PERSON
Ulrich Bröckling
German sociologist (b. 1959) whose The Entrepreneurial Self (2007) mapped how neoliberal governance manufactures subjects who optimize themselves—the diagnostic framework for understanding AI's arrival into pre-engineered selves.
Ulrich Bröckling is a professor of cultural sociology at the University of Freiburg whose four-decade project has traced the specific mechanisms through which contemporary subjects are fabricated. His landmark Das unternehmerische Selbst (2007), translated as The Entrepreneurial Self, argued that neoliberal governance operates not through markets alone but through the production of individuals who manage themselves as enterprises—optimizing their human capital, competing perpetually, experiencing self-exploitation as self-realization. Drawing on Michel Foucault's governmentality and technologies of the self, Bröckling mapped the creativity imperative, coaching dispositif, and permanent flexibility demand through institutional infrastructure with sociological precision. His framework reveals that the compulsion documented in You On AI—the inability to stop building—is not personal pathology but structural: the achievement subject meeting a tool that removes the last brake on a regime already operating at maximum intensity.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Bröckling emerged from the German sociological tradition shaped by Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France, particularly the 1978-79 Birth of Biopolitics course