The power of platforms—precarity and place

The expanding scale and scope of digital platforms in our lives seem undeniable as they restructure commerce, communication, work, finance, popular culture, and private and public services. However, despite their ubiquity in our lives, platforms’ relationship to increasing inequality and precarity and its implications for places, democracies and civil society remains underexplored. Kenney and Zysman (2020) consider the concentrated power of digital platforms arguing that regional scholars have failed to examine the implications of key internet platforms ‘connecting massive numbers of users/customers with service providers, advertisers or other users’. Some of these firms create profit by selling a commodity, but many others sell labour, capital and attention within the nation-state or globally (Christophers 2020). Kenney and Zysman (2020) call on researchers to study how platforms wield power, paying particular attention to how the practices of platforms impact on the spatial organization of the economy. The urgent need to study the concentration of economic, social and cultural power became even more acute under Covid-19 as a range of platform firms (for example, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple and Uber) were able to consolidate market power and market valuation under lockdown as mobility and spending patterns changed both rapidly and radically. Around the world, the prevalence of online purchasing and delivery services increased, resulting in fundamental changes to flows of capital, goods, labour and people (Batty et al., 2022). With the economic and social impacts of the pandemic spread unevenly, many people, firms and regions faced increased precarity and uncertainty under lockdown and beyond (Gray et al., 2023; Montgomerie, 2023). At the same time, the major platforms are being publicly scrutinised and criticised over monopoly practices, tax avoidance and poor labour practices, with many questioning their role and the lack of regulatory oversight. Recently, scholars have begun to theorise this form of capitalism, arguing that these platforms represent new forms of rentier capitalism (Christophers, 2020), labour precariousness (Sadowski, 2020) and surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019). The platforms’ role in reshaping, ­reorganizing and possibly reclaiming civil society and democratic access is also becoming an urgent question (Diebert, 2020). Lyon (2023) explores these issues and raises troubling questions about platform companies’ ability to create new kinds of infrastructures that challenge both the democratic state and capitalist economy. Alternatives to the dominant commercial orientation of platforms are being articulated and explored by scholars and practitioners through the concept of platform cooperativism (Scholz, 2016a). These clone the technical core of platforms and operate within a cooperative model in relation to ownership and governance. Within platform cooperativism, there is a range of different models, from producer-owned platforms to those owned by cities or backed by unions; the latter emerging in relation to increased pressure for fair working conditions for those labouring in platform economies (Graham et al, 2020). However, as Sandoval (2020) points out, while the ideas of platform cooperativism aim to subvert digital capitalism from the inside, there is always the danger of co-option. Beyond this, calls for even more radical shifts to platform commoning are appearing (Papadimitropoulos, 2021), which argue for a broader model of open cooperativism, premised on the principles of commons-based peer production that aspire to more circular and sustainable models of production, consumption and disposal. Certainly, whether commercial or cooperative, these changes raise serious questions about the urban, social and economic geography of platforms; the power they wield and their regional economic, social, environmental and spatial impacts (Feldman et al., 2020). For instance, how will platforms affect the ways in which people and institutions re-engage locally with regional economies in a post-pandemic future? What new challenges will arise with respect to platforms’ access to data and embeddedness in urban infrastructures? In what ways do platforms challenge the notions of place-making, including democratic access and civic engagement? How does the power of platforms affect the distribution and regulation of work? What are the issues in regulating platforms? Are new regulatory powers needed? If so, at what scale? Can labour organise around a global platform structure? Are platforms accelerating a global ‘race to the bottom’ or are there ways to regulate platform labour markets? This paper begins by reviewing key definitions of platforms and how their power can be defined. It then examines the emerging regulatory approaches to digital ­platform firms in what Cioffi et al (2022: 821) refer to as a new ‘pro-intervention swing of the governance pendulum’ before considering evidence of emerging precarity and place-based impacts from Spain, China, USA, the Philippines, India, UK, Germany and Portugal on precarity and place-based impacts. It concludes by examining alternative models of platformism and discussing directions for future research. According to Gillespie (2010), the term platform is a metaphor that has been imbued with multiple meanings. It has been employed variously in populist appeals and marketing pitches by advocates of emerging sharing economies (Davies et al., 2017). At times it is used to refer to the hard and software of digital ‘platforms’, on other occasions it is used to evoke ‘platforms’ of opportunity (Mansell and Steinmueller, 2020). Digital platforms, the focus of this paper, are of interest because they have characteristics that include the retention of information about exchanges, including customer purchases, as well as information on patterns of online behaviour whether they lead to a purchase or not. According to Mansell and Steinmueller (2020: 6) platform companies utilize customer and other user-created content to elicit revenues through network effects associated with ‘digitization, mobile communications, datafication and artificial intelligence’. It is widely recognised that digital platforms have been technical and economic disrupters, but they are also exerting significant forces on a range of social processes and practices, from business models to academic models and to public debates on governance, privacy and justice. Fundamentally, then, these digital platform firms make up what Kenney and Zysman (2016) call the platform economy, consisting of a distinctly new set of economic relations that depend on the internet, computation and big data in the context of new labour relations. It is essentially an ecosystem with its own source of value that sets terms by which users can participate. Platform economies have changed the way value is derived within the capitalist system. In previous iterations of capitalism, goods and services were produced and capital value was derived from them. This was often dependent on the ownership of the means of production. In the platform economy, however, the production of a goods or services is not dependent on ownership of the means of production, but rather on the development of a digital network that provides a matching service, made possible through technology. The platforms pass all the risks onto the owners of the good or service being produced and extract value through the means of organizing the production. As a result of digitalisation, platform economy firms can grow rapidly on an international scale, make minimal local investment and cause significant local disruption. 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