1 Exploring Platform Capitalism

This two-part work brings together the outcomes of the Horizon 2020 Project PLUS, “Platform Labor in Urban Spaces”. Running from December 2018 to March 2022, which included an extension from December 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this research project investigated the main features and dimensions of the impact of digital platforms on the economy and society, with a specific focus on labour, urban transformations, and welfare. Sixteen partners, including universities, research centres, and cooperatives, investigated the operations of four digital platforms (AirBnb, Deliveroo, Helpling, and Uber) in seven European cities (Barcelona, Berlin, Bologna, Lisbon, London, Paris, and Tallin). The research involved, in different ways, municipalities, independent researchers, platform managers, and established grassroot unions. The fact that the four abovementioned platforms operate in diverse fields—accommodation, food delivery, domestic labour, and transport—has allowed us to carry out a wide-ranging analysis of the rapid spread of digital platforms across the economy and society.

The visibility of digital platforms and related labour has only increased with the COVID-19 pandemic, providing us with the opportunity to study their impact in a more intensive and “pure” way. While it is important to keep in mind the exceptional nature of the pandemic, the situation encapsulated by the iconic image of empty cities traversed by riders has allowed us to grasp features of platforms’ operations that could remain obscured in “normal” conditions. We have attempted to use this exceptional situation to our epistemic advantage, while doing our best to negotiate the problems brought about by the spread of the virus. It is also important to note that in the years leading up to the pandemic there was an exponential increase in interest in digital platforms, something that the pandemic simply reinforced. You need only look at the reference lists in the following chapters to see the recent uncontrolled increase in the academic literature on digital platforms. This work aims to make original contributions to this literature by focusing on labour, urban transformations, and welfare, as well as on the intertwining of these dimensions in the operations of platforms.

As a number of the chapters explain in more detail, our approach is shaped by a theoretical decision to employ the notion of “platform capitalism”. This means that we investigate digital platforms as emerging actors that facilitate the valorization and accumulation of capital. To put it in a slightly different way, and as reflected in the title of this book, we analyse capitalism in the platform age. By their nature, digital platforms have an elective affinity with capitalism. Benjamin H. Bratton, in his The Stack, called them “generative mechanisms” that set the terms of participation according to fixed protocols and “acquire strength and dimension by mediating unplanned and perhaps even unplannable interactions” (Bratton, 2016, 374). Adding value to “strength and dimension” provides an abstract but effective picture of how platforms can promote the valorization and accumulation of capital. We have chosen to include the word capitalism in the title in order to stress this aspect. We are aware that it is not a neutral term, but we are not aiming to write a neutral book.

However, far from reducing our analysis to the domain of the “economy”, our understanding of platform capitalism led us to emphasize the social and cultural implications of operations that impinge on society as a whole. These implications include the extractive nature of digital platforms, which is often emphasized with respect to techniques of data mining; the disruption of any work-life balance associated with platform labour; and the impact of platforms on lifestyles, consumption patterns, and imaginaries. At the core of digital platforms, beyond their huge heterogeneity with respect to their scale, fields of operation, and even rationality, there is a drive to capture interactions and act as intermediators between them. Platform capitalism is defined as an attempt to convert these interactions into a vehicle for the valorization of capital through deploying specific forms of intermediation. The new business model and the new type of firm instantiated by digital platforms are entirely predicated upon this logic.

Nick Srnicek demonstrates that platform capitalism emerged in the wake of the turmoil generated by the 2007–2008 financial crisis, when the generalized low interest rate environment reduced the rate of return on a wide range of financial assets and prompted investors, so-called “venture capitalists”, to “turn to increasingly risky assets”, which in turn facilitated the rise of platforms (Srnicek, 2016, 30). This is an important reminder of their recent origin, making the pace of their spread even more astonishing. Nonetheless, it is important to delve into the genealogy of digital platforms, shedding light on their antecedents and on the contested and even antagonistic nature of the developments that led to their emergence. The field of logistics is particularly important here, regarding both the rationality of intermediation that we mentioned above and the long history of labour struggles that spurred on most of the technical innovations in the logistical world. Moreover, recent studies have emphasized the capacity of logistics to produce spaces, subjects, and “worlds”, another feature it shares with digital platforms (see Cowen, 2014).

Our research is focused on Europe but is also shaped by an awareness of the fact that the spread of digital platforms goes far beyond Europe and the Western world. Just think of China, where there has also been an intense spread of digital platforms, although with its own peculiarities. Thus several chapters call for the “de-Westernization” of platform studies. One concept that allows us to grasp the effects of the spread of digital platforms without homogenizing them is “platformization”, which encourages an analysis of the effects of the operations of platforms even beyond their specific domains. While platformization is at work both in China and Europe, although in different and geographically diversified ways, it allows us to study the ways in which digital platforms transform the very structures of the economy and society. For instance, the concept of the platformization of labour invites us to investigate the differential although powerful “spillover” of labour management systems characteristic of platform labour into other sectors of dependent labour. More generally, we elaborate on the concept of platformization based on an understanding of platforms as digital infrastructures that increasingly build the conditions of possibility of social relations—of “intersections”. Therefore, we underscore the political dimension and effects of the operations of platforms, and their involvement in processes of government understood with Michel Foucault as a “conduct of conducts” (Foucault, 1994, 237).

However powerful platforms are, their functioning is far from smooth. They are crisscrossed with forms of resistance, including practices of appropriation and counter-use. In this book, we do not limit ourselves to a provisional mapping of these struggles, but use them as a methodic principle to guide our research, ensuring it is attentive to the frictions and tensions surrounding processes of platformization. This means that we call attention not only to actual and potential sites of conflict but also to the spaces within which an appropriation and subversion of the very code of digital platforms becomes possible. Far from feeling compelled to take sides in the endless debate between “technophiles” and “technophobes”, we focus our analysis on the ambivalent and contested nature of digital technology (and indeed of technology as such), and on the social relations and clashes that drive its development. This is an important aspect of our work that helps to shape our analysis of urban transformations, labour, and welfare.

2 Platformed Urban Ecosystems

In recent years, the disrupting impact, organizational strategies, spatial mutations, and new dynamics of daily life in cities determined by digital platforms have been framed through the term “platform urbanism” (Barns, 2020; Mörtenböck & Mooshammer, 2021). This neologism emerged within urban studies to interpret the nexus between cities, capital, and technology, and to emphasize the hegemonic role of digital platforms as the core of this interrelation.

While the smart city framework—as the prevalent concept for restructuring urban spaces via digital technologies in the first decades of the twenty-first century—was based on collaboration between companies (like IBM) and municipal governments, using a substantially top-down model, platform urbanism is more antagonistic to government regulations,Footnote 1 more interactive with users, and characterized by a rapid scaling-up via network effects and venture capital (Caprotti et al., 2022). Digital platforms tend to mediate social action and to automate the market, producing a digital disruption thanks to the combination of business, technology, data strategy, and interaction, which is designed to produce “platform ecosystems”.

What emerges from the research gathered in this work is an expanded notion of platform urbanism. Digital platforms are not simply the urban interface of platform capitalism but are an intrinsically urban phenomenon. They develop thanks to the spatial proximity of individuals in cities, benefiting from population density and from the potential that this concentration has in terms of availability to work and consume. The strategy of digital platforms “is fought on the urban front: surge into cities, spread like wildfire, subvert any regulation, supplant all competition, and secure their position as an aspiring monopoly” (Sadowski, 2020, 451). However, it also goes deeper than that.

Platforms and urbanism should be read as consubstantial, leading to transformations in both directions. In other words, platform urbanism is not only about how digital platforms are transforming cities, but it is also about how cities are transforming the digital environment. We could also go further to say that now platforms and the urban both contribute to the evolution of the same transformative process. Platforms represent the infrastructuralization of the web, what we could call the “urbanization of the internet”, with the internet becoming a digital copy of urban power relations.

Moreover, we could say that in a metaphorical sense, any single platform is a city in itself, interconnected with but separated from other platforms-cities via socio-technical arrangements. We could thus describe this as an emerging complex hyper-urbanscape, with multiple mobile localizations like a fluctuating archipelago of islands/cities. To employ a notion proposed by Keller Easterling, platforms could be seen as architectures of “digital extrastatecraft”, and their territories as a zonal technology that colonizes space through the management of time. Moreover, these city platforms promote computationally managed systems that can learn and adapt, self-evolve, and continuously self-optimize by collecting data without the need for “external” political or social intervention.

The emergence of this complex urbanscape prompts a reimagining of the existing infrastructural geographies of the city and of the labour underpinning the functioning of urban life. Platforms interact with existing infrastructures and environments, thus transforming the way the urban is governed and experienced through technology (Wiig & Masucci, 2020). These interfaces have now become ubiquitous, and this book also puts an emphasis on the necessity for the methodological and genealogical investigation of these phenomena, in order to more accurately grasp the transformations they undergo and influence.

An analysis of the territorialization of digital platforms (and of the new spatial arrangements and social relations they produce) requires an approach with a planetary perspective that is able to grasp how they interact, the frictions they produce, and the adaptations they require in the urban fabric. This is why in our research we studied platform operations on the ground in local urban settings. However, rather than considering specific urban case studies as meaningful in themselves, we have adopted a research approach that focuses on the continuities, resonances, and commonalities that platforms are producing on a large scale. This does not mean that specificities, differences, contextual and situated factors do not matter. On the contrary, we think that a trans-urban analytical approach should be able to emphasize the contextual dynamics by enlightening the common ground in which they are produced and the particular frictions emerging in the processes of territorialization (Cuppini et al., 2022).

There is a radical paradox: on the one hand, platform urbanism dismantles consolidated city forms and ways of life through digital and transnational process that have a dispersive effect—but thanks to the agglomerated effect of the urban nodes, and, on the other hand, platform urbanism concentrates the previously dispersed shapes of the web, creating city-like platforms as new agglomerated concentrations—but thanks to their infrastructural planetary operations.

Another significant aspect of our research methodology and theoretical framing was the interpretation of the urban-labour nexus. A vast amount of the literature indicates, albeit using different approaches, how the antagonistic labour-capital relationship “translates” spatially. Historically, the approach to this issue revolved around the city-countryside dichotomy, and many approaches have subsequently understood the issue in global terms with respect to the centre-periphery relationship. Even if this rigid representation has been gradually challenged over time, the central point is that space is treated as a strategic social construction for the generation of profits and thus for capitalist reproduction. Capital has a continuous need to reshape space, just as labour produces continuous encroachments from such spatial designs. However, the temporal aspect must also be added to this reading: space is continually temporalized as capital puts different times and speeds of valorization to use in the world market. The more production is based on exchange, the more crucial communication and transportation systems become. Thus, as stated above, platforms have become the new frontier of this infrastructural and logistical logic.

In The Platform Society, van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal address the infrastructural dimension of platforms in stark terms: composed of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft (known as the GAFAMs), they argue that the “infrastructural platforms” form “the beating heart of the ecosystem through which an infinity of other apps or platforms can be built” (2018, 20). These include a number of “sectoral platforms” that thrive through them. These can be from a particular sector or “serve niche markets such as infonews, transportation, food, education, health, finance or hospitality” (Ivi, 46). However, even if this binary division of platforms has its merits, and justifications in terms of method (and in some ways connects The Platform Society to Nick Srnicek's work), we believe it should be more nuanced. It seems to us more productive to conceive the infrastructural process of platform urbanism as a whole, highlighting its eco-systemic character.

Finally, it is important to note that speaking about platforms in terms of infrastructures does not mean we see them as a neutral or “technical” apparatus. The infrastructural dimension of platforms makes the paradoxical functioning of platform urbanism possible, allowing it to operate in an articulated manner to both concentrate and disperse the consolidated spatial arrangements. And, like all infrastructures today and in the past, digital infrastructures connect but at the same time restrict and impose particular movements. The combination of the urbanization of the internet and the flattening of cities provides the material and immaterial terrain on which new codes of power and new political forms are being defined today within emerging complex multi-spatiality.

3 Workers Characters and Strategies

The second crucial subject of our analysis is labour. The labour process was the field in which the research most deeply analysed the continuities, resonances, and commonalities that platforms produce on a large scale. Within the three years of the PLUS project, researchers conducted more than 230 qualitative interviews and hundreds of quantitative interviews with various stakeholders in the seven cities involved. Among stakeholders, platform workers also participated in all of the various focus groups, Social policy labs, and Communities of practice that were organized as part of the project. The outcomes of this multi-layered research process are discussed in the book.

In general terms, we could argue that platforms de facto introduced the figure of the “potential worker”, posing various challenges both from a theoretical and practical viewpoint. This figure lives in a situation of continuous flux, entering and leaving platforms in which labour intensity is never constant due both to market uncertainties and to the fact that there is a structural dimension of “overemployment” within platforms. Thus, “platform capitalism” goes beyond the wage labour/employee binomial, as Yann Moulier Boutang would call it (1998), for at least three reasons.

Firstly, while most platform workers are not wage labour, they are still essentially workers with all the duties of employees, even if platforms consider them to be self-employed. For example, due to rating systems, workers such as Deliveroo riders cannot chose to have a weekend off without losing their ranking position, which would have direct consequences on their shift allocation (although that situation is changing slightly after riders’ strikes).

Secondly, platforms create hierarchies within their ecosystems. They push for strong engagement by workers, with those who do not engage enough being partially excluded from work possibilities. For example, Airbnb strongly encourage hosts to allow guests to do “instant booking” in order to have a better position in terms of announcement visibility (thus, in terms of number of bookings).

Thirdly, the binomial wage labour/employee is also overcoming in relation to social security. Those who work with platforms have to completely shoulder the burden of their own social security. Thus, although they are essentially employees, platform workers do not benefit from any form of welfare and social security, unlike normal wage labourers. This results in phenomena such as multi-employment and multi-apping: some of the freelancers interviewed integrated platform labour with other jobs, thus guaranteeing social security coverage, while others, especially those in delivery and ride-hailing, operated on more than one platform to increase their possibility of getting orders.

When looked at in more detail, we see that within “platform capitalism” workspaces are changing, work modalities are transforming, and the distinction between working and not-working time is becoming increasingly blurred. Platforms have transformed cities into new spaces of work. As stated, we are witnessing a kind of urbanization of platforms as well as a platformization of the urban. “La rue est notre usine” (The street is our factory) could be read on many posters in demonstrations that have taken place in France since 2018. Indeed, urban spaces became the new workspaces as well as the “new terrain” of struggle for many people busy with the variegated world of platforms. Furthermore, despite the widespread rhetoric of the end of labour, work is far from having disappeared. It is simply parcelled out and extended. What is changing is not its substance but its modalities and, sometimes, workers’ perceptions. It is worth stressing here that many platform workers still absorb the official ideas and rhetoric of gig-work. In multiple interviews, we heard positive evaluations of the idea of “playbour” (“I like this job because I like to ride my bike and it allows me to work out…”), of “competition” (due to the ranking system and “personal score” in Uber, Deliveroo, Airbnb, and Helpling), and of “flexibility and self-organization” (“I bring my book and study in my breaks…”).

In the field of labour, we can reveal further features that are peculiar to some cities, though not exceptional. For example, fieldwork in Paris showed how some Uber drivers had to go into debt to pay for the car that allowed them to work to pay back the debt. This is a vicious circle also seen in other platforms (such as the case of Deliveroo in Bologna: indebtedness to buy an electric bike to make faster deliveries) and has produced complicated situations, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. This “financialization of the platform economy” impacts subjective relationships to work and also shapes (at least in some cases) the degree of engagement, subordination, and constraint.

The phenomenon of intermediary companies is also peculiar to some cities, although also not exceptional. Intermediation agencies such as Uber TVDE hire drivers in Lisbon to act as brokers between the platform and the workers. In similar terms, Airbnb sees the figure of the “Properties Manager” as an intermediary between the platform and the owner of the house/apartment/room. In such cases, the extraction of value from the work of a single driver or host occurs both by the platform and by the intermediary companies.

Another significant element is the role algorithms play offstage. Platforms often seem like black boxes with neither workers nor low-level managers knowing exactly how they work. Platforms are led by algorithms. While in some cases this is seen positively (for instance, by few female workers who argue that not having a boss in the flesh means they lessen the “continuous risk of sexual harassment”), the information asymmetry between employees and platforms mainly led to the algorithm being seen as a field of tension: workers would like to know more about how their shifts are allocated in, say, Uber, Deliveroo, or Helpling, with the opacity surrounding the algorithm contributing to inciting strikes.

We will now briefly examine strikes and workers’ actions before moving on to the next section on welfare and social security. As mentioned at the beginning of this introduction, various forms of resistance break the smooth surface of platforms. There are two strategies platform workers often adopt: the first we will describe as “exit”, and the second as “voice”.

The first refers to forms of escaping from platform rules, for example, avoiding strong management control techniques and creating a disintermediation between users and workers (e.g., establishing a direct enduring relationship between a user and a worker as could happen with apps such as Helpling, Airbnb, or Uber). This is also intertwined with the topic of the platforms’ relation with the informal economy, another issue that is examined in the book.

The second refers to voice-oriented and strike strategies, which are more common with platform workers who have a low-income level but experience high-control techniques with few possibilities of establishing direct long-term relationships with users outside the platform. These workers partially or totally refuse the narrative of self-entrepreneurship with its commission-based payment logic and ask the platforms to guarantee their common rights. Among the platforms investigated by PLUS, Deliveroo faces a huge amount of discontent and protest by riders, who are frequently organized in grassroots unions, such as the Riders Union (Bologna), CLAP (Paris), RidersxDerechos (Barcelona), and the IWGB (London). This effort at unionization was not limited to the local level but included multiple efforts to build transnational networks. A particular role has been played in this grassroots platform unionism by migrant workers, who are able to start organizing processes within their communities due to shared language, culture, and common social spaces.

4 Policies and Scenarios

The third and final point of our analysis is welfare. The innovations brought about by digital technologies are not limited to the spatial dimension of labour or its organization. Framing these transformations in terms of “platform capitalism” means that we look at them as part of a more general attempt to reshape society. For this reason, it is worth considering the effects of platformization on social protection. To be clear, we do not doubt that platforms convey opportunities. However, it is obvious that firms like Deliveroo or Uber pose large problems in terms of job continuity, income, working conditions, freedom of association, and the right to collective bargaining. Furthermore, these issues do not regard just a handful of digital companies, but represent general and urgent topics of public debate.

As many studies have demonstrated, and as we hinted at above, platform labour is characterized by sharp discontinuities in employment, a lack or absence of social protection, barriers towards unionization, and a lack of work-life balance. We have already highlighted how the pandemic provided an opportunity to analyse platform capitalism in an intensified and “pure” way, which is also true for issues related to welfare. Some platform workers noted the lack of economic aid they received while they were unable to work, and others had to deal with the necessity of providing their own personal protection equipment. Behind this is the fact that platforms generally based their labour policies on the idea that they are simply a marketplace matching supply with demand, or, if anything, just taking advantage of independent associates. So, refusing any or much of the duties ascribed to an employer towards his/her employees. The narratives of the gig and sharing economy that supported the growth of these companies contributed to both the outsourcing of corporate responsibilities and the individualization of welfare.

The territorialization of platforms into urban spaces corresponds to a simultaneous de-territorialization of other functions and duties. This is what Mark Graham calls conjunctural geographies, meaning “a way of being simultaneously embedded and disembedded from the space-times they mediate. These geographies ultimately allow platforms to concentrate and exert power” (Graham, 2020, 454). These digital companies grew through profiting from gaps in statutory protective legislation or delays in applying it, together with the difficulties public decision-makers had in grasping the innovative elements of these production processes. We could argue that these companies produced a platform-based market which aspired to be fully self-regulating, replacing the legal system, and, in particular, mandatory labour regulation.

Obviously, some of the issues we are referring to are not exclusive to platform labour, and neither are they brand new. Labour outsourcing and the spread of autonomous labour are part of a larger re-organization of labour in the West that started with the end of Fordism, which was based on welfare as a form of redistribution mediating between capital and labour. Understanding the paradigm as an exception means ignoring the fact that precarity could be the norm in capitalist societies (Neilson & Rossiter, 2008). According to Jan Breman and Marcel van der Linden, «the real norm or standard in global capitalism is insecurity, informality or precariousness, and the Standard Employment Relationship is a historical phenomenon which had a deep impact in a limited part of the world for a relatively short period of time» (Breman & van der Linden, 2014, 920). Thus, we could consider platform capitalism a further step in the contemporary process of informalizing the economy.

However, this is not a one-way phenomenon. Workers and policymakers may influence the development of platform capitalism from a platform-based market to a fairer more regulated market. As we have stressed above, in recent years we have witnessed not only the success of a new business model but also the flourishing of innovative and unpredictable forms of unionization. In many cases, workers had to deal with the difficulty of identifying their colleagues and meeting up with them, compounded by the anti-union approach of the companies and the presence of antitrust legislation that prohibits the formally self-employed from engaging in collective bargaining. Food delivery riders are undoubtedly the most well-known case due to the global dimension of the phenomenon and the radicality of the protests, but other attempts at the organization also emerged in other services, from Uber drivers to crowd workers.

At the same time, municipalities were the first public institutions to try to intervene in platform regulation, which was due to the urban dimension of the platform economy. These local attempts have been a fundamental testing ground for the development of state legislation (Italy, Spain) and supranational legislation (the EU “Directive on improving working conditions in platform work”). Readers will learn more about these experiences in the following chapters.

These protests and legislative initiatives generally revolve around the employed/self-employed dilemma: Should we understand platform labour as standard, or should we consider it as autonomous? Should we refer regulation initiatives to all platform workers or just to a specific segment? The dilemma’s solution is complicated by the impact of digital technologies and the fact that platform labour is spread across the urban space. One option has been to argue that platform labour is misclassified and is not in fact self-employment. Another option suggested has been to provide independent workers with a set of minimum labour protections, as some initiatives have attempted.

The crucial point for policymakers is to clarify if the contractual form of an employee should be considered a prerequisite for accessing social protection, or if, on the contrary, it would be more appropriate to call for protections even for those without an employment contract. From our point of view, whatever option is taken, it is crucial to ensure that platform workers have access to effective welfare. There is no doubt that national legislation historically guaranteed social protection just to standard workers. Nevertheless, this category has been deeply eroded over the years and we have already witnessed cases of platform workers being re-classified as employed without any real improvement in their working conditions.

Furthermore, our research demonstrated that each platform has its own way of urbanizing, not only its own conjunctural geography, but also its own subjectivity. Deliveroo riders and Airbnb hosts do not tell you the same story. This multiplication of types of labour is not only endured but is also sometimes enacted by workers according to personal or collective goals. In the end, the challenge seems to be to define universal forms of social protection capable of ensuring fair work for all without universalizing the Standard Employment Relationship of the Fordist paradigm. With this in mind, the PLUS project worked on two proposals: a charter of rights and the well-known issue of the universal basic income.

The charter of rights offers a cross-status protection, meaning that it is not anchored to a specific type of contract; its entitlement of a minimum level of protection applies to all people working through platforms irrespective of their employment status. The charter identifies a corpus of rights conceived of as modular, distinguishing between those to be assigned to “platform workers” and those to be assigned to a “person performing platform work”. The aim is not to propose a specific contract or law, but rather a model that can be tailored to particular legislative initiatives or collective bargaining actions. This combines a universalistic basis of safeguards with a selective approach to social protection that takes into account the different organizational modalities of different platforms, and the different links between platforms and workers.

The universal basic income has instead been considered by PLUS as a tool for softening the impact of discontinuity and empowering collective bargaining. During our research, much attention has been focused on possible ways of funding it. This would clearly require overcoming ongoing policies on taxation based on fiscal residency towards a nexus between a business and a place based on the concept of “significant economic presence”—so subverting the conjunctural geographies built up by platforms that until now guaranteed them the presence into a territory without assuming its regulation; and this would require also overcoming the imposition of a withholding tax on so-called “digital transactions”—blurring the distinction between proper labour and non-labour activities. These are all topics that are covered in the following chapters. Taken together, we hope that they provide an integrated analysis of platform capitalism, combining theoretical analysis with grounded research.