Guests without hosts: On the digital biopolitics of network hospitality

This article uses the concept of guests without hosts to explore digital biopolitics in hospitality at the intersections of platform capitalism, algorithmic governance and tourism dwelling design. Originally conceived to describe the blurring of hosting and guesting practices in network hospitality, the phrase guests without hosts is now devastatingly suited to more recent images of travellers stranded by disasters and pandemics, unwelcome strangers at the border or the replacement of human hospitality workers with robots and AI. Using Airbnb’s digital platform as an example, this article reads the concept of guests without hosts from two different directions. On the one hand, it can refer to an inhospitable form of institutional and algorithmic governance that constrains hosts and guests in extractive relations. On the other hand, it is a potential model of collaborative sociality through which we might imagine and enact alternative futures. I illustrate these perspectives with two figures of guests without hosts drawn from the literature – the absent Superhost and the mobile neighbour – to consider the digital biopolitics involved in visibilizing, (self-) disciplining and erasing hosts.