Machinic, inadequate, entrepreneurial: Uncovering the citizen subject of the human-centric welfare state

Abstract

This article argues that in the turn towards the human-centric in Finnish welfare reform, the human is a flexible signifier which arises out of technical metaphor to stand for certain neoliberal fantasies regarding welfare citizenship, market society and the state. I situate my analysis in the preceding literature on the cultural production of the citizen in market-oriented welfare reform. Through a close reading of user representations in a governmental AI Programme seeking transform the welfare state towards human centricity, I identify three dominant articulations of the human: the machinic, the inadequate and the entrepreneurial. These articulations disambiguate the human-in-the-centre as a chimaeral fantasy representing a late-neoliberal policy regime and evince the role of the imagination of engineers in government technopolitics.