Platforms as States

* Article / Chapter: Platforms as States: The Riseof Governance through Data Power. By Petter Törnberg. In book: Data Power in Action.

URL = https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376715056_Platforms_as_States_The_Rise_of_Governance_through_Data_Power

Description

"Recent years have seen the explosive growth of platforms such as Amazon, Alphabet, Airbnb, Facebook, and Uber – forming an ecosystem which is now central to contemporary capitalism while amassing unprecedented levels of money and influence (Langley and Leyshon, 2017; van Dijck et al,2018). As any fundamental shift, platformization is born and shaped from crisis. The Great Depression birthed Fordist–Keynesianism, the 1970s crisis brought post-Fordism and neoliberalism (Harvey, 2007), and the first steps of the incipient rise of a digital form of accumulation was birthed in the2008 financial crisis. Its dominance was cemented and made visible through the COVID-19 pandemic, and it appears now to be maturing through the subsequent financial and inflation crises. The large core corporations left following this process are emerging as a new form of ‘company-states’: firms with the capacity to control not only trade but also law, territory, and liberty – in other words, to regulate life. This role has not escaped the firms themselves, many of which view their governance as so central to their business model that they refer to their users as ‘citizens’. Platformization thus signifies a transformation of urban governance and politics, as ‘data is generative of new forms of power relations and politics’ (Bigo et al, 2019, 4).In this chapter, we will examine the impact of data’s transformation of governance. We here view the growing powers of data to shape human life as lying at the core of platformization.

On the basis of this perspective, the chapter will examine platformization in two parts.

• First, we will examine platformization as a form of capitalist accumulation based on employing data power to privatize regulation. emerged as proprietary markets owned and created by platform corporations –such as Airbnb or Uber ( Langley and Leyshon, 2017 ). The proprietary market business model is based on using the control over markets to extract monopoly rents. This has been described as a continuation of neoliberalism’s constant annexation of new fields by the market, reaching its logical endpoint in the market’s annexation of the market itself (Barns, 2020). However, the logic of platformization has since generalized to the use of data power to manipulate markets in order to extract profits through the concentration of political-economic power. Platformization can thus be understood as private actors employing digital technopolitical strategies to target vulnerabilities in local institutions, in the pursuit of control over market regulation. Platforms seek to claim regulatory control through data surveillance, while seceding from state control, thereby challenging the distinction between the economic power of corporations and the political sovereignty of states. The result isa gradual and variegated shift towards the private capture of governance, as capital supplants democratic institutions with private technological solutions.

• Second, we will examine the nature of regulation as it is pursued through data power. Platform regulation implies a fundamental shift in the way of seeing those governed, bringing a shift in the regime of power. Scott (1998)famously characterized how the modernist state made the social world legible and amenable to state power through a top-down population-based epistemology, exerting power through hierarchical command-and-control that spread from the Fordist factory to shaping society, cities, and even a period of modernity. The platform mode of regulation implies a new way of seeing, as platforms see those governed through the novel epistemology of Big Data – cluster-based, bottom-up, and relational – and exerting control through the design of programmable social infrastructures. This signifies a fundamental shift in the regime of power, lying at the heart of the societal transformations emerging from digitalization and platformization."

(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376715056_Platforms_as_States_The_Rise_of_Governance_through_Data_Power)