The Extraction Platform: Big Tech’s Raw Material-Fueled Future

• In Event: Political Ecology (Co-sponsored by Environmental Sociology Section)

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 has taken hold across traditional sectors, spawning new monopolistic firms. This argument in part stems from the ubiquitous reliance on a handful of global giant tech firms monopolizing various scales of the operations of organizations and controlling everyday material life. 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 on patterns of urban development. Taking a longer view through the lens of world-system orientated global commodity chains adds a valuable world-historical perspective to examine the material conditions of this rise of big tech. Excavating the role of platform capitalism’s physical infrastructure in the built environment and expanding raw material consumption, particularly data centers and logistics warehouses, looks to provide a remedy to the often overly abstract and dematerialized treatments of the digital economy. This research looks to account for the necessary physical infrastructure for both cloud computing and AI. More than any other single corporation, Amazon takes on this full range of shifts, combining monopolizing vertical integration strategies with gig labor, logistics, and rent extraction. With this focus on the dual labor and environmental consequences of big tech infrastructure, it becomes clear that understanding these economic platforms are a part of the present-day’s global formation of racial capitalism. Such a concrete perspective offers a needed refocus on ways labor, environmental, and community organizations might form ways of countering the power of these firms.

Authors

• Luc McKenzie, University of California-Irvine

• David A. Smith, University of California-Irvine