[...] digital platforms internalize consumption as well, turning it into a form of subtly incentivized labor. Previous forms of labor organization depended on managerial overseers and workers who were rendered into “docile bodies” by, in Foucault’s account, social institutions like factories, prisons and hospitals. Platforms, by implementing code as control, introduce flexibility and mobility to the process, akin to the logistical and managerial innovations brought on by just-in-time production processes popularized by Toyota in the 1970s. Productivity is ensured not by the fear of punishment but by a series of techniques and technologies that allow workers to experience agency even as they are guided toward the expected productive activities. Gamification is central to this.

[...] platforms are technologies for the production of distribution itself, and if platform capitalism is about distribution, then it’s primarily about space. Platforms create a space in which specific forms of exchange can occur, and set the terms for those exchanges, all while extracting rents. This is true not only in the virtual realms of space-exploration games like EVE Online, where new territory and new forms of goods are created that exist only within the game. but of Uber as well, which overlays urban landscapes with its proprietary dynamic maps of supply and demand.

Rosa Luxemburg argued that colonialism was primarily about expanding markets and labor forces, and Lenin, building on the work of Rudolf Hilferding, made a similar case in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Because capitalist economies generate an excess of capital relative to internal investment opportunities, capitalists need to create new markets and absorb new laborers to exploit. Daniel Greene and I have made the case that this process persists not only in geographic space but also in the “spaces” of the internet. The same process of dispossession and enclosure that has characterized the expansion of capitalism happens online. Whereas peasants and serfs were dispossessed of land and forced to urbanize and take up wage labor, internet users are being dispossessed of their time and attention, which are being enclosed through surveillance, then quantified and monetized.

Platforms are the means for this enclosure, mediating activity for the purposes of controlling all forms of exchange around it. The sheer quantity of platforms that purport to be “Like Uber, but for X” shows how this process continues, with the goal of finding pieces of life that aren’t already commodified to bring them into the orbit of capital, taking things that were once free and selling them to us. Marxists call this “dispossession,” and platforms excel at it.