Platforms
Essentially, [platforms] are a newly predominant type of business model premised upon bringing different groups together. 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.
Data
Essential to all of these platform businesses – and indicative of a wider shift in capitalism – is the centrality of data. Data is the basic resource that drives these firms, and it is data that gives them their advantage over competitors. Platforms, in turn, are designed as a mechanism to extract and use that data: by providing the infrastructure and intermediation between different groups, platforms place themselves in a position in which they can monitor and extract all the interactions between these groups. This positioning is the source of their economic and political power.
That characteristic also helps us to understand a first mystery: why firms outside the technology sector are adopting platform elements. As data becomes a central resource for both tech and non-tech sectors in the economy, companies are having to rapidly develop ways to siphon off and aggregate this information. The platform provides a ready-made solution to this problem. The result is companies like John Deere, the largest agricultural machinery company in the world, are building a platform that links together farmers, seed producers, chemical producers, equipment sensors, tractors, and more. All the while John Deere itself extracts the data and uses it to improve its services to customers (such as making better predictions about when and where to plant a particular crop), to improve its products (reducing wear and tear on its machinery, for example), and ultimately to gain an advantage and beat its competitors, as capitalism demands.
Yet this drive towards more and more data has a nefarious consequence: impingement on privacy becomes a necessary feature of platform capitalism. As Shoshana Zuboff has argued, the fact that platforms require more and more data – just as the old railroad monopolies once devoured coal – means that there is an intrinsic drive for these companies to be pushing up against the limits of what we presently consider the private realm. Google has been rebuked for collecting household wi-fi data as its Google Street View cars drove by; Facebook has been continually criticised for pressing too far into individuals’ lives; and Vizio was denounced for spying on people via their smart TVs. Rather than seeing these incidents as accidental oversteps, we must see them as necessary consequences of platform capitalism: if data is a central resource, and capitalist competition places a high premium on getting that data, then our age will inevitably be filled with privacy scandals.
Platforms Economy
The term platform economy refers to the latest transformations in production, distribution, labor, and consumption, mainly due to technological developments in Internet reach and the increase in cloud storage. These changes have been analyzed in openly celebratory terms, such as digital revolution,
popularized by the book Race against the Machine (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2011). With their futurist accounts, these two authors from the MIT Business School not only captured the imagination of many business student cohorts, but also influenced emerging digital companies by serving as their expert consultants. Their appraisal portrayed an overly utopian landscape where machines, platforms, and people interact happily ever after (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2016; McAfee and Brynjolfsson 2017).
Summary
Platforms have become a central concern in scholarly production due to their sudden scope and rising popularity in mainstream discourse, which either hyper-celebrate their possible achievements, or over-dramatize underlying consequences. Together with related terms—such as sharing economy, digital ecosystems, algorithmic decision- making—the so-called platform revolution has been portrayed as a profound transformation upon previous modes of economic exchange and models of business organization. Platform scholarship is sharply divided among utopian and dystopian prospects, contributing to a multiplication of terminology and opposing narratives around the emergence and development of platforms. While some fields and disciplines emphasize its multiple potential benefits, others explore its continuities with previous negative trends. Both, defenders and critical scholars of platforms, agree upon the intermediary role of connecting economic agents through technological innovations as the defining feature of platforms.
Those working in the field of anthropology—and its sister disciplines such as sociology, human geography, cultural and media studies, as well as legal scholars—have been steadily contributing to complicate, if not undo, an overly optimist or pessimist portrait of the platform economy. Thanks to case-based studies and empirical appraisals of its inner workings, these disciplines are developing more complex and rather critical accounts of its human and environmental entanglements. The very study of platforms, as with other research objects such as mobility, technology, and racism, among others, request a certain fluidity between disciplinary boundaries, giving rise to transdisciplinary fields and approaches. In the case of the emerging field of platform studies, the discipline of anthropology has a lot to offer. Indeed, anthropology’s attention to materiality, everyday practices, and agency are already informing the literature on platforms. Methodologically, ethnography is becoming one of the main approaches to engage the complexities of platforms. For an anthropology of platforms to fully unfold, three areas of research can be identified as worth exploring: (a) tracing the genealogies and logistics of platform infrastructures; (b) further understanding the limits of this economic model by building and expanding upon established concrete and critical engagements; and (c) accounting for the conjunctural contingency of platforms by paying due attention to expressions of resistance and instances of reappropriating platforms.