Abstract
By now, glamourous accounts of work in creative and new media industries are common: foosball tables, kitchens stocked with junk food, on-site laundry services, and office complexes that seem more like playgrounds than worksites. This paper considers the practices of these creative and cultural workplaces through Foucault’s notion of biopolitics. A conception of biopolitics as the maintenance and regulation of life itself (Foucault, 1978) can account for these practices as strategies designed to harness the potentiality of labour power and channel it into production for capital accumulation. Although new media workplaces may seem “fun,†some tactics of these workplaces may be better understood as strategies of control, designed to facilitate the self-governing, self-regulating, productive worker.
