Online platforms are an unstoppable force that tracks our every move to give us new signals in the form of advertisements to get us to consume more.

The phase shift to informational capitalism also entails a new organizational logic for¶ economic exchange, which revolves around platformization. Unlike the fictional construct of a market, which is dematerialized and universal, platformization entails more concrete and specific computational and sociotechnical arrangements. Generally speaking, platforms are information intermediaries that use data-driven, algorithmic methods and standardized, modular interconnection protocols to facilitate digitally networked interactions and transactions among their users. The platformized arrangements that have emerged within the political economy of informational capitalism also exploit those structures in additional, more specific ways.¶ The early decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed the emergence of dominant platform firms with seemingly limitless power to configure new, public-facing information-based services on a global scale. They facilitate, intermediate, and control a blend of old and new activities that together define the user experience of the information economy, including but not limited to ecommerce, access to software and digital tools, access to information and entertainment, search, social media, and cloud storage of digital resources. The platform business model represents a distinctive strategy for harnessing legibility to provide access to multiple user constituencies.19 Generally speaking, the dominant platforms (along with a host of smaller platforms) rank order content (including advertising) for presentation to users. They use highly granular data collected from and about users and user populations to optimize the rank ordering process for engagement, which, in turn, maximizes the platform’s ability to extract surplus value in the form of digital advertising revenues, and they design digital devices and interfaces in ways that encourage automatic, habitual use and acquiescence to data collection.20¶ Scholars and regulators alike have puzzled over the seeming mismatches between platformized arrangements and preexisting legal frameworks. For the most part, such work has focused on the effects produced by dominant platforms in their capacities as self-interested economic actors. Work in antitrust and competition law has explored the way that so-called multi- sided platform businesses disrupt conventional predictions about competitive discipline within markets.21 Work in organizational anthropology and in labor and employment law has probed the ways that dominant platform businesses are reshaping the landscape of work, replacing formal employment structures with outsourced and gig labor arrangements and permeating both old and new work arrangements with continual, invasive worker surveillance.22¶ Viewing the effects of platformization through the lens of competition law or labor law, however, tends to overshadow other important questions about the computational and sociotechnical logics underlying the political economy of informational capitalism. Platformization represents both a privatized extraction strategy and a core organizational logic, and the latter does not depend (entirely) on the former.¶ Most basically, platforms represent “strategies for introducing friction into networks.”23 They exploit principles of network organization, within which hubs and nodes structure flows of interaction and participants reap benefits as the networks grow in size and scale, as well as the affordances of digital information and communications networks, which are structures for the exchange of modularized packets of information. Atop open networks, platforms use other technical protocols to define networked spaces in which their users can conduct particular activities and to structure those spaces for ease of use.¶ The giant platforms that now dominate the emergent global political economy of informational capitalism have attained that status by leveraging the power of network-and- standard-based architectures and modular communication protocols in a particular way. More specifically, they have pursued so-called “ecosystem” strategies for layering proprietary data collection and exchange protocols systematically across the underlying infrastructure of the open internet. Those strategies rely on software developer kits (SDKs), which are off-the-shelf utilities prepared and distributed by platform proprietors to website and mobile app developers, and which function as “boundary resources” that enable critical kinds of system extension and control.24 Developers use the SDKs to enable a wide range of platform functions—for example, location mapping, ad placement, and universal login. Platforms use them to harvest data from website and mobile app users, transmit it to platform data centers to augment already-existing user profiles, and push profile-driven functionality and content back to users via websites and mobile apps.25¶ The resulting disaggregated, modular architectures have reached levels of penetration that are self-reinforcing and that inhere in their capabilities for tracking, targeting, and tailoring at scale. For individual and organizational users, they foster experienced personalization and seamless convenience. For developers, they facilitate relatively effortless development and deployment of compatible apps and utilities. For publishers and advertisers, they promise targeted messaging calibrated to user engagement. Every incremental expansion further embeds the data-driven business models into which app developers, website partners, advertisers, and users are recruited, supplying the continual streams of data that drive personalization and enable algorithmic tuning of recommender systems to optimize for engagement and ad targeting. Heterogenous webs of actors are united by dispersed, algorithmic supply chains that cross conventional organizational boundaries—and that frequently resist conventional approaches to accountability.26¶ Platformization, however, does not simply represent a new way of organizing transactions and interactions among members of the public at scale. It also represents a more widely subscribed organizational logic that involves harnessing algorithmic management and standardized, modular interconnection protocols for seamless access to and exploitation of economic resources within enterprises of all kinds.27 Examples include credit reporting agencies, payment processing intermediaries, specialized services for employee recruitment and human resource management, portals for licensing rights to access and use copyrighted content, dashboards for financial trading, and many more. Preeminence in a particular field may flow from control of a defined resource— as, for example, with trading platforms for the major financial exchanges or platforms for licensing musical performance rights. Conversely, a platformized service can be vulnerable to disintermediation if a rival service manages to position itself as the intermediary of choice—and, for that reason, platforms of all sizes use contracts and technical protocols to define both collected data and algorithmic logics as zones of exclusivity.28¶ Both old and new platformization strategies now coevolve with the disaggregated, modular data architectures developed and operated by the dominant platforms. So, for example, a wide range of third parties with business models based on multi-dimensional commodification routinely seek and receive permission to embed their own SDKs in popular websites and apps.29 Others rely on platformized advertising dashboards to supply them with targeted pools of potential customers, and still others scrape publicly available data from the social web. Of special importance for the coming decades, both dominant platforms and new entrants now rely on both platformized data architectures and the computing power amassed by a few dominant platform entities to power ventures in neuromarketing, biometric surveillance and generative AI.30¶ Platformization accelerates the phase shift to informational capitalism in two ways that complement and reinforce the processes of multi-dimensional commodification described in Part 3, and that work to embed economic power structurally and epistemically.¶ First, it offers users (what appear to be) powerful new kinds of transactional flexibility, which, in turn, is both enabled and configured by underlying modular protocols for data exchange. That result parallels what Gillespie described in the context of social media as a “raised, level service” affording limitless freedom for self-presentation, which, in turn elides the necessary work of policing the platform’s protocological edges.31 The apparent freedom with which this chapter is concerned, however, is the freedom to configure and reconfigure datafied resources in new and profitable ways that facilitate both their use and their multi-dimensional exploitation—while, at the same time, tethering the conditions of resource access and use to the platform and its imposed constraints.32 ¶ Second, platformization facilitates and perfects a type of nonmarket ordering that inheres in the ability to command fine-grained, data-driven, algorithmic intermediation of information exchange. The most dominant digital platforms now function as fundamentally nonmarket mechanisms for tuning access to information and allocating goods and services.33 The disaggregated, modularized datastructures resulting from platformization also embody distinct kinds of functionality and flexibility. They can be made to extend vertically, in stacks that superimpose data-driven logics over a wide variety of underlying inputs, and/or laterally, in webs that extend tendrils of linkage and control into domains that formerly were more distinct.34