Platform capitalism spiega in poco più di 100 pagine il fenomeno delle piattaforme digtali che stanno egemonizzando vari mercati, grazie all’effetto network in ambito digitale. Una analisi seria e condivisibile, senza necessariamente essere anticapitalisti, anzi. Il fenomeno interessa anche l’hardware, come il caso citato di GE. Non c’è solo AirBnB o Uber (e Facebook e Google)
Ti ripropongo a seguire qualche passaggio che ho sottolineato durante la lettura.
As I will attempt to show in this chapter, data have come to serve a number of key capitalist functions: they educate and give competitive advantage to algorithms; they enable the coordination and outsourcing of workers; they allow for the optimisation and flexibility of productive processes; they make possible the transformation of low-margin goods into high-margin services; and data analysis is itself generative of data, in a virtuous cycle.Given the significant advantages of recording and using data and the competitive pressures of capitalism, it was perhaps inevitable that this raw material would come to represent a vast new resource to be extracted from.By providing a digital space for others to interact in, platforms position themselves so as to extract data from natural processes (weather conditions, crop cycles, etc.), from production processes (assembly lines, continuous flow manufacturing, etc.), and from other businesses and users (web tracking, usage data, etc.). They are an extractive apparatus for data.In summary, lean platforms appear as the product of a few tendencies and moments: the tendencies towards outsourcing, surplus populations, and the digitisation of life, along with the post-2008 surge in unemployment and rise of an accommodative monetary policy, surplus capital, and cloud platforms that enable rapid scaling.Set in context, the lean platform economy ultimately appears as an outlet for surplus capital in an era of ultra-low interest rates and dire investment opportunities rather than the vanguard destined to revive capitalism.The challenge today, however, is that capital investment is not sufficient to overturn monopolies; access to data, network effects, and path dependency place even higher hurdles in the way of overcoming a monopoly like Google. This means that, if these platforms wish to remain competitive, they must intensify their extraction, analysis, and control of data– and they must invest in the fixed capital to do so.The fact that the information platform requires an extension of sensors means that it is countering the tendency towards a lean platform. These are not asset-less companies– far from it; they spend billions of dollars to purchase fixed capital and take other companies over. Importantly, ‘once we understand this [tendency], it becomes clear that demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the Internet is like asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand’.The aim for Facebook is to make it so that users never have to leave their enclosed ecosystem: news stories, videos, audio, messaging, email, and even buying consumer goods have all been progressively folded back into the platform itself.Non-platform companies will put pressure on platforms to lower their prices, and platforms will fight back by making switching platforms increasingly costly and monopolistic. Amazon, too, aims to be a closed platform, separated from Google. Rather than turning to an internet search engine for buying goods online, users would search for goods, compare, purchase, track, and review, all without ever leaving the Amazon platform.In the end, the tendency of major platforms to grow to immense size thanks to network effects, combined with the tendency to converge towards a similar form, as market pressures dictate, leads them to use enclosure as a key means of competing against their rivals. If this analysis is right, then capitalist competition is driving the internet to fragment. There is no necessity to this outcome, as political efforts can stall or reverse it; but within a capitalist mode of production there are strong competitive pressures towards this end.Rather than just regulating corporate platforms, efforts could be made to create public platforms– platforms owned and controlled by the people. (And, importantly, independent of the surveillance state apparatus.) This would mean investing the state’s vast resources into the technology necessary to support these platforms and offering them as public utilities.