Raising Platform Capitalism: Infrastructure and the Emergence of Big Tech

• In Event: 40821 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 18. Urban (Re)Development

Abstract

The notion of platform capitalism increasingly holds sway as a crucial and analytical description of the latest key strategy for capital accumulation in the first quarter of the 21st century. The reliance and proliferation of information technology, understood as the digital economy, has taken hold across traditional sectors, spawning new monopolistic firms. With the ascendance of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, the massive power requirements of data centers come to the forefront. Despite extensive scholarly research on the role of platforms for labor around the gig economy, much of this research neglects the dual labor and ecological consequences of platform capitalism. However, taking a longer view through the lens of the world-system orientated global commodity chains adds a valuable world-historical perspective to examine the material conditions of the expanding rule of big tech. This shifts attention to the role of physical infrastructure, logistics, as well as land and energy use, including ways labor, environmental, and community organizations form ways of countering the power of big tech. Excavating the role of platform capitalism’s physical infrastructure, particularly data centers and logistics warehouses, looks to provide a remedy to the often overly abstract and dematerialized treatments of the digital economy. More than any other one corporation, Amazon takes on this full range of shifts towards platform capitalism, combining monopolizing vertical integration strategies with gig labor, logistics, and rent extraction from consumption and data management. With this focus, it becomes clear that understanding these economic platforms are a part of the present-day’s global formation of racial capitalism. The intensification of energy consumption raises the prospect of generating carbon emissions disproportionately impacting the Global South. But environmental injustices targeting the air quality in communities of color and the rise of racialized labor around logistics helps bring in to focus big tech’s embrace of Donald Trump.

Authors

• David A. Smith, University of California-Irvine

• Luc McKenzie, University of California-Irvine