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.
