Platform Economies

Exocapitalism: economies with absolutely no limits

There is a touch of destiny with this one. We have real…

Design choices: Mechanism design and platform capitalism

Mechanism design is a form of optimization developed in economic theory. It casts economists as institutional engineers, choosing an outcome and then arranging a set of market rules and conditions to achieve it. The toolkit from mechanism design is widely used in economics, policymaking, and now in building and managing online environments. Mechanism design has become one of the most pervasive yet inconspicuous influences on the digital mediation of social life. Its optimizing schemes structure online advertising markets and other multi-sided platform businesses. Whatever normative rationales mechanism design might draw on in its economic origins, as its influence has grown and its applications have become more computational, we suggest those justifications for using mechanism design to orchestrate and optimize human interaction are losing traction. In this article, we ask what ideological work mechanism design is doing in economics, computer science, and its applications to the governance of digital platforms. Observing mechanism design in action in algorithmic environments, we argue it has become a tool for producing information domination, distributing social costs in ways that benefit designers, and controlling and coordinating participants in multi-sided platforms.

Implicit Feudalism — Rushkoff Archive

Too many of us think it doesn’t matter when a platform like X/Twitter has a single, all-powerful owner. Most of our online worlds are simply run by what we hope are benevolent dictators. After all, we figure, if we don’t like what they’re doing or allowing, we can just leave, right? But in most cases we’re just jumping from one rich dude’s idea for how the world should be to another rich dude’s idea for how the world should be.

The politics of ‘platforms’ - Tarleton Gillespie, 2010

Online content providers such as YouTube are carefully positioning themselves to users, clients, advertisers and policymakers, making strategic claims for what ...

Paul's Leaflets

There's a surprisingly nuanced discussion in development about the political economy of clients and servers in the Atmosphere

1% for the People

Capitalism is the undisputed powerplant of global prosperity. Since Adam Smith first described the “invisible hand” that allows economies to be efficiently self-organizing and self-renewing, every attempt to supplant it with a competing system has failed spectacularly.

Planetary carambolage: The evolutionary political economy of technology, nature and work

The following editorial introduces the special issue (SI) on “Work, Environment and Planetary-scale Computation in Political-Economic Evolution”. Here, however, we go beyond an outline of what each contribution to the SI addresses, and attempt to draw a more pronounced shared embedding of the arguments that have come to the fore. The original idea of this SI was to synthesize a range of contemporary global political-economic challenges, i.e. (1) technology (esp. digital transformation), (2) nature (esp. ecological crisis) and (3) work (esp. precarization via the evolving platform economy). The main argument developed in this editorial reflection focuses on the common ground and origin of those processes found in the complex evolution of capitalist development. We frame the latter by assigning it a new term, i.e. “planetary carambolage”.

The politics of purely client-side apps - Paul's Leaflets

There's a surprisingly nuanced discussion in development about the political economy of clients and servers in the Atmosphere

The politics of ‘platforms’

Online content providers such as YouTube are carefully positioning themselves to users, clients, advertisers and policymakers, making strategic claims for what they do and do not do, and how their place in the information landscape should be understood. One term in particular, ‘platform’, reveals the contours of this discursive work. The term has been deployed in both their populist appeals and their marketing pitches, sometimes as technical ‘platforms’, sometimes as ‘platforms’ from which to speak, sometimes as ‘platforms’ of opportunity. Whatever tensions exist in serving all of these constituencies are carefully elided. The term also fits their efforts to shape information policy, where they seek protection for facilitating user expression, yet also seek limited liability for what those users say. As these providers become the curators of public discourse, we must examine the roles they aim to play, and the terms by which they hope to be judged.

Systems: How the Ultra-Wealthy Think About Money - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Power: A Primer for Perplexed Economists

Let's Assume an Unfettered Marketplace of Ideas! Or Actually, Let's Not.

Capitalism Tech Stack Map — A Cross-Civilization Infographic (D3 Force)

CNCF Platforms White Paper

This paper intends to support enterprise leaders, enterprise architects and platform team leaders to advocate for, investigate and plan internal platforms for cloud computing. We believe platforms significantly impact enterprises' actual value streams, but only indirectly, so leadership consensus and support is vital to the long-term sustainability and success of platform teams. In this paper we'll enable that support by discussing what the value of platforms is, how to measure it, and how to implement platform teams that maximize it.

Positive Sum Worlds: Remaking Public Goods

An era of global protocols requires a visionary redefinition of public goods, in service of others.