The entrepreneur as capitalism's ideal subject
A short history of the figure an economic order hands us as the norm, seen from the admin panel.
When we say "entrepreneur", we picture someone who founded a company. That figure left the world of business a long time ago. Today everyone is invited to be one. The employee, to run a career like a startup. The student, to invest in themselves. The platform courier, to "choose their own hours". Entrepreneurship has become a way of being a person at all. I am interested in how this happened, partly because I take part in producing the figure myself: I write the interfaces it lives in.
From occupation to norm
Historically the entrepreneur is a specific economic role: the one who combines resources and takes on risk for the sake of profit. A respected role, but a particular one. Most people were not entrepreneurs and had no plans to become one. There were workers, officials, craftsmen, doctors. The entrepreneur was one type among many, and it would never have occurred to anyone to demand that a schoolteacher think of themselves as a venture project.
The turn comes when entrepreneurship stops being one of the roles and becomes the model for all the others. Now the worker has to "invest in their development". The unemployed person has to "work on themselves". Rest gets framed as an investment in future productivity, and even sleep becomes a metric to optimise. A figure that once described a minority becomes the norm everyone is pulled toward. And it pulls gently, through language and familiar metaphors.
The entrepreneur is convenient because it removes the question of structure: if everything depends on initiative, there is no need to talk about order.
A subject who treats himself as a project
This figure has an inner logic. The entrepreneurial subject treats himself as an enterprise. He has "capital": skills, reputation, reach, connections, all of which need to grow. He has "risks" to manage. He has a "brand" to keep up in a CV and a profile. Life becomes a project of self-optimisation with no delivery date.
It is easy to slide into denunciation here, but I don't think this is hypocrisy or a trick. People genuinely start to think and feel this way, because the shape of the economy pushes them to. When employment is unstable and guarantees are thin, treating yourself as a project is a sensible strategy. I live this way too. I keep notes with yearly goals, I watch which skills are "appreciating", I change jobs when I feel I have stopped growing. The figure of the entrepreneur doesn't have to be imposed. It grows from below, out of real conditions, and it grows inside me among other places.
What it looks like from the admin panel
For years I have worked on feature flags, the switches that turn pieces of functionality on and off inside a large system without shipping a new release. Working on Unleash, a platform for exactly these flags, I got used to seeing a product from the inside out. For me it is first of all a table of flags, each with an owner, a creation date, and a rollout percentage across users.
A switch like that is not hard to imagine, and it lives in all sorts of systems. Take a made-up partner_self_schedule: its job is to make part of the workforce see their schedule as a set of slots they "pick themselves", where it used to be a shift that got assigned to them. Technically it is one line in a config and a couple of approvals on a code review, where the question of what exactly has just been redescribed almost never comes up. What gets redescribed is a relationship. The same load, the same hours, but on the screen it looks like freedom, and responsibility for the empty hours quietly moves onto the worker.
And there is usually no reason to turn a flag like that off. The metrics for the group are good: people really are clicking, really are "choosing", retention holds. From the dashboard's point of view everything works. This is the exact moment that made me take up the research in the first place: a switch that produces the entrepreneurial subject gives an engineer no reason at all to touch it.
What the figure conceals
Every norm has a reverse side, the thing it makes invisible. The entrepreneurial subject conceals structure. If success is the result of initiative, then failure turns out to be the result of its shortage. The problem always becomes personal: didn't push hard enough, didn't take the risk, didn't invest, didn't level up the right skill. The question of how the labour market is built and who got which starting conditions dissolves into talk about motivation.
The usual objection to me is that the autonomy is real. The courier really does prefer a flexible schedule to a fixed shift, the developer really does want to pick his own projects, and nobody forced them. The objection is correct, and I won't wave it away. Freedom to choose your own hours is not an illusion at the level of experience. But the same interface that lets me pick a slot also relieves the company of any duty to keep that slot paid if I don't take it. Both things are true at once: the autonomy is real, and the transfer of risk is real. The figure of the entrepreneur is convenient because it lets you notice only the first half.
That is why it is so durable. It explains the economy in a way that moves structure out of view and leaves individual people with their choices. It is hard to argue with for another reason too: it flatters. It is nicer to believe everything depends on you.
Platforms and one field in a database
Digital platforms have pushed this logic to its limit. On paper the courier is a "partner", an independent entrepreneur in charge of his own time, and not a worker at all. The content creator is a one-person business who is also his own sales team and his own HR. Productivity apps sell self-optimisation as a way of life and send a notification if you failed to "work on yourself" today. Technology produces the entrepreneurial subject by building it into interfaces and into the very form of employment. The difference between "employee" and "partner" sometimes comes down to one field in a database and one flag in an admin panel, but behind that field stands an entirely different life.
I study this figure not in order to condemn it. Entrepreneurship is a real and often productive practice, I do it every day and I love a lot of it. What unsettles me is something else. Sometimes I catch myself reading the theory about the entrepreneurial subject exactly the way that subject would read it: to level up one more skill and optimise myself a little better. I am not sure I have stepped outside the figure I am trying to describe. The question that stays is not "who is the entrepreneur" but "what does an order that demands everyone be an entrepreneur make of us". And I ask it of myself too, when I think about that same switch.