that the biopolitical effects on subjectivity and social reproduction would be more evident in hosts whose Airbnb operated in conjunction with their daily lives, rather than absent hosts who let their investment property or holiday home, or who employed property managers to manage their second home or investment. The gender mix of the sample is 19 females and 10 males, reflecting findings of other research on Airbnb hosts in New Zealand, where the gender mix is around 70% female participation compared to male participation (O’Mahoney et al., 2018; Parkinson, 2018). Participant age range extends from mid-30s to mid-70s. All participants view Airbnb as their secondary or supplemental income. Five hosts work full-time in other occupations, three own another small business, five are retired and fifteen work in part-time or seasonal jobs.

Hosts were sourced via a variety of methods: advertisements were placed in local newspapers and local Facebook groups. Snowball sampling (Bryman, 2016) was also utilized in the recruitment process. Interviews were semi-structured in nature. The form of the interview was informed by a pre-prepared topic guide to generate discussion between the participant and myself as researcher. Because the topic guide provided no specific questions, participants were free to discuss any aspect of hosting they felt was important. Participant interviews were audio recorded and data was transcribed manually. Nvivo software was employed for data coding of interviews into themes, which were then analysed and interpreted manually. Additionally, content analysis was utilized to analyse the Airbnb website and various websites set up to assist hosts, such as Airhosts forum and Fairbnb (Airhosts forum, 2018; Fairbnb, 2018). Additionally, some participants shared emails sent by the Airbnb platform to hosts, and these were also included in the data.

Biopolitics and platform capitalism

Under conditions of contemporary platform capitalism, external power (such as that exercised by institutions such as nation-states or sovereigns) has been transferred to corporate power. Platform capitalism is an iteration of corporate power, and the platform capitalist organization Airbnb employs a ubiquitous yet diffuse deployment of power that is internalized by the individual and implemented through the use of digital technologies. Cheney-Lippold (2011) applies the idea of ‘soft biopolitics’ to understand the ways in which biopower works at the level of categorization, computer coding, statistics and digital surveillance. The adaptability of code, as algorithmic analysis adjusts to the modulations and variations of the behaviours of the platform users, ensures that users are shaped according to the logic, rules and functioning of the digital architecture of the platform. Cheney-Lippold (2011) claims that under such modulation, discipline, in its strictest sense, has become more or less obsolete, since algorithmic analysis of metadata configures the life-choices of users by pre-constraining and regulating the conditions of possibility. However, digital platforms, in order to ensure that users comply with paths set by the algorithms, still operate systems of discipline and reward. This is particularly true in the case of reputational systems such as that employed by Airbnb, as compliance by the host side of the market is integral to the success of its trust-building within the guest side of the market (Pennell, 2019).

Biopolitics, by its very definition, acts on the body. The composition of the word itself refers to the relations between life and politics, drawing from the Greek ‘bios’, meaning life, and ‘polis’ referring to a body of citizens, or political community (Campbell and Sitze, 2013). Biopolitics is implicated in both the personal and the social. However, its foremost conceptualization centres around the dynamics of populations. Foucault’s theories of governmentality, power and resistance illuminate the ways in which populations are constructed as subjects of regimes and how the people within those populations are constituted as individualized subjects (Juniper and Jose, 2008). Understanding of Foucault’s work has developed over time so that biopolitics can be conceptualized as the diffuse but encompassing enactment of power that has found a way to inhabit even the most neutral aspects of bodily life. Digital technologies – and the ability to surveil, categorize and analyse people’s behaviour through multiple data-points – contribute to the ability of platform capitalist organizations such as Airbnb to manage their user populations. Sloterdijk (2009: 25) explains biopolitics as ‘not just a matter of pacifically directing the herd which has already tamed itself; it is a question of systematically generating new, idealized, exemplary individuals’. Sloterdijk’s analysis suggests a double deployment of power; one in which power is exerted from an external source to shape the individual, as well as an internal deployment of power, in which the individual does the work of power by ‘taming’ herself.

Digital technologies and biopolitics

Biopolitical power exercised through digital technologies has inserted itself into the most banal aspects of daily life via not only an externalization of power or directive but, crucially, via an internalization of subjectivity. The links to Foucault’s conceptualization of the Panopticon are clear: the digital subject is exposed to absolute visibility (in Airbnb’s case, through the internet, through Airbnb’s host pages, which provide access to millions of viewers, and through digital architecture such as algorithmic surveillance and data-tracking). The point that intersects with biopolitics and makes the Panopticon model so successful as a method of population control is the internalization of power in the subject. In other words, subjects internalize and project the constraints of power upon themselves because they operate under conditions of the knowledge of absolute visibility. The subject therefore ‘becomes the principle of his own subjection’ (Zupančič, 2016: 55). To add nuance to this argument, Bauman and Lyon (2013) comment that the important point is not that biopolitics has a specifically repressive nature, but rather that the dispersal of power under conditions of infinite scrutiny has the effect of being appropriated in and by the subject and then reinterpreted as a desirable characteristic or behaviour rather than a disciplining force.

Put another way, the Orwellian concept of Big Brother is no longer a legitimate threat to the individual. Instead, individuals and populations are surveilled by thousands of digital ‘little brothers’ (Dean, 2002: 79). The notion of ‘little brothers’ indicates an encompassing biopolitical power effected through diffuse channels. Little brothers are the myriad digital technologies that enable the sharing of data, including, but not limited to, GPS tracking, smartphone use, Fitbit or smart-watch wearables and any device capable of transmitting remote data such as smart refrigerators, smart televisions and even remote-controlled garage doors. These types of devices are sometimes referred to as ‘the internet of things’. The ‘little brothers’ collect and collate bits of data on digital users that are then subjected to algorithmic analysis. Such analyses allow the platform to both shape behaviour and guide options available to the individual through pre-ordained choices.

The ability to capture and use data on its users is arguably the key characteristic of platform capitalism. Internet technologies have the ability to exercise an invasive reach into individuals’ private lives and manipulate outcomes (Dean, 2005; Parker et al., 2016). Controversies such as the recent Facebook and Cambridge Analytica collusion in manipulating users during the 2016 American presidential election highlight this fact (Reidy, 2018). Despite the widespread knowledge of metadata collection by digital platforms, internet users are habituated to expect privacy incursions of their data as a trade-off for the use of the internet. It is important to note that Airbnb, like many platform capitalist organizations collect data on their users’ behaviours outside of their platform as well as their user behaviour when inside the programme. Privacy incursions are most frequently presented as beneficial for users by framing them as technologies that present users with pleasing choices for their life-worlds. For example, many digital platforms allow users to sign in easily by using social media sites such as Facebook, Google accounts, Instagram or Twitter. The attraction for users is that they can sign into the platform without having to enter authentication protocols such as usernames and passwords. Data mining is enabled through the use of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and a specific form of API called OAUTHs, which are activated when a user signs on through a third-party application. These types of applications give the platform access to certain parts of a user’s social media account.

Users of digital platforms are modified and disciplined by such widespread and invasive manipulation and surveillance in both overt and covert ways. Algorithmic analysis of the collated data then allows for parsing and data mining to shape users’ behaviour. For example, users are confronted with banner ads that reflect their assumed interests through algorithmic analysis of their browsing history. Consequently, Airbnb banner ads will appear for destinations that have been searched on the internet, or for searches involving such organizations as third-party rental vehicle providers or tourism operators. Similarly, requests from Google for ratings of places based on geo-cached data that has been data mined from smart phone use, and the appearance of news items related to interests posted on Facebook and other social media are commonplace. Thus, the ‘internet of things’ is utilized by platform capitalism to capture users more completely (Parker et al., 2016; Slee, 2015). A consequence of such pervasive digital surveillance is that users become acclimatized to the notion of the gaze of the other. Emblematic of this is a host in Wanaka who tells me:

They say that the website can sense that you’re tending your listings. I do watch. (Jenny, Wanaka)

Discourse as a biopolitical tool

Foucault (1972: 49) describes discourses as ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’. The constitutive nature of discourse is an influential tool in constructing subjectivity as well as in the deployment of power as a productive (rather than repressive) force (Foucault, 1980). For example, Airbnb openly positions its hosts as ‘hospitality entrepreneurs’ (Airbnb, 2018a). These are idealized subject-positions that signal the subject oversees their own individual success. Deployment of this type of neoliberal discourse deflects focus from the fact that platform capitalism is a system of capture, in which a subject’s ‘freedom’ exists only in its capacity to act according to the demands of the platform. The biopolitical machinations of such discourse utilized by Airbnb are evidenced by the conflating of privacy incursions with notions of community and social justice. Such coupling of antithetical discourse brings about a seductive kind of discipline, in which the user is complicit in willingly shaping her own behaviours in ways that benefit the platform. This willingness arises from the ways in which digital interactivity offers users a sense of individual choice; a specific mechanism that, combined with the platform’s neoliberal construction of hosts as ‘individual hospitality entrepreneurs’ in charge of their own futures, combines to blur boundaries between external discipline and internal disciplining. Kylie Jarrett explains the nuanced nature of this process within digital technologies:

Although the power structures may not be disciplinary in societies governed by biopower, the individual techniques of power are still disciplining. (Jarrett, 2008: 6)

Figure 1 demonstrates the use of antithetical discourse employed by Airbnb that specifically appeals to the neoliberal subject.

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Figure 1.

Airbnb ‘Community Compact’.

Privacy invasions are couched in discursive constructions of ‘democracy’, ‘community’, ‘freedom’, ‘openness’ and notions of participating in the ‘sharing economy’ that appeal to a higher ideal of community and social justice but in fact deflect attention from the real reasons for the mass collection of data – that of capitalist ventures whose logics are accumulation and compound profit (Dean, 2005; Slee, 2015). For example, Airbnb frequently promotes itself as ‘democratizing travel’, providing opportunities for people to become ‘hospitality entrepreneurs’ and giving people ‘freedom’ and ‘flexibility’ over their financial future (Airbnb, 2020b). Airbnb’s deployment of notions of sociability, social responsibility and community advancement collapses values of intimacy and sociability into economic value. The dual actions of the deployment of Airbnb’s rhetoric and hosts’ own reframing of value provides fertile ground for Airbnb’s overarching logics: priming hosts for maximum capital extraction.

The concept of discourse as a biopolitical tool is deeply implicated in digital technologies and the construction of subjectivity. Digital platforms regulate anomalies in users’ behaviours to optimize states of being satisfactory to the platform by constant categorization to shape and modulate behaviours and preferences – the mode of operation that Cheney-Lippold (2011: 165) calls ‘soft biopolitics’. Biopolitics, effected through combined deployment of discourse and algorithmic categorization and surveillance, produces algorithmic identities that are largely constructed by digital manipulation. However, despite knowing that Airbnb deploys power in this way, hosts display what Dean (2002: 5) describes as ‘the pervasive cynicism of contemporary technoculture’. This refers to the ways in which digital users inherently know that data collection is performed relentlessly on digital behaviours and that this information is used, traded or sold on for purposes over which they have no control, yet they engage with digital media anyway. Within Airbnb, hosts feel the lack of control most keenly in the rating system. For example, Jenny recounted an incident in which she received a negative review over the hardness of the bed:

I’m still suffering from that one star, a year later. It’s pulled me down. They’re always five star, [Jenny’s ratings] but it pulled me down to 92%. (Jenny, Wanaka)

Jenny’s sense of unfairness parallels that of Gerard, a host in Picton. Gerard also feels aggrieved at the punishment he received for a ‘misdemeanour’. He says

We were Superhost status but they took that off us. They took away my Superhost just coz I cancelled a booking! So, our bookings have dropped off since we lost that. They’re very hard on booking cancellations. (Gerard, Picton)

Donna, a host in Picton, articulated the relationship between her ongoing engagement with Airbnb and her sense of lack of control:

I hate it. I hate the whole horrible process. It’s ghastly. I hate playing the game. (Donna, Picton)

Regardless of Donna’s obvious cynicism towards the system, she, like the other interviewees, continues to engage with the platform. She rationalizes her experiences as ‘part of the game’. The abstraction of data from self only serves to underpin the cynicism of digital subjectivities.

Hosts as commodities

Airbnb appropriates the internalization of biopolitics by free-riding on conditions of digital subjectivity. Digital subjectivity refers to a performative self that is configured ‘in terms of accessibility, visibility, being known’ (Dean, 2002: 114, italics in the original). Moreover, the digital subject moves fluidly between digital and non-digital (offline) worlds (Dean, 2002). Technocultural subjectivization is enacted through a politics of display wherein the digital subject is impelled to commodify themselves. Dean (2002) calls this mode of enactment ‘celebrity’, whereby individuals must work to ensure they are digitally known, visible and accessible. To be un-known in the digital world is akin to failing, or worse, failing to exist. Therefore, it is a fundamental characteristic of the digital subjectivity to have a profile that is discoverable and accessible to other users.

Each Airbnb listing has provision for photos and descriptions of the hosts’ private spaces: their homes. Additionally, hosts have their own personalized ‘page’ in which they are encouraged by Airbnb to display a photo and a laudatory promotional blurb about themselves. The images and text displayed on hosts’ pages are both inviting and commodifying. The hosts themselves are presented as desirable items of consumption in addition to the physical space that is offered for rent. Airbnb encourages its host population to provide this type of personalized and individualized information (Airbnb, 2020b). Hosts willingly provide information and engage affectively with the opportunity to frame the imaginary of themselves and their space under the rubric of a ‘hospitality entrepreneur’.

Zygmunt Bauman comments that contemporary society has become a ‘society of consumers’ and succinctly notes that:

In the society of consumers no one can become a subject without first turning into a commodity, and no one can keep his or her subjectness secure without perpetually resuscitating, resurrecting and replenishing the capacities expected and required of a sellable commodity. The ‘subjectivity’ of the ‘subject’, and most of what that subjectivity enables the subject to achieve, is focused on an unending effort to itself become, and remain, a sellable commodity. (Bauman, 2007: 12)

Bauman’s interpretation of contemporary society is clearly evidenced in the Airbnb hosts interviewed for this current research. Moreover, the Airbnb platform actively directs hosts to commodify themselves in order to achieve status as a ‘hospitality entrepreneur’. For example, the platform provides frequent directives couched in terms of advice and examples of ways in which hosts should appear on the platform. Additionally, Airbnb regularly provides feature articles and photos of various hosts as exemplars of the standards expected by the platform. Airbnb hosts are encouraged, nudged and coerced to commodify themselves and to reinvent themselves to remain a fresh, appealing sellable item. Figure 2 shows the type of discourse used by the platform to shape host behaviour:

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Figure 2.

Airbnb profile advice.

In order to achieve recognition through the ratings system and booking activity, hosts willingly commodify their life-worlds to meet the demands of Airbnb. Hosts, guided by Airbnb’s examples, tips and specific advice, do this by concentrating behaviours that will propel them towards achieving the type of status celebrated by Airbnb. Lynn, a host in Whitianga demonstrates an enthusiastic commodification of the self in her host profile, which reads:

The things I love are music – (Eric and I are musicians) we love all of the arts in their glory; reading a really well written novel; good food and wine; planning and executing an exciting project big or small; and relaxing in the dappled light of a Pohutukawa tree on a beautiful beach with a glass of wine in one hand and a good book in the other! . . . Eric and I are both people people, and we care about others. (Lynn, Whitianga)

Lynn’s description of herself is highly performative. She re-presents a stylized and curated version of ‘real life’ in which the commodity is both herself and her life-world: she is selling the notion of ‘authenticity’, but authenticity is in fact re-packaged as a romanticized lifestyle. Moreover, her product includes affective labour; the package comes complete with ‘care’.

Roelofsen and Minca (2018: 177) reinforce the notion that it is necessary for hosts to commodify themselves by uploading personal data onto the Airbnb platform so that they can ‘stay alive’. This has material effects on hosts. For example, Samantha, an Airbnb host in Wanaka, is aware that her host profile needs to be constantly updated and refreshed in order to maintain a front-page search ranking, which is necessary to maintain frequency of bookings. She says: ‘I work very hard on it. Very hard.’ The commodification of the self thus marks a difference between Airbnb and other short-term, holiday accommodation portals, such as booking.com and bookabach.co.nz because Airbnb specifically promotes the host as an integral part of what is being sold, rather than just the physicality of space.

As digital exposure becomes the norm on platforms where data collection is a constant, uncertainty is aggravated by the pervasive heterogeneous gaze effected through algorithmic collation of data. Hosts express the need to constantly reinvent and update their profiles in order to keep up with the competition. For example, Samantha says:

Yep, I constantly keep an eye on it. . . . It’s just a lot of pressure. And all year you’ve got to keep your response levels and everything really high so you come up on the search levels better. I think I get a lot of bookings because I’m constantly playing around with my pricing, with my profile. That gets you higher up the search rankings. Yeah, I do plenty of things around that.

To add to the biopolitical enclosure of hosts, Airbnb provides an online space for the ‘community’ of Airbnb users who can post advice, questions and information related to Airbnb hosting in an online forum. In this forum, Airbnb hosts share tips and tricks on ways to improve their Airbnb business. For example, in one thread asking for tips to improve one’s host profile, comments prompt hosts to profile themselves as commodities with advice such as ‘Make sure you add a profile picture, or pictures! It’s important for people to see their host’, and ‘you have about 10 seconds to make an impression verbally or in writing when “selling” a product or service to someone’ (Airbnb Community, 2018). These types of advice demonstrate a characteristic of biopolitically managed populations whereby individuals act together to reinforce cultural norms.

Traditional short-stay accommodation businesses display the quality of their rooms, services, facilities and location to attract customers. Airbnb also highlights these aspects but in addition Airbnb overtly advertises the host as an integral part of the ‘experience’ of using Airbnb’s service (Airbnb, 2020b). This feature of Airbnb is aimed specifically at attracting the guest side of the market to engender feelings of trust along with potential benefits of staying with ‘a local’. Moreover, the Airbnb Community webpage frequently features advice from within the Airbnb hosting community about the best ways to frame one’s host profile (Airbnb Community, 2018).

Hosts are exhorted by Airbnb to reveal personal details of their private spaces on their listing page. For example, a highlighted tip during the online listing process under the banner of ‘Your Personal Belongings’ advises that ‘Guests like to know if they’ll see personal things, like pictures or clothes, when staying in your place’ (Airbnb, 2020b). The exhortation to commodify oneself is experienced on a very personal, embodied level. Jenny, a host in her mid-60s, discloses that:

It [being an Airbnb host] hugely impacted my life. I’ve never worn make-up before. A friend took me through the ropes and I keep myself more presentable. (Jenny, Wanaka)

The paradox of hospitality: avowal and disavowal of the body

Through the commodification of themselves as an integral part of the Airbnb package being sold, hosts are caught in a paradox: that of simultaneously being seen and being unseen. On the one hand, being an Airbnb host requires the individual to effectively market and sell themselves in terms of their personalities, personal characteristics, their friendliness and the homeliness of their personal spaces: in short, they must commodify their private life-worlds. This requires a visible, accessible presence of the host. However, on the other hand, hosts must act as disembodied ‘hospitality entrepreneurs’, which means that while they must be available for guests’ queries and needs, they must simultaneously remain invisible so as to not intrude on guests’ consumption of the hosts’ home and life-worlds for their vacationing pleasure.

The imperative to avow and disavow themselves is delivered to hosts through digital messaging. All hosts interviewed for this research receive at least daily communication from the platform in the form of emails and system messages. These digital missives provide diffuse directions to hosts on how to act, look, display themselves and their home, and behave. As a result of this biopolitical messaging, hosts make multiple modifications to their daily lives to meet these demands. Roelofsen and Minca (2018: 177) note that Airbnb hosts use ‘self-tracking as a practice in which people regularly monitor, record, and measure elements of their behaviour and/or their bodily functions’.

A difficulty arises, however, as hosts attempt to negotiate the gaps between exhortations to be unique and local, and requirements of hinted-at, but not stated, standards. Once guests arrive at their doorstep, hosts negotiate the physicality of having strangers in their private spaces, providing good hospitality while not appearing overly obtrusive, and demonstrating displays of ‘authenticity’ and localness. Hosts must therefore complete a sort of ‘Mobius strip’ about-face in which they work to disavow their own bodily presence while simultaneously remaining on hand when and if guests require their services to provide local information, to explain the workings of the household, to provide breakfast, to answer questions and so forth. Put another way, hosts experience an intense unspoken pressure to be bodily invisible to provide privacy for the guests, but this is concomitant with a constant requirement for absolute availability when needed.

One key way that hosts attempt to meet these nebulous standards is to disavow their bodily presence. At the lower end of the scale this amounts to hosts limiting their noise to avoid drawing attention to the messy facts of their daily lives. This theme is evident in host narratives. For example, Janice admits to ‘sneaking around’ quietly. Both Julia and Donna do not use the television if guests are in residence. Petra takes her two young children out to the stand-alone garage to sort out squabbles, and Samantha and her partner predominantly stay in their bedroom when they have guests in their house, all the while listening out for when they might be needed.

Disavowal of the body gives rise to its antithesis; avowal; the affirming of the body. Airbnb host Jenny exhibits the paradoxical nature of avowal / disavowal of the body in her description of the ways in which she negotiates this dilemma. Jenny sees her own invisibility as paramount to her guests’ experience of staying at her up-market Airbnb: a self-contained studio unit adjacent to her house. Her lounge, which faces towards the Airbnb space, has net curtains. Jenny describes how she keeps the net curtains closed when she has guests in so that they cannot see her movements as she goes about her daily life. The net curtains allow her to keep an eye on guests should they show indications of wanting assistance or advice. On sunny days Jenny goes a step further to mask her presence. She closes the block-out drapes in order to avoid her body or movement creating a silhouette which might remind her guests that other humans live onsite. Despite these somewhat extreme measures to avoid visibility to her guests. Jenny admits to often peeking through the curtains, and on occasion, hiding in the bushes to check if her guests look like they need assistance. When asked about why she engages in these behaviours, Jenny tells me that even though she understands these behaviours are extreme, she is deeply fearful of receiving bad ratings from guests, and so works really hard to anticipate their wishes and needs. Jenny’s desire to be available manifests in distinct ways. She advertises her availability to be bodily present by leaving home-baking with personalized notes in the guest room. The notes advise guests of her availability to share information on local attractions and restaurants, and solve any issues or questions they may have. In case she is called upon, her newly acquired habit of wearing make-up ensures she is ‘presentable’ (to Airbnb’s presumed standards). Moreover, her surreptitious surveillance of guests (to anticipate moments where she may be needed) demonstrates a direct link to her fear of receiving negative ratings. Jenny’s modified behaviours of both avowal and disavowal provides insight into the impact and influence of Airbnb’s biopolitical messaging on the body.

Disavowal of the hosts’ bodies takes more extreme forms in some cases. For example, Lisl’s Airbnb is a self-contained section of her house that was previously the master bedroom and en-suite, with a ranch slider door for external access. In order to create a private space for her guests, Lisl locks the door that joins this space to the rest of the house. Even though Lisl’s guests have no access to the remainder of her house, Lisl will not flush her toilet when guests are in. Lisl is deeply uncomfortable with the idea that her guests might hear her and give a negative review. Her decision to avoid flushing her toilet stems from a desire to deflect attention to the fact that another human is living on the other side of the door – somewhat contrary to Airbnb’s demand for authenticity. Authenticity, it seems, is of the kind that reflects the aims of the platform, rather than the messy reality of daily living.

Donna’s disavowal of her body goes a step further. Donna’s home has only one bathroom. She has installed a lockable door in the hallway that leads to the rest of the house, leaving the Airbnb room with sole access to the bathroom. When guests are in residence, Donna goes outside to her detached garage to use a portable camping toilet. Donna will also not shower while she has guests, preferring to use the kitchen sink and a flannel to attend to her personal hygiene. Like Lisl, Donna is clearly uncomfortable with this arrangement, but sees it as necessary to avoid negative ratings. Her bodily disavowal behaviours are a direct response to Airbnb’s biopolitical messaging.

Disavowal of bodily presence extends to hosts’ families and friends. All hosts interviewed for this research actively avoid entertaining friends or having family visit when guests are in residence because they are afraid of receiving negative reviews on Airbnb’s rating system. Lynn ruefully states that she has ‘a bit of trouble “training her friends” to use an alternative entrance’ away from the guest area. Another host, despite being very proud of her grandchildren, refuses to let them stay overnight because ‘it’s not fair on the guests’ (Janice, Paihia). Janice recounts a time when her daughter was ill, and she had to look after her grandchild. The child’s father dropped the child at Janice’s home before he went to work and collected him after work. While he was in her care, Janice kept the child in the kitchen ‘where the guests couldn’t see him’. These examples point to significant shifts in the practices of social reproduction and the ways in which hosts inhabit their previously private spaces as they respond to the biopolitical influence of the platform. The performativity of hosts as they negotiate the transformation of the private sphere of the home into a commodifiable product under the imperatives of Airbnb’s criteria creates surplus meaning of both spatial and temporal boundaries (Stabrowski, 2017). The implications of such surplus point specifically to crises in social reproduction: the relations of care enacted predominantly in the home that produce the emotional, physical and physical health of both individuals and communities.

Conclusion

As Michel Foucault describes:

The success of disciplinary power derives no doubt from the use of simple instruments; hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement and their combination in a procedure that is specific to it, the examination. (Foucault, 1979: 97)

Despite being written in 1979, Foucault’s analysis is especially applicable to the contemporary conditions of digital capitalism, where algorithmic analysis and surveillance of data ensures the capture of its target populations in ways that are unprecedented. The success of Airbnb’s biopolitical management of hosts is evident in the embodied behaviours of Airbnb hosts in this study. The deployment of biopolitical power through diffuse means ensures embodied and willing compliance by hosts as they negotiate the equivocal but constant demands of engagement with the platform. One expression of this is the ways in which hosts both avow and disavow their bodily presence when encountering guests. Thus, Airbnb’s biopolitical regime infiltrates the life-worlds of hosts, their private behaviours and social worlds, as well as their physical spaces. Hosts’ embodied practices of performing ‘home’ and ‘hospitality’ become accessible data-points for the platform and contribute to the hosts’ construction as ranked entities that are able to be mined for data and monetary extraction by the platform. Thus, the life-worlds of hosts and the spatialities that this reframed ‘authentic life’ is enacted in become reduced to a capitalist understanding of value in which the discourses of democracy, freedom, sharing, authenticity and local are separated out from their social and cultural contexts of origin, and reframed as quantifiable, commodifiable assets. Airbnb hosts, then, represent a new biopolitical horizon in the digital age in which human qualities are increasingly quantified, separated and manipulated under the guise of a digital subjectivity, and in which the politics of display and metric ranking are intimately entwined and constantly shifting.