Platform capitalism

{{Short description|Business model of technological platforms}}

Platform capitalism refers to the activities of companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Airbnb, Amazon and others to operate as platforms. In this business model both hardware and software are used as a foundation (platform) for other actors to conduct their own business.{{cite book |last1=Srnicek |first1=Nick |title=Platform Capitalism |date=2016 |publisher=Polity Press |location=Cambridge, UK |isbn=978-1-509-50486-2}}L. Weatherby, "Delete Your Account: On the Theory of Platform Capitalism," Los Angeles Review of Books, 2018.

Platform capitalism has been both heralded as beneficialA. McAfee and E. Brynjolfsson, Machine, platform, crowd : harnessing our digital future. W. W. Norton and Company, 2017. and denounced as detrimentalJ. Lanier, Ten arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now. Henry Holt and Co., 2018. by various authors. The trends identified in platform capitalism have similarities with those described under the heading of surveillance capitalism.S. Zuboff, The age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs, 2019. Technology companies build platforms that entire industries rely on, and those industries can easily collapse due to the decisions of those technology companies.{{cite magazine | last=Herrman | first=John | date=28 April 2023 | title=The news went viral: The media bet its future on Facebook | work=Intelligencer | publication-place=New York City | publisher=Vox Media | url=https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/04/how-buzzfeed-news-went-bust.html | access-date=25 April 2024}}

The possible effect of platform capitalism on open science has been discussed.P. Mirowski, "The future(s) of open science," Soc. Stud. Sci., vol. 48, no. 2, pp. 171–203, Apr. 2018.

Platform capitalism has been contrasted with platform cooperativism. Companies that try to focus on fairness and sharing, instead of just profit motive, are described as cooperatives, whereas more traditional and common companies that focus solely on profit, like Airbnb and Uber, are platform capitalists (or cooperativist platforms vs capitalist platforms). In turn, projects like Wikipedia, which rely on unpaid labor of volunteers, can be classified as commons-based peer-production initiatives.{{cite book|author1=Dariusz Jemielniak|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=yLDMDwAAQBAJ|title=Collaborative Society|author2=Aleksandra Przegalinska|date=18 February 2020|publisher=MIT Press|isbn=978-0-262-35645-9}}{{Rp|31, 36}}

==See also==

• Enshittification
• Platform economy