Was vereint Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Monsanto, Uber und Airbnb? Sie alle sind Unternehmen, die Hardware und Software für andere bereitstellen, mit dem Ziel, möglichst geschlossene sozio-ökonomische Tech-Systeme zu schaffen. Google kontrolliert die Recherche, Facebook regiert Social Media und Amazon ist führend beim E-Commerce. Doch nicht nur Technologie-Unternehmen bauen Plattformen auf, auch Traditionsfirmen wie Siemens entwickeln ein cloudbasiertes Produktionssystem.
Plattformen sind in der Lage, immense Daten zu gewinnen, zu nutzen und zu verkaufen – Monopolisierungstendenzen sind die 'natürliche' Folge. Sind wir auf dem Weg in einen digitalen Monopolkapitalismus? Diese Streitschrift ist unerlässlich für alle, die verstehen wollen, wie die mächtigsten technologischen Unternehmen unserer Zeit die globale Ökonomie verändern.

What unites Google and Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, Siemens and GE, Uber and Airbnb? Across a wide range of sectors, these firms are transforming themselves into platforms: businesses that provide the hardware and software foundation for others to operate on. This transformation signals a major shift in how capitalist firms operate and how they interact with the rest of the economy: the emergence of ?platform capitalism?.
This book critically examines these new business forms, tracing their genesis from the long downturn of the 1970s to the boom and bust of the 1990s and the aftershocks of the 2008 crisis. It shows how the fundamental foundations of the economy are rapidly being carved up among a small number of monopolistic platforms, and how the platform introduces new tendencies within capitalism that pose significant challenges to any vision of a post-capitalist future. This book will be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the most powerful tech companies of our time are transforming the global economy."

In part, this book is a synthesis of existing work. The discussion in Chapter 1 should be familiar to economic historians, as it outlines the various crises that have laid the groundwork for today’s post-2008 economy. It attempts to historicise emerging technologies as an outcome of deeper capitalist tendencies, showing how they are implicated within a system of exploitation, exclusion, and competition. The material in Chapter 2 should be fairly well known to those who follow the business of technology. In many ways, the chapter is an attempt to give clarity to various ongoing discussions in that world, as it lays out a typology and genesis of platforms. By contrast, Chapter 3 hopefully offers something new to everyone. On the basis of the preceding chapters, it attempts to draw out some likely tendencies and to make some broad-brush predictions about the future of platform capitalism. These forward-looking prognoses are essential to any political project. How we conceptualise the past and the future is important for how we think strategically and develop political tactics to transform society today. In short, it makes a difference whether we see emerging technologies as inaugurating a new regime of accumulation or as continuing earlier regimes. This has consequences on the possibility of a crisis and on deciding where that crisis might emerge from; and it has consequences on our envisaging the likely future of labour under capitalism. Part of the argument of this book is that the apparent novelties of the situation obscure the persistence of longer term trends, but also that today presents important changes that must be grasped by a twenty-first-century left. Understanding our position in a broader context is the first step to creating strategies for transforming it.