Platform Capitalism: Data as Raw Material
Classified in Technology
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Cloud Platforms
Cloud platforms enable outsourcing much of a company's IT department. This pushes knowledge workers out and often automates their work. Data analysis, customer information storage, and server maintenance can be moved to the cloud, providing the capitalist rationale for using these platforms.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) was developed internally to handle the company's increasingly complex logistics while building a massive logistical network.
Industrial Platforms
As data collection, storage, and analysis become cheaper, more companies bring platforms into traditional manufacturing. The most significant attempt is the 'industrial internet of things' or 'industrial internet'. As factories implement industrial internet components, a major challenge is establishing a common communication standard, ensuring interoperability, especially with older machinery.
Product Platforms
These developments enabled new on-demand platform business models: product and lean platforms. Product platforms are how companies attempt to recuperate the tendency towards zero marginal costs in some goods.
Lean Platforms
Lean platforms operate through a hyper-outsourced model. Workers, fixed capital, maintenance costs, and training are outsourced. All that remains is minimal control over the platform, enabling monopoly rent.
Conclusion
Twenty-first-century capitalism has a new raw material: data. Platforms have become a dominant way to organize businesses, monopolizing, extracting, analyzing, using, and selling data. Old business models had limited data extraction capacity from production or customer usage. This new form intertwines with long-term trends and short-term cyclical movements.
While lean platforms seem short-lived, other examples point to a shift in how capitalist firms operate. Enabled by digital technology, platforms lead and control industries. At their peak, they have prominence over manufacturing, logistics, and design, providing the landscape for the rest of the industry.