Platform Colonialism: The Lower Circuit at the Center of Capitalist Accumulation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The study seeks to analyze how the self-employed are inserted in the context of financialization and how this insertion enables financial capital accumulation. We initially adopted the concept of neoliberal rationality of Dardot and Laval as our main theoretical lens. However, our immersion in the research field showed us the value of integrating Latin American authors. Through the story of a self- employed couple in the confection industry, and applying hermeneutic analysis, our results make two main contributions. First, we build a new concept – that we call platform colonialism – that unveils the mechanisms by which the work of micro-entrepreneurs constitutes a source of accumulation for financial capital. Although this concept emerged from a Latin America context, their transferability to other ‘colonized’ contexts is plausible and open to future investigation. Second, we argue that when trying to understand a social phenomenon taking place in a peripheral territory, it is worth to also mobilize local theories, instead of mechanically just borrowing Western-based ones, therefore nourishing the increasing movement of ‘decolonizing’ our minds. Additionally, our study illustrates the use of critical hermeneutics, showing its potential to increase our ability to deepen understand the interplay of different trajectories, from life stories to historical accounts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".