Platform Capitalism Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This new book analyses the strategies, usages and wider implications of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding platforms in the culture and communication industries that are reshaping economic, organizational and social logics. Platforms are the object of considerable hype with a growing global presence. Relying on individual contributions coordinated by social media to finance cultural production (and carry out promotional tasks) is a significant shift, especially when supported by morphing public policies, supposedly enhancing cultural diversity and accessibility.

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- Digital Culture, Crowdfunding, Digital Labour, Platform Capitalism

O capitalismo de plataformas constitui um modelo econômico no qual as plataformas digitais representam o elemento central. Integrado na evolução do trabalho, dos últimos 40 anos, caracterizada por um aumento da precarização, este modelo acelerou as transformações sociais e econômicas, com importantes impactos tanto no trabalho quanto nas cidades. O exemplo talvez mais representativo é a Uber, da qual se gerou o conceito de uberização, o que representa o processo de desagregação do emprego em micro-tarefas simples e a redução da proteção no trabalho. Estas características podem ter uma relação com a informalidade do trabalho, contribuindo para uma sua difusão. O Brasil, apesar das suas diferenças internas, representa um caso paradigmático neste sentido, tanto porque é um país marcado historicamente por uma alta taxa de informalidade, quanto porque possui uma regulamentação avançada sobre a questão do Trabalho Decente: por exemplo, o Escritório da OIT no Brasil elaborou um Sistema de Indicadores Municipais de Trabalho Decente (SIMTD), através do qual construir uma base de dados a fim de desenvolver uma visão de conjunto da situação brasileira.
Através de uma revisão da literatura científica, o objetivo deste artigo será de analisar o impacto que a uberização exerce sobre o trabalho no contexto brasileiro, à luz das recentes alterações legislativas e face a normativa vigente do Trabalho Decente.

- by Giorgio Pirina
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- Decent work, Brasil, Digital labor, Digital Platforms

Dopo tre anni di battaglia legale, i rider di Foodora ottengono finalmente giustizia: sono lavoratori subordinati, e non autonomi come vuole la piattaforma. Si tratta di una vittoria significativa, di un segnale importante per il capitalismo digitale e per la voracità con cui punta allo sfruttamento del lavoro. È però un segnale debole, perché al coraggio dei giudici corrisponde l'inadeguatezza della politica, se non la sua complicità con i nuovi padroni, a beneficio dei quali ha edificato e presidiato il quadro delle regole entro cui hanno potuto prosperare. Regole che si avviano a divenire il punto di riferimento per una complessiva riforma del lavoro sempre più ridotto a merce.

- by Alessandro Somma
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- Labour Law, Neoliberalism, Labor law, Capitalismo
- by Clara Mogno
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- Sociology, Sociology of Work, Workerism, Gig Economy

Scopo di questo articolo è verificare la materialità sociale della cosiddetta società dell’informazione e del capitalismo delle piattaforme, mostrando le contraddizioni tra capitale, lavoro e ambiente naturale. Per farlo, useremo la lente delle filiere produttive delle materie prime alla base dei nuovi dispositivi elettronici, focalizzandoci su uno dei cosiddetti minerali insanguinati, cioè il coltan (columbite-tantalite). In un primo momento ci concentreremo sulle regioni minerarie del Kivu (Nord Kivu e Sud Kivu), nella Repubblica Democratica del Congo orientale: esse sono caratterizzate da una produzione mineraria prevalentemente di tipo artigianale (Artisanal and Small scale mining), in cui persistono numerose forme di coercizione extra-salariale a causa dell’attività
di numerosi gruppi paramilitari e della diffusa economia informale ed illegale. Successivamente, ci focalizzeremo sulla propagazione digitale per mostrare l’altro volto della materialità sociale della società dell’informazione e del capitalismo delle piattaforme. Dagli anni ’10 del XXI secolo ad oggi il numero di dispositivi elettronici portatili (smartphone, pc, ecc.), diventati centrali nelle interazioni della nostra vita quotidiana, è aumentato vertiginosamente. Il peso della crescente domanda è ricaduto sui lavoratori del Sud globale (e di paesi come la
Cina), i quali sono sottoposti a pressioni enormi e a ritmi lavorativi massacranti al fine di garantire la produzione dei dispositivi elettronici. Parimenti, l’impronta ecologica ha assunto forme sempre più marcate: oltre all’impatto ambientale dovuto alla produzione vera e propria e alla circolazione delle merci, vi è anche l’enorme consumo di energia elettrica necessario a mantenere operativi le infrastrutture informazionali alla base del capitalismo delle piattaforme.

Malgré les critiques dont « l’économie collaborative » a été récemment la cible, le crowdfunding continue de véhiculer la positivité des valeurs de la participation, du partage et de l’empowerment des utilisateurs qui ont encadré le développement de la « nouvelle économie ». Pour tant, les mutations idéologiques du capitalisme contemporain incitent à reconsidérer ces modèles de financement dits « alternatifs » ou « disruptifs » à la lumière des affinités électives qu’ils entretiennent avec elles.

- by David Pucheu
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- Crowdsourcing, Boltanski & Thévenot, Crowdfunding, Sharing Economy

This article examines a series of near-future SF stories that offer snapshots of an immediate future dominated by the intensification of contemporary economic tendencies, including increased automation and the rise of digital platforms. Much twentieth century SF tends to traffic in a certain techno-optimism in its outlook, not so much to suggest that technological advances would produce positive outcomes but that they would continue to develop and expand in their complexity and productivity. Today this utopian legacy is carried forward both by literary science fiction studies and by the uses of science fiction within contemporary political theory. In a different vein, and in tension with this outlook, is what we call ‘science friction’: a literary practice of slowing down visions of technological and social progress.

- by Sean O'Brien
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- Technology, Science Fiction, Precarity, Automation

The question of noise may not seem immediately relevant to recent upheavals in the political economy of music. But since I was asked to speak about streaming at the 'Ebbing Sounds' conference that zweikommasieben co-hosted last May in San Francisco and since my research is focused on the concept of noise, I put together some thoughts on that basis. Noise has a specific sharply defined computational meaning in several different theoretical frameworks in science, most centrally information theory, where it is defined in terms of uncertainty and interference. It also has a variety of social and cultural understandings that are more open to interpretation, related to perceptual and affective states and to general notions like randomness, unpredictability, disorder, resistance, and excess. Many of these concepts – information, randomness, noise – which have very specific scientific and mathematical meanings, are routinely employed to describe phenomena at the cultural level. There, they are at best problematically overextended, and more often serve as tools in ideologically motivated justifications for the continuing march of neoliberalism's creative destruction. The central claim of my work on noise is pretty straightforward: noise is relative to theoretical framework, level of description, and scale of analysis. Its well known that first the printing press, then early sound recording and transmission technologies – phonograph and radio – induced a scale transformation in the political economy of music, and that digital sound, file sharing, and now streaming have given rise to similarly radical transitions. Each of these technical developments profoundly altered the sonic domain, changing not only the distribution of music but also its composition and production, the ecology of listening, and the understanding of noise. This is also the case in the recent consolidation of the streaming economy, which needs to be thought of in terms of platform capitalism and the transition from ICT to AI. This is a shift from centralized broadcast media to interactive media, user generated content, and targeted advertising. But it is also a concurrent shift in the management of noise, as relatively fixed exclusionary frameworks based on robustness to noise give way to data-driven fluid modulation of relevance and resilience to noise. Lossy compression formats like the mp3, which made file-sharing and now streaming possible, are based on perceptual coding – which uses a model of the auditory system to compress a signal by exploiting redundancies in the way that auditory information is processed. Like noise, compression is relative to 1 theoretical framework: that is, the adequacy of a compressed representation to its object, or its utility for a subject, is dependent on the goal that it serves and the context in which it arises. In general it is computational resource allocation problems that dictate the pertinent level of compression in a given economy, whether cognitive-perceptual, or digital-financial. It is common knowledge that the huge impact of the mp3 format was due to achieving a reduction in the computational cost of storing and transmitting auditory data. But we can also talk of evolutionary biology as a process of generating compact representations, or of perception as a form of lossy source compression. This generalized notion of 2 compression is precisely the model of thought underlying recent theoretical developments in AI and cognitive science, a model that is undoubtedly now driving decisions in boardroom meetings at tech startups. Understanding political economy in general and platform capitalism in particular requires engagement with the problem of naturalization (explanation according to natural laws). Mainstream, or orthodox, economic theory is a naturalization of economic activity according to principles taken from physics. This is a brutal abstraction relying on a number of simplifying assumptions, so it treats various details as noise (most notably mainstream economics forgets asymmetries, historicity, and communication). More recent heterodox theories move to a biological or ecological paradigm, which accounts for some non-equilibrium 1 Sterne, J. (2012) MP3 – The Meaning of a Format. Duke University Press.

- by Inigo Wilkins
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- Cognitive Science, Algorithms, Music, Political Economy
- by Niccolò Cuppini
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- Technology, Working Classes, Labour Studies, Work and Labour

'The Changing State of Gentrification' (2001) by Jason Hackworth and the late Neil Smith is one of the most influential papers ever published in TESG. By introducing three waves, or periods, of practices and patterns of gentrification, it changed the way we think about gentrification. This Introduction to the Forum discusses the three waves introduced by Hackworth and Smith as well as fourth wave introduced by Lees et al. Finally, I will argue that during the global financial crisis we have entered fifth-wave gentrification. Fifth-wave gentrification is the urban materialization of financialized or finance-led capitalism. The state continues to play a leading role during the fifth wave, but is now supplemented—rather than displaced—by finance. It is characterized by the emergence of corporate landlords, highly leveraged housing, platform capitalism (e.g. Airbnb), transnational wealth elites using cities as a 'safe deposit box', and a further 'naturalization' of state-sponsored gentrification.

The book titled The Collaborative Economy in Action: European Perspectives is one of the important outcomes of the COST Action CA16121, From Sharing to Caring: Examining the Socio-Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy (short name: Sharing and Caring; sharingandcaring.eu) that was active between March 2017 and September 2021. The Action was funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology - COST (www.cost.eu/actions/CA16121). The main objective of the COST Action Sharing and Caring is the development of a European network of researchers and practitioners interested in investigating the collaborative economy models, platforms, and their socio-technological implications. The network involves scholars, practitioners, communities, and policymakers. The COST Action Sharing and Caring helped to connect research initiatives across Europe and enabled scientists to develop their ideas by collaborating with peers. This collaboration opportunity represented a boost for the participants' research, careers, and innovation potential. The main aim of this book is to provide a comprehensive overview of the collaborative economy (CE) in European countries with a variety of its aspects for a deeper understanding of the phenomenon as a whole. For this reason, in July 2017, an open call for country reports was distributed among the members of the COST Action Sharing and Caring. Representatives of the member countries were invited to produce short country reports covering: definition(s) of the CE; types and models of the CE; key stakeholders involved; as well as legislation and technological tools relevant for the CE. Submitted reports varied in length and regarding the level of detail included, in accordance with how much information was available in each respective country at the time of writing. Editors of the book have compiled these early reports into a summary report, which was intended as a first step in mapping the state of the CE in Europe. The Member Countries Report on the Collaborative Economy, edited by Gaia Mosconi, Agnieszka Lukasiewicz, and Gabriela Avram (2018) that was published on the Sharing and Caring website, represented its first synergetic outcome and provided an overview of the CE phenomenon as interpreted and manifested in each of the countries part of the network. Additionally, Sergio Nassare-Aznar, Kosjenka Dumančić, and Giulia Priora compiled a Preliminary Legal Analysis of Country Reports on Cases of Collaborative Economy (2018). In 2018, after undertaking an analysis of the previous reports' strengths and weaknesses, the book editors issued a call for an updated version of these country reports. Prof. Ann Light advised the editorial team, proposing a new format for country reports and 4000 words limit. The template included: Introduction, Definition, Key Questions, Examples, Illustration, Context, Developments, Issues, Other Major Players, and Relevant Literature. The new template was approved by the Management Committee in October 2018. The task force that had supported the production of the first series of country reports (Dimitar Trajanov, Maria del Mar Alonso, Bálint Balázs, Kosjenka Dumančić, and Gabriela Avram) acted as mentors for the team of authors in each country. The final reports arrived at the end of 2018, bringing the total number of submissions to 30 (twenty-nine European countries plus Georgia). A call for book editors was issued, and a new editorial team was formed by volunteers from the participants of the COST Action: Andrzej Klimczuk, Vida Česnuityte, Cristina Miguel, Santa Mijalche, Gabriela Avram, Bori Simonovits, Bálint Balázs, Kostas Stefanidis, and Rafael Laurenti. The editorial team organized the double-blind reviews of reports and communicated to the authors the requirements for improving their texts. After reviews, the authors submitted updated versions of their country reports providing up-to-date interdisciplinary analysis on the state of the CE in 2019, when the reports were collected. During the final phase, the chapters were again reviewed by the lead editors together with all editorial team members. At the time, the intention was to update these reports again just before the end of the COST Action Sharing and Caring in 2021 and to produce a third edition. However, the COVID-19 pandemic changed these plans. Thus, this final volume was created by 82 scholars-editors and contributors-and consists of reports on 27 countries participating in the COST Action.

- by Andrzej Klimczuk
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- Sharing Economy, Collaborative Economy, Platform Capitalism, Legal regulations

Tecnologia e politica intessono la trama della realtà sociale. L’elaborato esamina il rapporto tra social media e movimenti globali, analizzando l’azione collettiva di protesta sia online che offline. Gli interrogativi sulle interconnessioni tra le due dimensioni, la questione della leadership e la contraddizione di trarre beneficio dall’utilizzo delle piattaforme digitali aziendali hanno trovato risposta mediante una ricerca empirica. Il Capitolo 1 richiama i presupposti teorici del “Movimento dei movimenti” emerso negli anni Novanta, dalle tesi di Jean Baudrillard ai dati forniti da Naomi Klein. Il passaggio dall’azione collettiva all’azione connettiva, oggetto degli studi di Lance Bennett e Alexandra Segerberg, incontra l’interesse per l’approfondimento degli aspetti concernenti l’identità, come esplicitato dalle osservazioni di Paolo Gerbaudo ed Emiliano Trerè. L’antenato dei social network era Indymedia: a vent’anni di distanza, nel Capitolo 2 si approfondiscono le trasformazioni generate dal capitalismo delle piattaforme, di cui Mariana Mazzucato fornisce il contesto economico, e le sfide poste dagli algoritmi nell'estrazione e nella valorizzazione dei dati. Le analisi di Zeynep Tufekci e Evgeny Morozov affrontano il problema dell’omologazione e del contagio emotivo. Il Capitolo 3 presenta i risultati di una ricerca qualitativa che ha coinvolto venti attivisti provenienti da movimenti sociali contro il consumo per la giustizia sociale, ambientale e di genere, quali: School Strike 4 Climate, Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, Ni Una Menos, 15M e Occupy. Il punto di vista degli intervistati dialoga con la letteratura esistente per rispondere alle domande teoriche dei capitoli precedenti. Le conclusioni offrono uno sguardo d’insieme sui risultati rilevanti e qualche spunto per le ricerche future, in particolare in materia di etica applicata all’intelligenza artificiale. L’Appendice Fotografica fornisce un’ulteriore fonte visiva al contenuto testuale. [L'Appendice II presenta un'intervista a Moez Chakchouk, Assistant Director-General dell'UNESCO per il Settore Comunicazione e Informazione]

- by Sara C. Santoriello
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- Social Movements, Algorithms, Glocalization, Social Media
- by Federico Sofritti
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- New Technologies, Digital labor, Platform Capitalism

Il mio contributo intende soffermarsi su alcune caratteristiche che connotano l’attuale sviluppo delle cosiddette piattaforme digitali, quelle forme di impresa che fanno leva sull’uso di tecnologie di informazione e comunicazione, gestione algoritmica del processo produttivo e messa a lavoro di attività perlopiù informali. Nello specifico, vorrei provare a concentrarmi su alcuni aspetti della dimensione urbana delle piattaforme digitali, provando ad abbozzare il concetto di una nuova logistica metropolitana che credo possa risultare utile anche a si occupa di studi geografici. Quello che emergerà è una potenziale ma già visibile tensione fra la città come infrastruttura (quella che i latini chiamavano urbs) e la città come corpo sociale (la civitas): lo sviluppo di un sistema di servizi, flussi e investimenti trasforma stili di vita e forme del lavoro negli spazi urbani, generando – tra i vari effetti – anche conflitti sociali e l’esercizio di un diritto alla città da parte di alcuni gruppi.
L’esposizione si articolerà in quattro punti.
Dapprima mi soffermerò brevemente sulla relazione tra spazi urbani e dinamiche economiche per mettere in evidenza le caratteristiche dello sviluppo di forme di cittadinanza imprenditoriale e i mod in cui è cambiata la geografia economica della città.
Nella seconda parte cercherò di illustrare alcune caratteristiche della dimensione metropolitana del platform capitalism a partire da due fattori: la logistics revolution e le tecnologie di informazione e comunicazione (ICT). Queste vengono a costituire le infrastrutture di un processo produttivo che assume la città come suo spazio di produzione e consumo diffuso, reticolare, fluido e al cui interno reale e digitale
si confondono fino a diventare una cosa sola.
Nella terza parte invece prenderò in considerazione il modo in cui i soggetti urbani sono ‚catturati‛ all’interno delle maglie delle piattaforme digitali, trasformandosi da semplici utenti a produttori. La mia impressione è che la vecchia distinzione fra privatizzazioni e urban commons si stia trasformando in una tensione su chi decide nei processi organizzativi interna alle stesse forme di cooperazione.
In conclusione, mi soffermerò su alcune forme di protesta e contrapposizione che si sono generate all’interno delle città nei confronti degli effetti infrastrutturali e sociali delle piattaforme digitali. Da una parte, si possono individuare tentativi di legislazione locale volti a regolamentare e gestire l’espansività delle economie di condivisione o dei ‚lavoretti‛. Dall’altra, alcuni gruppi sociali stanno sperimentando forme di auto-organizzazione e sindacalizzazione che investono i loro rapporti diretti con le piattaforme – come nel caso dei riders dei sevizi di consegna pasti a domicilio.

- by Maurilio Pirone
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- Logistics, Work and Labour, Future of work, Digital Platforms

The political conflicts and struggles around urban platforms shape how they are understood and what their implications are. The argument is that more analysis of these struggles is needed, and the chapter takes this task forward, comparing across several platforms in order to identify common patterns and to note the effect of treating platforms as a very broad sector, captured in formulations such as ‘sharing economy’ and ‘collaborative economy’. In the face of criticism, social movement mobilisation and attempts by states to regulate platform businesses, some common legitimation tactics are employed by the businesses. The chapter introduces two of these: platforms’ discursive claims to be vectors of progress which frame states and regulation as backward; and platform sponsored grassroots lobbying, where civil society pressures are created or co-opted to influence public opinion and regulation. I identify three broad approaches to platform sponsored based grassroots lobbying: the direct mobilisation of platform users, the creation of front groups, and partnerships with existing grassroots groups.

- by Luke Yates
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- Political Sociology, Social Movements, Regulation And Governance, Lobbying

This article outlines a conceptual framework and research agenda for
exploring the relationship between tourism and degrowth. Rapid and
uneven expansion of tourism as a response to the 2008 economic crisis
has proceeded in parallel with the rise of social discontent concerning
so-called “overtourism.” Despite decades of concerted global effort to
achieve sustainable development, meanwhile, socioecological conflicts
and inequality have rarely reversed, but in fact increased in many places.
Degrowth, understood as both social theory and social movement, has emerged within the context of this global crisis. Yet thus far the vibrant degrowth discussion has yet to engage systematically with the tourism industry in particular, while by the same token tourism research has largely neglected explicit discussion of degrowth. We bring the two discussions together here to interrogate their complementarity. Identifying a growth imperative in the basic structure of the capitalist economy, we contend that mounting critique of overtourism can be understood as a structural response to the ravages of capitalist development more broadly. Debate concerning overtourism thus offers a valuable opportunity to re-politicize discussion of tourism development
generally. We contribute to this discussion by exploring of the potential for degrowth to facilitate a truly sustainable tourism.

- by Rob Fletcher
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- Tourism Studies, Capitalism, Neoliberalism, Sustainable Tourism

This article takes the case of Uber, a global platform specialized in transport technologies, to reappraise the claims of the sharing economy. The case presents a chronology of the struggles over the regulation of these digital markets in the US and France, using Uber´s self-description and web discourse for additional illustrative purposes. It exposes Uber´s
business model, the key driving actors and their strategies as well as multi-scalar countermovements. The analysis is framed from a Hayekian and a Polanyian perspective, and the potential of the sharing economy to go beyond market fundamentalism. The Polanyian utopia of sharing as more than market relations based on self-interest is mobilized for legitimizing the platform. The Hayekian utopia of a market society which transforms social relations of friendship and community service into market activities is describing actual development. Finally, Polanyian “counter movements” are described and their potentials are discussed.

- by Katarzyna Gruszka
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- Socioeconomics, Political Economy, Karl Polanyi, Cultural Political Economy

This paper introduces a special issue of New Formations on the subject 'This Conjuncture', da also discusses exhaustively: the concept of 'conjuncture' and Stuart Hall's deployment of it; the nature of Cultural Studies as an intellectual project; the specific status of the category of 'culture' within that project; the key features which should be understood as characterising the contemporary conjuncture.

- by Jeremy Gilbert
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- Cultural History, Cultural Studies, Cultural Theory, British Politics

This book is one of the important outcomes of the COST Action CA16121, From Sharing to Caring: Examining the Socio-Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy (short name: Sharing and Caring; sharingandcaring.eu) that was active between March 2017 and September 2021. The Action was funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology – COST (cost.eu). The main aim of this book is to provide a comprehensive overview of the collaborative economy (CE) in European countries with a variety of its aspects for a deeper understanding of the phenomenon as a whole. The book includes 27 country reports providing up-to-date interdisciplinary analysis on the state of the CE in 2019, when the reports were collected. Each country report went through a thorough peer review process. Lead Editors: Andrzej Klimczuk, Vida Česnuitytė, and Gabriela Avram Associate Editors: Cristina Miguel...

Elsagate was a controversy surrounding so-called “weird kids’ videos” on YouTube which were targeted to toddlers but at the same time contained inappropriate motives, including sexual scenes and violence. The issue came to light in 2017 and attracted significant public attention, with reactions ranging from curiosity through dissenting voices to conspiracy theories. The author uses peculiarity of Elsagate videos as a key to the understanding of “platform capitalism” and its influence on social media users. He begins by comparing YouTube to television and cinema, with particular focus on the “cinema of attraction”, drawing on ideas from Teresa Rizzo and Tom Gunning. He argues that Elsagate is a symptom of profound cultural changes, depicted by Gilles Deleuze as a shift from disciplinary societies to societies of control. Consequently, the author interprets “weird kids’ videos” as the visible expression of the invisible algorithmic power which simultaneously exploits children and infantilizes grown-up people.

- by Piotr Fortuna
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- Digital Culture, Gilles Deleuze, Social Media, Youtube

Ekonomi gig, sebagai bentuk ekonomi yang menekankan pada upah berdasarkan jumlah barang/jasa yang diselesaikan, kini semakin banyak diperbincangkan. Di satu sisi, banyak yang menyanjung ekonomi gig sebagai ekonomi masa depan, karena telah mampu menyerap jutaan tenaga kerja, memberi mereka fleksibilitas, dan menunjang pertumbuhan ekonomi. Namun di sisi lain, ekonomi gig telah berkontribusi pada kerentanan kerja, karena ketiadaan perlindungan sosial dan kepastian pendapatan bagi para pekerjanya. Kerentanan tersebut memungkinkan untuk terjadi, karena mereka diklasifikasikan sebagai kontraktor independen dengan hubungan kemitraan, bukan hubungan kerja buruh-pengusaha. Dampaknya, pekerja gig menjadi belum menikmati perlindungan kerja berupa upah minimum, jam kerja 40 jam/minggu, hak berserikat, hak libur, dan jaminan sosial sebagaimana yang diterima pekerja dalam hubungan kerja buruh-pengusaha. Sementara itu, hubungan kemitraan berjalan dengan tidak adil, karena setiap keputusan dilakukan sepihak oleh perusahaan platform, sehingga merugikan pekerja gig. Dalam buku ini, kami mengurai persoalan yang terjadi dalam ekonomi gig di Indonesia. Buku ini menyajikan analisis tentang belum tercapainya kondisi kerja layak dan adil bagi pekerja gig, baik yang bekerja sebagai pengemudi ojek online, kurir, musisi, buruh jahit, dan pekerja kreatif. Persoalan tersebut dianalisis dari kacamata yang beragam, dari pendekatan ekonomi politik, regulasi, budaya kritis, hingga kekuasaan. Buku ini menjadi bacaan awal yang penting untuk memahami beragam persoalan di ekonomi gig dan bagaimana untuk mendorong terwujudnya kerja layak dan adil bagi pekerja gig.

- by Arif Novianto
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- Social Movements, Platform Studies, Digital labor, Gerakan Sosial

Within the contemporary articulation of the Society of Control, online-platforms such as Facebook have vastly extended the breadth of surveillance and depth of control exerted by capital, used to guide our subjectivation within circuits amenable to the accumulation of surplus-value. As digital-networks facilitate the proliferation of information, the symbolic order becomes increasingly fractured and the capacity for previously authoritative sources such as news media to secure common meaning declines (Andrejevic, 2013). Through examining the development of control societies into Platform Capitalism, as well as the Cambridge Analytica and “Fake News” scandals emerging within the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, this thesis seeks to examine two converging strategies through which capitalism attempts to maintain its domination. The first is the control exerted over our subjectivation as statistical technologies facilitate the production of fine-grained inferences from unstructured data, such as our seemingly arbitrary Facebook likes being used to infer sexual orientation, ethnicity and political views (Kosinski, Stillwell, & Graepel, 2013). The second is the exploitation of a decline in symbolic efficiency, which the emergence of a ‘post-truth’ politics is symptomatic of. A problem which results in the subject turning towards affect as a means to resolve meaning (with affect measurable and exploited through data-analytics), and a culture of conspiratorial-cynicism which makes disinformation such as “fake news” effective. This thesis further examines the centralization of the internet through monopoly platforms as an expansion of imperialism, seeking to examine their role in contesting the sovereignty of the nation-state and shaping the terrain of political struggle.

- by Nils Makauskas
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- Marxism, Data Mining, Digital Media, Cybernetics

Socialists around the world are using social media platforms to produce, distribute, exhibit, and consume socialist media and cultural works, and they are openly building events, movements, and organizations within digital capitalism, to go beyond it. That said, the internet and social media platforms are surrounded by all kinds of deterministic, optimistic, and pessimistic rhetorics that cloud a clear view of what they give to and take from socialist communicators, especially as compared to the twentieth century’s mass media industries, whose state and corporate owners tended to filter out and vilify socialist ideas. While digital platforms are enabling socialists to communicate in ways that were not possible in the pre-digital world of mass media, they are supplements to – not substitutes for – building democratic and sustainable socialist organizations and militant working-class movements. Taking it as axiomatic that communications underpins any possibility for socialist organization and politics, this essay contextualizes the ‘brave new world’ of digital capitalism historicizes socialist communications from the ‘old media’ world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the ‘new digital media’ world of the early twenty-first, and then maps ‘another world’ of socialists on social media platforms, with an eye to the novelties, limitations, and challenges.

- by Tanner Mirrlees
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- Social Movements, Marxism, Political Economy of Communication, Internet Studies

The core contradiction in neoliberalism (studies) is that markets are organized and require significant bureaucratic coordination and governance. In light of the increasingly technoscientific nature of contemporary capitalism, it is important to examine exactly how markets are organized and their governance configured by techno-economic processes. In this paper, I argue that the entanglement of technoscience and capitalism has led to an automated neoliberalism in which markets are automated through technology platforms, personal lives are transformed into private data assets, and social relations are automated through algorithms, distributed electronic ledgers, and rating systems. Two issues arise in light of these changes: first, are markets being automated away, in that market exchange ends up no longer underpinning social order or organization? And second, does individual and social reflexivity problematize techno-economic automation, in that new platforms, data assets, ranking algorithms, etc. are all dependent on individuals telling the 'truth'? It is worth considering the political implications of this automated neoliberalism and our reflexive enrolment in it.

- by Kean Birch
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- Economic Sociology, Algorithms, Economic Geography, Technology

In this article, we investigate labour struggles under the condition of digital capitalism. The main research question we address is: How do German unions evaluate and respond to the rapidly accelerating digitalisation of economy and work? Based on a series of interviews with union representatives in Germany, we trace recent developments within an increasingly digitised economy, outlining challenges and opportunities for unions. Our findings show that the large-scale deployment of digital technologies fragments the workforce, reduces social standards, worsens working conditions, and exacerbates power imbalances to the detriment of the employed. These disadvantages are only insufficiently met with new opportunities to raise public awareness and connect with and mobilise workers by means of digital communication technologies. Our study suggests a growing significance of technological expertise for unions, a need to meet global capital with enhanced international and regional cooperation among labour organisations, and the importance of uniting established unions and grassroots workers' movements in shared struggles to improve the situation of workers under technologyenhanced conditions of globalised exploitation and control.

Taking the historical example of the emporium, this article attempts to situate India's emerging platform economy within the historical evolution of market exchange in the subcontinent. I argue that the market systems constituted by media platforms are, like all markets within a true economy, significantly dependent upon their interaction with other markets. In India, this includes the aggregation of erstwhile media industries along with informal markets for "services," increasingly under the aegis of finance capital and the operators of mobile digital infrastructure. From this wider perspective, we can trace the expansion of a "mediated economy" through which an increasing number of economic exchanges are being aggregated within portals that allow value capture at the transactional level. By emphasizing the evolutionary processes at work in the platform economy, this article also seeks to illustrate how the digital economy is shaped by pathways established within the distinctive economics of media systems.

- by adrian athique
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- Cultural Studies, Media Sociology, New Media, Political Economy of Communication

Монография раскрывает противоречивую природу политики цифровизации. В ней представлена оригинальная концепция технополитики как выявления трансформационных способностей техники и их влияния на политические феномены. В центре политической онтологии цифровизации лежит идея способности техники обеспечивать координацию взаимодействий в политике. Особое внимание уделяется центральным проблемам цифровизации в публичном управлении: рационально-смысловым системам, платформенной организации, соотношению рекурсивности и контингентности в управленческом взаимодействии, рефлексивному управлению, сетевым параметрам управляемости, гражданской науке. Представлена критическая оценка «капитализма платформ» и возможной цифровой автократии. Теоретические выводы базируются на широком эмпирическом материале различных стран — России, Европейского союза, Латинской Америки, Китая.

- by Leonid Tomin and +4
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- Sociology, Political Sociology, Social Sciences, Political Theory

Scholars have argued that the sharing economy represents a transitional pathway to sustainability. The growth, however, of multinational giants, such as Airbnb or Uber, has created new environmental, social, and economic problems and led many to question the dominant form of the sharing economy. In this paper, we study a transition within a transition-that is the emergence of a new niche of cooperative platforms within the sharing economy. We examine how promoters and followers of Fairbnb, a nascent cooperative alternative to Airbnb, frame and envision their project and then discuss tensions, debates, and limits around their ideas and business model. We find that their primary motivations are to mitigate the negative effects of mass tourism, to prevent the extraction of wealth from local economies, and to sustain a prosperous social business. Tensions are found around limitations of democratic governance, decentralization, and size of the project.

- by Angelos Varvarousis
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- Commons, Social Economy, Urban Studies, Solidarity Economy

L’entreprise de taxi « Uber » s’est rapidement implantée dans la plupart des grandes villes du monde. Elle gagne en popularité grâce à son application mobile qui met directement en contact ses « chauffeurs-partenaires » et des clients et clientes, et offre des déplacements à des tarifs concurrentiels. Son apparition s’est produite en tension, voire en confrontation avec les principaux acteurs de l’industrie du taxi traditionnelle, car le modèle Uber, associé à l’économie de plateforme, repose sur l’idée de la libre entreprise. C’est pourquoi Uber tente par différents moyens dont des activités de lobbying, une présence dans les médias de masse et les médias sociaux, de même que le recours à des moyens juridiques afin de faire dérèglementer l’industrie du taxi. À Montréal, comme ailleurs, il en résulte une baisse de valeurs des permis de taxi et une diminution des revenus chez les chauffeurs de l’industrie traditionnelle. Face aux inquiétudes de ces derniers et à la résistance des propriétaires de permis, le gouvernement du Québec propose un projet pilote pour permettre à Uber de poursuivre ses opérations dans un nouveau cadre légal. L’objectif principal de ce mémoire est de mettre en lumière les conditions nécessaires à l’implantation et à la consolidation d’Uber dans la région métropolitaine. Pour y parvenir, nous avons fait appel à une perspective de géographie critique et en particulier aux travaux de Brenner qui nous permettent d’avancer que l’implantation d’Uber relève de trois processus de transformations sociospatiales soit la mondialisation, la métropolisation et la néolibéralisation. Nous avons été en mesure de voir que la stratégie adoptée par Uber vise la « destruction » ou le démantèlement de certains arrangements institutionnels mis en place pendant la période keynésienne-fordiste et la « création » de nouveaux arrangements favorables à la libre-concurrence et à l’économie de plateforme.

- by Émile Baril
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- Urban Geography, State Theory, Urban Sociology, Montréal

Il contributo sostiene, a partire da analisi qualitative e quantitative, la seguente tesi: la locazione breve turistica è oggi uno dei principali strumenti della rendita e i supporti digitali che la favoriscono ne determinano alcune forme e modalità peculiari, in particolar modo nei contesti urbani. L'industria turistica e il capitalismo di piattaforma verranno quindi riletti a partire dal ruolo che svolgono nell'ambito dell'economia della rendita. Il presupposto da cui muove l’analisi è che la valorizzazione immobiliare innescata dal “capitalismo di piattaforma” (Srnicek, 2016) attraverso le STR, con specifico riferimento ad Airbnb e ai suoi omologhi, abbia trasformato l’industria turistica in un uno dei principali attori del real estate. La tesi che si intende sostenere è che la cosiddetta sharing economy di Airbnb di fatto non esista, se non come maschera retorica dell’economia della rendita. Spogliata dei suoi neologismi, ridimensionata nella sua innovatività e calata nella dimensione territoriale, la locazione breve turistica può quindi essere efficacemente affrontata se interpretata dalla pianificazione e dall’urbanistica stessa come una declinazione contemporanea della rendita.
Pre-print (versione pubblicata: DOI: 10.3280/ASUR2020-129-S1009)

- by Alessandra Esposito
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- Urban Studies, Platform Studies, Naples, Napoli

Extant research tends to adopt a community perspective when examining value creation in consumer collectives, which limits the understanding of how value is created in loosely organized, dynamic, and heterogeneous networks. This study expands research on value creation by adopting a circulation-centric perspective that explains how value is created systemically in collaborative consumer networks. Inspired by anthropological theories of value creation, this study examines how circulation enables the systemic creation of value by connecting networked participants, their actions, objects, and value outcomes. Ethnographic and netnographic data were collected on the collaborative network of geocaching, in which consumers promote the circulation of objects known as Travel Bugs. The systemic creation of value in collaborative consumer networks is composed of four subprocesses triggered by object circulation—enactment, transvaluation, assessment, and alignment—which may happen concurrently and in multiple iterations. This process explains how geographic dispersion can coexist with the cultural situatedness of value creation and helps integrate prior research on value creation and value outcomes through the development of a systemic framework that explains value creation both in terms of individual actions and collective outcomes. Moreover, the findings motivate discussion on the affordances of physical and digital objects for value creation.

- by Daiane Scaraboto and +1
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- Marketing, Cultural Studies, Platform Economics, Social Networks

Airbnb prominently argues to promote more inclusive forms of tourism through enabling ordinary households to occasionally share their home with tourists. This conventional understanding of ‘home-sharing’ has been challenged, however, with critics arguing that property owners and landlords use the platform for the commercial provision of permanent holiday homes. This article uses Airbnb provision practices and the dichotomy of ‘home-sharing’ and commercial provision as an empirical entry point into the debate to what extent Airbnb promotes more inclusive tourism development. While existing studies on Airbnb provision practices in the European context have predominantly focused on the major tourism centres with the biggest tourism numbers, we consider a second-rank European tourist city with a rapidly growing Airbnb supply, Vienna, Austria. Methodologically, we critically review and extend common approaches to identify commercial practices. Based on a new dataset of Airbnb listings, quantitative statistics and GIS, we find that, in Vienna, the notion of ‘home-sharing’ is insufficient to fully explain the characteristics of the Airbnb supply, with commercial practices playing a considerable part, yet in geographically uneven ways. Our extended methodological framework provides further, more differentiated insights into provision practices than previous studies. We conclude by relating our findings back to debates on inclusive tourism development and discuss questions for further research.

- by Justin Kadi and +1
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- Urban Geography, Tourism Studies, Recreation & Leisure Studies, Platform Studies

The Chinese digital technology giants, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (BAT), dominate over their competitors in China across platforms that include e-commerce, digital entertainment, e-finance and artificial intelligence (AI). To understand BAT's corporate power and their strategic role working with the government-in this case, their involvement in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)-this paper unveils the capabilities of these three oligopolies and discusses their international expansion in relation to the BRI. The BRI is being constructed on two layers, the physical and digital infrastructure, and the BAT are contributing to the latter. This paper examines the interrelations between BAT and the state through case studies, observing the tensions and potential contradictions arising from the reliance of the Chinese state on the BAT to build digital infrastructure, while the BAT seek to minimize direct state regulation for their datadriven business models.

- by Chunmeizi Su
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- China studies, Soft Power, Platform Studies, State Power

What are the main features of the new contemporary power regime and the emerging forms of surveillance? I intend to investigate this question following the steps of Michel Foucault, but looking beyond the sovereign, disciplinary and biopolitical or securitarian logics. In this presentation, I would like to return to the course "Security, Territory, Population" (1978), in which Foucault reflects on the organization of cities and the fight against contagious diseases, through the triad of leprosy, plague, and smallpox, or La Métropolitée, Richelieu, and Nantes. I propose a fourth paradigmatic moment: Covid-19 and smart cities and necropolises. I want to emphasize the complexity and variations in the way power and surveillance operate in the contemporary world, with special attention to the ways in which the Global North and the Global South differ. I argue that neoliberal governmentality assumes two important features today, one more focused on the "winners", on the production of entrepreneurial subjects, and another more authoritarian, focused on the "losers" or the "undesirables". In the former, we observe the "principle of racism" and the sacrificial logic operating, as we can notice in the Brazilian way of dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. I also argue that a complete analysis of the new power regime cannot ignore this twofold dynamic, just as a complete analysis of European modernity is not possible without considering the phenomenon of colonization.

Online platforms have disrupted parts of the capitalist economy, with allegedly severe consequences in the world of work. It is difficult to assess the potential magnitude of this effect, however, because little is known about the conditions under which platforms take over any given market, industry or occupation. This study examines live music in Germany and the UK, where online platforms do not dominate, despite considerable digitalization of market intermediaries. We argue that the live music market frustrates online platforms because (1) assessments of value are qualitative; (2) the task is complex and contingent; and (3) the organizational field is fragmented. Digitalization has varying effects on the organization of work and exchange relationships between musicians, intermediaries and clients. We find that, as the degree of digitalization increases, matching services tend to work less as a workers' representative-which is traditionally the case for live music agents– and more as a force of marketization that disciplines workers by orchestrating price-based competition.

- by Charles Umney
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- Industrial And Labor Relations, Music, Technology, Sociology of Work