2.1. Democratising Platform Monopolies

How they work

Digital technologies are at the heart of the ongoing technological transformation we see all around us. Since the spread of Internet technologies from the 1990s onwards, our lives have been enriched with an explosion of digital technologies and devices, our ways of communication have shifted and our modes of coordination have undergone rapid change.

The digital transformation encompasses many positive elements and opportunities to improve people’s lives. Our access to knowledge is growing, it is easier to communicate and connect with others, and novel creative spaces have opened up. The digital economy has created many new products and services and strengthened connections across the world. However, this transformation has also yielded ambivalent and negative effects. The communication revolution has brought us overwhelming complexity, the spread of misinformation and collective nervousness. The digital economy is automating jobs and consolidating monopolistic structures.

Many of these negative aspects, however, do not follow from the properties of digital technologies as such, but rather from the ways in which they are used and governed, i.e. the societal structures and contexts of these technologies. The current state of capitalism has led to surveillance and platform monopolies forming technological empires with illegitimate power over the lives of billions of people.

The market dominance of a handful of platform businesses relies on two core principles — the network effect and the lock-in effect.

The network effect is quite simple: the more people use a certain platform, the more valuable it becomes for everyone. The lock-in effect is also well known to people using e.g. social network platforms: the more you integrate the service in your daily life, the more dependent you become on the service. Extraction of big data from the growing user base is key to this huge market dominance. Every person who uses digital services is creating a valuable economic and social resource in the form of personal data.

The underlying economic structures, worldviews and cultures – which have gone global – take their users’ attention as the product to be sold to the highest bidders. The data that is extracted and privatised is used to constantly manipulate individual and collective behaviour. These systems sell our freedom to destroy it. In a standard Silicon Valley sales pitch, people are not citizens with rights, virtue and dignity, but consumers to be manipulated by marketing, and data points to be tracked and sold as commodities.

Vast digital infrastructures and datasets have been built and privatised in the hands of a tiny and largely unaccountable economic elite. These very datasets are then used to shape and train automated systems that are being offered back to us “as-a-service”.

Work formerly executed by both experts and low-skilled-workers is now done by users, who create valuable data that is constantly fed back into the system. Workers are not compensated for the data which they generate on the job, and in so doing, train their own robotic replacements.