by
Nick Srnicek
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[...] It would seem that these are asset-less companies; we might call them virtual platforms. Yet the key is that they do own the most important asset: the platform of software and data analytics. Lean platforms operate through a hyper-outsourced model, whereby workers are outsourced, fixed capital is outsourced, maintenance costs are outsourced, and training is outsourced. All that remains is a bare extractive minimum--control over the platform that enables a monopoly rent to be gained.
another asset is of course reputation. look at what's been happening to Uber lately
[...] the traditional labour market that most closely approximates the lean platform model is an old and low-tech one: the market of day labourers--agricultural workers, dock workers, or other low-wage workers--who would show up at a site in the morning in the hope of finding a job for the day. [...] The gig economy simply moves these sites online and adds a layer of pervasive surveillance. A tool of survival is being marketed by Silicon Valley as a tool of liberation.
so good
[...] Where is the money coming from? Broadly speaking, it is surplus capital seeking higher rates of return in a low interest rate environment. The low interest rates have depressed the returns on traditional financial investments, forcing investors to seek out new avenues for yield. Rather than a finance boom or a housing boom, surplus capital today appears to be building a technology boom. [...] Just like the earlier dot-com boom, growth in the lean platform sector is premised on expectations of future profits rather than on actual profits. The hope is that the low margin business of taxis will eventually pay off once Uber has gained a monopoly position. Until these firms reach monopoly status (and possibly even then), their profitability appears to be generated solely by the removal of costs and the lowering of wages and not by anything substantial.
instead of a "vanguard destined to revive capitalism" (p91), lean platforms are just the latest outlet for all this surplus capital ... this, too, shall pass
[...] The challenge today, however, is that capitalist investment is not suficient to overturn monopolies; access to data, network effects, and path dependency place even higher hurdles in the way of overcoming a monopoly like Google. This does not mean the end of competition or of the struggle for market power, but it means a change in the form of competition. In particular, this is a shift away from competition over prices (e.g. many services are offered for free). Here we come to an essential point. Unlike in manufacturing, in platforms competitiveness is not judged solely by the criterion of a maximal difference between costs and prices; data collection and analysis also contribute to how competitiveness is judged and ranked. This means that, if these platforms wish to remain competitive, they must intensify their extraction, analysis, and control of data--and they must invest in the fixed capital to do so. And while their genetic drive is towards monopolisation, at present they are faced with an increasingly competitive environment comprised of other great platforms.
relevant the whole platform wars thing
[...] 'once we understand this [tendency], it becomes clear that demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the Internet is like asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand'. Calls for privacy miss how the suppression of privacy is at the heart of this business model. [...]
on companies like Google collecting all sorts of privacy-infringing data on users
quoting Shoshana Zuboff in http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-debate/shoshana-zuboff-secrets-of-surveillance-capitalism-14103616.html
A third dominant tendency is the funneling of data extraction into siloed platforms. When extensive means are not sufficient for competitive advantage, this approach tries to tie users and data to the platform by locking them in through various measures: dependency on a service, inability to use alternatives, or lack of data portability, for instance. [...]
it's funny how we think of all of these techniques as very standard capitalist tricks to ensure competitiveness, with the idea being that it buys the corporation time to deploy true innovation, when in reality they are fundamentally un-innovative and bad for users and, in the long run, remove market pressure to become more innovative and thus reduce innovation in the long run ... either you see the goal of a corporation as delivering a product and thus have to admit that these techniques are not in your best interest, or you explicitly acknowledge that the product is a means to the end of delivering profits to shareholders and thus have to ask why the hell you're wasting your life to make rich people richer
(the other tendencies: spreading into other related products/fields as business models converge and everyone competes with everyone else, and buying up other companies to aid in that quest)
[...] capitalist competition is driving the internet to fragment. There is no necessity to this outcome, as political efforts can stall or reverse it; but within a capitalist mode of production there are strong competitive pressures towards this end.
[...] The industrial internet will undoubtedly give rise to some successful firms who may be able for a time to derive extra profit, above and beyond what their competitors receive. The key question, though, is whether or not this in the long-term overcomes the lack of profitability and the overcapacity of global manufacturing. This seems unlikely, as nothing in the industrial internet program appears to radically transform manufacturing, but rather simply to reduce costs and downtime. Rather than improving productivity or developing new markets, the industrial internet appears to drive prices still further down and to increase the competition for market share, thereby exacerbating one of the main impediments to global growth. The platform owners will simply siphon off more of the revenue generated, leaving direct manufacturers with even less. On top of this, the widespread turn to austerity is continuing to depress aggregate demand across the world, and the global trends for productivity are in decline. [...]
[...] lean platforms are entirely reliant on a vast mania of surplus capital. The investment in tech start-ups today is less an alternative to the centrality of finance and more an expression of it. Just like the original tech boom, it was initiated and sustained by a loose monetary policy and by large amounts of capital seeking higher returns. While it is impossible to call then a bubble may burst, there are signs that the enthusiasm for this sector is already over. Tech stocks have taken a massive hit in 2016. There has been a wave of cutbacks on employee perks in the start-up sector--no more open bars and free snacks. [...] What is likely to happen is for a large number of these services to go out of business in the next couple of years, while others will move towards becoming luxury services, producing on-demand convenience at high prices. Whereas the tech boom of the 1990s at least left us with the basis for the internet, the tech boom of the 2010s looks as though it will simply leave us with premium services for the rich.
Rather than just regulating corporate platforms, efforts could be made to create public platforms--platforms owned and controlled by the people. (And, importantly, independent of the surveillance state apparatus.) This would mean investing the state's vast resources into the technology necessary to support these platforms and offering them as public utilities. More radically, we can push for postcapitalist platforms that make use of the data collected by these platforms in order to distribute resources, enable democratic participation, and generate further technological development. Perhaps today we must collectivise the platforms.