The Entrepreneurial Self

The entrepreneurial self is not a description of how anyone actually lives. It is what Ulrich Bröckling calls a “real fiction”—a normative ideal that no one fully achieves but against which everyone is measured, and whose power is precisely this structural unattainability: the gap between what the subject is and what the ideal demands ensures the subject must perpetually optimize, and the optimization is the regime's primary product. The mechanisms that produce this subject are specific and identifiable: the performance review that converts a human being into a dashboard of competencies, the creativity workshop that converts innovation from a capacity into an obligation, the coaching session that teaches the subject to coach herself. Each operates not through coercion but through the invitation to be free—to realize one's potential, to develop one's human capital, to compete in the arena of authentic self-expression. The entrepreneurial self before AI was limited by the friction of execution: the time required