Data is the basic resource that drives these firms, and it is data that gives them their advantage over competitors. Essential to all of these platform businesses – and indicative of a wider shift in capitalism – is the centrality of data. Facebook and Google connect advertisers, businesses, and everyday users Uber connects riders and drivers and Amazon and Siemens are building and renting the platform infrastructures that underlie the contemporary economy. By taking this into account, and looking at platforms as a new business model within capitalism, we can come to illuminate some of the more mysterious activities of these firms.Įssentially, they are a newly predominant type of business model premised upon bringing different groups together. Not only that, they are economic actors operating within a capitalist economy – a type of economy that imparts specific demands upon firms. Yet this common approach to these firms obscures the fact that they are first and foremost economic actors. The appeals to act better or more humanely are made in cultural and political terms. Similarly, when critics argue about how these firms should act, the arguments are often made in the language of values – of a Californian ideology, of libertarianism, of information wanting to be free. The uproar about fake news is only the most recent example, but the history of these firms is often laden with privacy violations and political lobbying. Yet what are these entities, and what sorts of commonalities do they share?įor the most part, critical reflection on these firms has focused on them as political and cultural actors. Facebook is blamed for perpetuating fake news and changing the American election outcome Amazon is radically transforming logistics and creating an automated jobless future Google is rapidly developing new artificial intelligence techniques that are already changing how we interact with technology around us while Uber sets out a new hyper-exploitative employment model. All around us, it seems that a nebulous series of entities called ‘platforms’ are increasingly shaping our world.
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