Digital Emporiums: Evolutionary Pathways to Platform Capitalism

Abstract

In Janpath, a major thoroughfare at the heart of Lutyen’s New Delhi, stands a series of state-operated emporiums offering goods from across India. In a concretization of the political and economic relationships of the 1970s, the row of emporiums offering wares from specific Indian states sits across the road from the towering structure of the All India Central Cottage Industries Emporium. As reminders of the heyday of the command economy era under Indira Gandhi, Delhi’s handicraft emporiums continue to offer customers a consciously curated array of goods, enclosed within a tightly regulated space where the inefficiencies and hassles of everyday exchange are negated by the standardization of both prices and goods under the aegis of the state. They also deliver. A reminder of the rational promises of a receding era, these emporia in turn reference the retail emporiums that appeared in global metropoles at the end of the nineteenth century, heralding the era of the urban department store. Beyond its historical resonance as a grandiose sensory-retail experience, I propose that the emporium might serve us well as both a metaphor and a structural analogy for India’s emerging ‘platform economy’, through its component qualities and their attendant vectors: