The rise of the platform economy into statelike dominance over the lives of entrepreneurs, users, and workers.
The early Internet was a lawless place, populated by scam artists who made buying or selling anything online risky business. Then Amazon, eBay, Upwork, and Apple established secure digital platforms for selling physical goods, crowdsourcing labor, and downloading apps. These tech giants have gone on to rule the Internet like autocrats. How did this happen? How did users and workers become the hapless subjects of online economic empires? The Internet was supposed to liberate us from powerful institutions. In Cloud Empires, digital economy expert Vili Lehdonvirta explores the rise of the platform economy into statelike dominance over our lives and proposes a new way forward.
Digital platforms create new marketplaces and prosperity on the Internet, Lehdonvirta explains, but they are ruled by Silicon Valley despots with little or no accountability. Neither workers nor users can “vote with their feet” and find another platform because in most cases there isn’t one. And yet using antitrust law and decentralization to rein in the big tech companies has proven difficult. Lehdonvirta tells the stories of pioneers who helped create—or resist—the new social order established by digital platform companies. The protagonists include the usual suspects—Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Travis Kalanick of Uber, and Bitcoin’s inventor Satoshi Nakamoto—as well as Kristy Milland, labor organizer of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and GoFundMe, a crowdfunding platform that has emerged as an ersatz stand-in for the welfare state. Only if we understand digital platforms for what they are—institutions as powerful as the state—can we begin the work of democratizing them.
Author(s): Vili Lehdonvirta
Publisher: The MIT Press
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 290
City: Cambridge
Contents
1. Introduction
Three Thousand Years of History in Thirty Years
The Ancient Problem
Inspiration from Our Ancestors
How to Read This Book
Part I: Economic Institutions
2. Reciprocity: The Golden Rule in Cyberspace
Digital Cowboy
A Declaration of Independence
The Problem of Exchange
Evolution of Cooperation
Trouble at the Electronic Market
A Global Market for Labor?
Eternal September
Bodily Needs
3. From Reputation To Regulation: The Birth of a Giant
Echobay.com
Five out of Five
Bags and Bags of Envelopes
Blackmail
Dead People Don’t Write Reviews
A Universe of Rules
4. The Privacy Dilemma: Maintaining Order In a Masquerade
Mask of Dread Pirate Roberts
A Most Brazen Attempt
Holiday Surprise
Unmasked
The Privacy Dilemma
Your Virtual Passport
5. Death Of Distance, Resurrection Of Borders: Labor Markets in Cyberspace
The Tyranny of Distance
“You May Say You Attended Harvard . . .”
Same Work, Different Pay
Globalization in Cyberspace
The Edges of Clouds
6. Centrally Planned Free Markets: Programming a Soviet Union 2.0?
Eliminating Human Imperfections
A “Smarter” Marketplace
The Algorithm Becomes the Market
The Perfect Market
Badges and Nudges
Sleepwalking into Soviet Union 2.0
Optimal to Whom?
Part II: Political Institutions
7. Network Effect: From Digital Revolutionary to Everything Emperor
Dashed Ambitions
Liftoff
A Digital Revolution
“Egalitarian in the Best Sense”
“Amazon Has Crushed Another Little Guy”
El Comandante
8. Cryptocracy: The Quest To Replace Politics with Technology
Problem of Trust
Thwarting the Sybil Attack
The Most Dangerous Project
A Bug in the Machine
Software Update
Competing Interests
A Broken Market for Rules
Trusted Central Parties
Rise of Cryptocracy
9. Collective Action I: Workers of the Internet, Unite?
Artificial Artificial Intelligence
Turker Nation
Adult Content
“Not Enough for Anyone in Government to Care”
Digital Workers of the World
The Free-Rider Problem
“How Dare You Take from the Little Guys?”
Advent of Platform Politics
10. Collective Action II: Rise of a Digital Middle Class
Customers in over Twenty Countries
David versus Goliath
“I’m Going to Lose my Company”
“Team Up to Make Our Voices Louder”
Rise of a Digital Middle Class
Part III: Social Institutions
11. The Digital Safety Net: Social Protection and Education in a Platform Economy
Technological Unemployment
Certified by Google
Fraying Welfare State
Enter the Digital Safety Net
Engaging the Audience
Care by Amazon
People versus Profits
12. Conclusions
Understanding the Great Betrayal
Why Platforms Are Overtaking the State
States without Estates
Building a Digital Single Market
Deposing Digital Despots
A Failing Market for Rules
Essential Infrastructure versus Creative Anarchy
Platform Nationalism or Platform Cooperativism?
A Bourgeois Revolution
Writing a Digital Constitution
What We Owe the Founders
Acknowledgments
Notes
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Index
