Platforms facilitate different epistemological realities and incentivizes content creation to sustain them. In the end, platforms see content as no different from any other consumer good. This is because platforms are theorized not as communication technologies, but as marketplaces.

To understand the logic of how platforms are designed and why they have taken over, it helps to examine what economists and management theorists call “multisided” or “two-sided” market theory. Platforms are all versions of a multi-sided market, which gives them an economic advantage over conventional retailing. Mainly this is because platforms are monopolies that can produce consumers who don’t know the true costs of their participation.

Conventional retail is a one-sided market: a direct interaction between a buyer and seller of a commodity. In classic liberal economics, that means (putting it reductively) that both parties pursue their own self-interest in price negotiation, leading to an “equilibrium” price that can be seen as “just,” determined between two equals with corresponding incentives. Multisided markets are fundamentally different: They are mediated by a third party that owns the market, which profits by charging access and transaction fees. Credit-card processing is a classic example: On one side are businesses that sign contracts with companies like Mastercard, Visa, and American Express to ensure that customers can use these cards in their store. On the other side are credit card users, who are charged interest rates for the privilege to carry a balance. In the middle is the credit-card company, which owns the infrastructure and manages both customer bases, adjusting prices to try to maximize participation on both sides.

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Multi-sided market theory explicitly discusses how platforms can use their position to engage in anti-competitive behavior. As Jean-Charles Rochet and Jean Terole wrote in 2003, “The quest for ‘getting both sides on board’ makes no sense in a world in which only the total price for the end-user interaction, and not its decomposition, matters.” In other words, because most platforms put the weight of the “cost” on one side — for most tech companies, that means the advertisers’ side — consumers are generally unfamiliar with any of the costs of using platforms. This gives the platforms considerable leverage in their interactions with a enormously large pool of users that either misunderstand or do not care about how their labor (the data they produce that is sold to advertisers) or their commerce (the in-platform purchases they make) is commodified.

This results in monopolistic domination: when the large corporations in control reshape markets in their own image, ensuring winner-take-all dynamics. As noted above, this is most obvious in cultural industries like television, film, games, or apps where a few titles dominate and capture the majority of sales, leaving the rest to drown in obscurity. It’s no secret that a structural monoculture is sculpted out of this. The kind of stories we tell and hear overwhelmingly represent the voices of the already well-off white men who also happen to profit from them.