Expansion of the internet and capital technologies sustains algorithmic thinking into policy making itself. These technological forms of growth bracket out black life for the sake of sustaining market efficiency and the super exploitation of blackness. Reject their form of predatory inclusion and prefer the alternatives approach towards resistance.

An early reader of this article posed a provocative question: is there anything analytically distinct about the Internet? My answer revealed my priors. “Of course the Internet is distinct,” I wanted to say. But that is arguing from an embarrassingly basic logical fallacy. The question of what the Internet does analytically that, say, “capital” or “economy” or “culture” or “organizations” does not already do is important. My answer is debatable, but the debate is worthwhile. I do not know if the Internet adds something analytically distinct to our social inquiries, but it adds something analytical precision. Other constructs capture important dimensions of social life in a digital society. For instance, one can argue that Silicon Valley is a racial project (Noble and Roberts 2019; Watters 2015) or a sociohistorical construction of racial meanings, logics, and institutions (Omi and Winant 2014). White racial frames (Feagin 2020) or color-blind racism (Bonilla-Silva 2006) can elucidate how ironic humor about Black people, Muslims, and immigrants in online gaming platforms reproduces “offline” racism (Fairchild 2020; Gray 2012). These are just two examples of noteworthy approaches taken to studying Internet technologies and “mainstream” sociological interests (i.e., economic cultures and discourses, respectively). Still, sociological practice does not systematically engage with the social relations of Internet technologies as analytical equals to the object of study. If there is anything particular about Internet technologies for sociological inquiry, we should make it explicit. And once explicit, we should give it the same theoretical care as states, capital, and power. Daniels (2013) points us in the right direction when she argued that, “the reality is that in the networked society . . . racism is now global . . ., as those with regressive political agendas rooted in white power connect across national boundaries via the Internet, a phenomenon that runs directly counter to Omi and Winant’s conceptualization of the State as a primary structural agent in racial formation.” Daniels named to the global nature of both racism and the networks of capital we gesture to when we say Internet or digital. It is an argument for bringing back the political economy of race and racism. Internet technologies are specific in how they have facilitated, legitimized, and transformed states and capital within a global racial hierarchy. An app with which underemployed skilled labor sells services to customers (e.g., TaskRabbit) might be a U.S. racial project. But the capital that finances the app is embedded in transnational capital flows. Global patterns of racialized labor that determine what is “skill” and what is “labor” mediate the value of labor and the rents the platform can extract for mediating the laborer-customer relationship. Even the way we move money on these platforms— “Cash App me!”—is networked to supranational firms such as PayPal and Alibaba (Swartz 2020). Internet technologies have atomized the political economy of globalization with all the ideas about race, capital, racism, and ethnicity embedded within. An understanding of the political economy of Internet technologies adds a precise formulation of how this transformation operates in everyday social worlds: privatization through opacity and exclusion via inclusion. Both characteristics are distinctly about the power of Internet technologies. And each characteristic is important for the study of race and racism. Understanding platform capitalism helps us understand how these two characteristics are important. Internet technologies have networked forms of capital (Srnicek and De Sutter 2017; Zhang 2020), consolidated capital’s coercive power (Azar, Marinescu, and Steinbaum forthcoming; Dube et al. 2020), flattened hierarchical organizations (Treem and Leonardi 2013; Turco 2016), and produced new containers for culture (Brock 2020; Noble 2018; Patton et al. 2017; Ray et al. 2017). By that definition, the Internet has amplified and reworked existing social relations. Platform capitalism moves us toward the analytical importance of Internet technologies as sociopolitical regimes. Platforms produce new forms of currency (i.e., data) and new forms of exchange (e.g., cryptocurrencies), and they structure new organizational arrangements among owners, workers, and consumers (see “prosumers”). Even more important for the study of race and racism, platforms introduce new layers of opacity into every facet of social life. So-called mate markets move from neighborhood bars to dating apps, moving family formation behind a platform’s velvet rope (Hobbs, Owen, and Gerber 2017; OllierMalaterre, Jacobs, and Rothbard 2019). It transforms public education into “online delivery,” locking student-teacher-school interactions into privately controlled black boxes (Woolcock and Narayan 2000). “Smart cities” extract our routine activities from public life, which shapes democratic access to how our communities are governed (Brauneis and Goodman 2018; O’Neil 2017; Walsh and O’Connor 2019). A colleague recently bemoaned the difficulty of negotiating with Facebook for data on political attitudes. Many sociologists share her lament. In our routine work we realize that different rules produce and govern data, from survey to observational, than the rules even 20 years ago. That is but a minor example of the myriad ways platform capitalism’s opacity is qualitatively distinct. That opacity has a logic. Pasquale (2015) argued that ours is a “black box society.” Administrative opacity is a deliberate strategy to manage regulatory environments. It shields organizations, both public and private, from democratic appeals for access and equity. As the state legitimizes the use of digital and algorithmic decision making, it also creates new data worlds (Gray 2018; Milan and van der Velden 2016) to which few sociologists have access. The inaccessibility of these data is part of their value to state and capital interests. Private data worlds where decision making can be veiled from democratic inquiry fuel economic and political commitment to more datafication. This brings about more secrecy. Sometimes, a firm or organization performs secrecy just for the sake of secrecy. This reinforces its ability to do so and its right to do so (Seaver 2017). Pasquale outlined three types of secrecy strategies. One of those strategies, obfuscation, is particularly relevant to the study of race and racism. Theoretically, obfuscation operates much like willful whiteness that can always claim ignorance of statistical discrimination, for example, because it owns the means of discovery. Obfuscation does not mean that someone or some organization does not know these data. It means that the information is difficult to access and often couched in needlessly complex technical jargon or process. As we privatize public goods, Internet technologies promise cost savings (usually by reducing labor) and increased efficiency of whatever task is at hand. Those Internet technologies introduce a web of data extraction and valuation that has significant economic value (Zuboff 2015). Obfuscation becomes a technique of privatization through two processes. One, it extracts data that would have previously been public, publicly available or legally discoverable. Two, it expands obfuscation as a logic, even in organizations or institutions that have a public mandate. When full privatization is not possible, obfuscation privatizes information by making it inaccessible in practice. Information is the vessel for social actions and social facts. If information is inaccessible, the objects of everyday life are too. Although secrecy and means testing for information have always been features of the administrative state and of capital, platform capitalism is about the scale of secrecy, the value of secrecy, and the logic of obfuscation. By thinking about the politics of the Internet technologies embedded in the current political economy, we more precisely capture a set of social relations than occurs when Internet technologies are tangential to our analyses. Thinking about the analytical utility of the Internet also brought to mind one of the most vexing dialectal tensions of racism under platform capitalism. The Internet expands. This “pervasive expansion” (Castells 2010) is near total. It is no longer a question of whether one is “online.” Whether or not one is online, one’s life chances are shaped by online (Fourcade and Healy 2013). That settles the thing. The expansion requires bringing people into the social relations of Internet technologies. That can happen as a user (Ritzer 2015) or as a site of extraction (Amrute 2016) or by producing a surplus population of users and nonusers (McCarthy 2016). This expansive quality sets us on a crash course with a fundamental understanding of what race does. Race (as deployed by racism) excludes. It also devalues and stratifies. But exclusion is one of the most studied aspects of race and racism in social science. The racialized social hierarchy produced these Internet technologies. Also, Internet technologies became a dominant tool of capital because of their ability to expand markets and consumer classes. To both expand and exclude, the platform-mediated era of capitalism that grew from Internet technologies specializes in predatory inclusion. Predatory inclusion is the logic, organization, and technique of including marginalized consumer-citizens into ostensibly democratizing mobility schemes on extractive terms One of the clearest articulations of predatory inclusion comes from work on education, where educational access and its attendant social rewards are extended to excluded groups on extractive terms (Dwyer 2018; Eaton et al. 2016; Seamster and Charron-Chénier 2017). With higher education, predatory inclusion looks like expanding “access” to higher education (and its relation to labor market and status returns) by offering online college degrees that both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations market to African American women (Cottom 2017). When those African American women disproportionately enroll in these institutions, they most often do so by taking on student loans. Some of those loans are publicly subsidized and others are from private lenders. These students’ loans have been shown to be harder to pay off, easier to default on, and more likely to reach negative amortization than student loans taken out at other kinds of institutions by other kinds of students (Scott-Clayton and Li 2016). African American women’s inclusion in higher education comes at a high individual price and with a significant profit to the financial caretakers of that extraction. Predatory inclusion happens not only in education. It operates through credit schemes, consumer debt (Charron-Chénier and Seamster forthcoming) and small business lending (Nopper 2010). It frames how minorities are “included” in homeownership schemes that pervert the value of ownership because of bad loans and racist social policy (Taylor 2019). Although not explicitly named, another example is found in the “gig economy.” This is where waged work has become harder to secure and surplus labor is nominally included in the “digital economy” on extractive terms. These schemes could happen without Internet technologies. But they happen using Internet technologies, and Internet technologies have made these cases more efficient. Moreover, platform capitalism generates the logic, incentives, and capital for these predatory inclusion practices. Whether they use the Internet to affect these practices, the logic of capital that financializes through algorithmic means at a scale made possible because of network technologies makes these particular processes of the digital society