 Srnicek's Platform Capitalism is an important contribution for understanding the economic structures of the current moment, given the dominance of the platform capitalism model (ideologically and economically), the centralization of power by Big Tech during the COVID-19 pandemic (adoption of digital tech), and the Big Tech Anti-Trust hearings in the U.S.
There are roughly three parts to Srnicek's investigation: 1) historicization of platform capitalism; the current manifestation of platform capitalism is the result of previous crises and as a part of the logic of capitalism; 2) a typology of the various platforms; and 3) the future of platform capitalism. Platform capitalism, while appearing as a novel emergence, is connected to the past few decades of capitalism. Srnicek focuses on three crises in capitalism in particular: the 1970s downturn, the boom and bust of 1990s, and 2008 financial crisis. Srnicek's story begins in the post-World War II period, marked by social democratic policies and a large manufacturing sector that provided stable employment for a large number of workers. Manufacturing at that time was marked by a "just-in-case" approach (in contrast to "just-in-time" manufacturing) that justified retaining workers and inventory in reserve. From the 1970s, competition from Japanese and German manufacturers led to an influx of manufacturing goods, a downward pull on prices of goods, and reduced profitability. Firms responded by slimming down their operations (moving from “just-in-case” to “just-in-time” manufacturing) and through a frontal assault on labour power and labour unions, leading to the outsourcing of jobs overseas and contracting labour on increasingly flexible and low wage contracts. The boom-and-bust period of the 1990s was marked by speculative investment in the Internet, which was still unmatched at the time of the writing of the book (2017). The amount of capital invested led to the construction of key digital infrastructure, like “millions of miles of fibre-optic and submarine cables… major advances in software and network design… and large investments in databases and servers” (p. 22). When the bubble burst, and the bust came, government response came in the form of “asset-price Keynesianism” (p. 24). Instead of deficit spending, the government cut interest rates, leading to investments of capital in financial assets and housing. Loose monetary policy is one of the legacies of the boom-and-bust period. Finally, during the financial crisis of 2008, the government took on large deficits to bail out Wall Street, turning “high levels of private debt … into high levels of public debt” (p. 26). Continuing the trend from the boom-and-bust period, key interest rates fell to near-zero levels. Due to the rise in deficits, federal governments started to impose economic policies of austerity, cutting budgets and raising taxes. In place of fiscal stimulus, governments began to create new types of monetary policy, principal among them quantitative easing, in which money is created by the central bank to purchase various forms of assets, lowering the interest rates of longer term assets and leading to investors seeking higher yields in riskier investments, like in the many untested tech companies in the market today. Meanwhile, the new dominant tech companies in the market are able to move intellectual property to low tax jurisdictions to evade taxes, draining government revenues even further, and leading to a vicious cycle of “tax evasion, austerity, and extraordinary monetary policies” (p. 33). While this is happening, there is trend towards precaritization of work and long-term unemployment. It is in the rubble of these historical and economic trends that platform capitalism is situated. Thanks in part to the boom-and-bust period of the late 1990s, there is a large amount of infrastructure to record, collect, and analyze behavioural data. Data can be used for the following functions: 1) algorithm development for competitive advantage; 2) “coordination and outsourcing of workers”; 3) “optimization and flexibility of productive processes”; 4) “transformation of low-margin goods into high-margin services; and 5) “data analysis,” which is “itself generative of data, in a virtuous cycle” (p. 42). Further technological advancements are expanding the type of data that can be collected and it is making data collection increasingly cheaper. Platforms are a new business model optimized to make use of the new raw material, data. Srnicek defines them as “digital infrastructures that enable two or more groups to interact” (p. 43) as intermediaries that enable user-generated content. Through the platform, businesses are able to record user interactions and user activities. Given these characteristics, digital platforms benefit from “network effects”, where “the more numerous the users who use a platform, the more valuable that platform becomes for everyone else” (p. 45)—social media sites like Facebook are obvious examples. The importance of network effects means that platforms naturally strive toward monopolies, given cheap marginal costs that allow them to scale rapidly. In contrast to the lean business models used by the manufacturing sector in the post-1970s era, platforms use “cross-subsidization” to attract and retain users, where some functions are given for free and are subsidized by other functions that generate the revenue. Finally, design considerations are important for platforms. Design attracts and retains users (i.e., UX) and, more importantly, design of platforms sets the ground rules for interactions and platform governance. Despite apolitical pretensions, platforms are both political in nature (as they represent a system of governance) and affect politics—this is hardly a controversial statement given the events of the past few years (e.g., Cambridge Analytica, the Rohingya genocide, etc.). Srnicek identifies five different types of platforms: 1) Advertising platforms: The first iterations of platform capitalism and the primary revenue generating model of Google and Facebook. 2) Cloud platforms: Cloud platforms offer services like storage, computing power, applications, etc. and are becoming basic infrastructure for the digital economy; also allows privileged access to data. 3) Industrial platforms: Platforms are entering traditional manufacturing; industrial IoT produces data and allows for optimization of production processes. 4) Product platforms: Product platforms rent out products; in the case of digital products, they take advantage of zero marginal costs for digital products (e.g., Spotify), while for physical products like Rolls Royce aircraft engines, data is used for maintenance and repair. 5) Lean platforms: Lean platforms like Uber and Airbnb are often assetless and embody the results of previous economic crises; they rely on precarious labour and are driven by the cheap availability of capital—they are rarely profitable. Srnicek ends with a discussion on the future of platform capitalism by focusing on intra-capitalist competition. As per the previous discussion, platforms tend toward monopolies to exploit network effects; these monopolies can be harder to overcome for new businesses due to access to data and established networks. Platform competitiveness is based on data collection and analysis, and the various great platforms tend to converge and encroach into each other’s markets to occupy key positions (e.g., Uber’s attempt to buy a mapping provider). As Srnicek writes, “companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Alibaba, Uber, and General Electric (GE) are also direct competitors” (p. 108). While there is a trend towards convergence, large platform companies are looking to silo their platforms and create enclosed ecosystems to tie their users to the platform, potentially leading “from an open web to increasingly closed apps” and “driving the internet to fragment” (p. 113). Srnicek calls for public platforms instead of mere state regulation of corporate platforms. These platforms would be outside of the purview of the state and would not function as a part of the state surveillance apparatus, instead, it would be controlled by the public. These could be offered as public utilities, and the data collected could used democratically, instead of being extracted by private platforms.
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 A completely egocentric novel: the first-person narrator (hardly ever named, cannot even recall the name) recounts his life since his infancy to his current stage of life, his early adulthood. His narration is marked by an excess of subjectivity, a surfeit of self-consciousness; the novel is a confession where he recalls and analyzes significant life events with the detachment and the precision of a surgeon with his scalpel. Some otherwise important facts of his individual existence are passed off casually as extraneous details and are only mentioned in relation to his self-development: readers learn only on page 85 that he has a brother and sister--Mishima reveals that this very same sister dies with a short and unfeeling comment later on in the novel.
The confession is marked by doubt. The novel begins with a stunning statement: "For many years I claimed I could remember things seen at the time of my own birth..." Is the confessor behind the mask endowed with an unforgetting memory? Or is his memory faulty and events conveniently modified? Is his narrative to be trusted? The thrust of the narrative (and the aforementioned self-development) is centered on the protagonist's exploration of his deviant sexuality. His earliest unquestionable memory at the age of four sets the theme for the rest of his life: it is of a "young man... with handsome ruddy cheeks and shining eyes, wearing a dirty roll of cloth around his head for a sweatband... carrying a yoke of night-soil buckets over one shoulder, balancing their heaviness expertly with his footsteps... He was a night-soil man, a ladler of excrement" (p. 8). Toward the night soil man he felt "a piercing sorrow, a body-wrenching sorrow. His occupation gave me the feeling of 'tragedy' in the most sensuous meaning of the word. A certain feeling as it were of 'self-renunciation,' a certain feeling of indifference, a certain feeling of intimacy with danger, a feeling like a remarkable mixture of nothingness and vital power..." (p. 9). The swarthy, handsome, well-toned, working class man redolent of sweat and a fatal destiny--these are the men to whom the confessor is invariably drawn; these are the men whose flesh he craves.(Note: This type maps on exactly to the sailor that the adolescent protagonist in Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea idolizes). Both Mishima himself and the protagonist are bourgeois and educated (consumer of representations and spectacles, and not engaged directly with the world); they are of smaller stature, weakly and sickly; in body they are nearly directly opposite to their objects of sexual desire. Could this be the source of their attraction, the ressentiment of those imprisoned in a frail constitution against those endowed with an overwhelming and generous physicality? The confessor details some of his sexual fantasies; these were graphic and were sometimes difficult to read. The most stunning among them is a clandestine banquet in a cellar, where a beautiful and muscular young man is stripped naked and presented to a handful of guests, faces hidden in the shadows. The confessor kisses the young man's lips and then sticks a silver fork into his heart--"a fountain of blood struck [him] full in the face" (p. 97)--he then starts to carve "the flesh of the breast, gently, thinly at first..." (p. 97) It is his awareness of deviance and his experience of estrangement with the rest of his adolescent peers that leads to the excess of self-consciousness. The confessor is forced to reconcile himself to his deviant sexuality--this is his true life. He becomes aware that he must always play a role to hide his aberrant subjectivity. While normal men play their role naturally, without doubt and self-comment, his is a practiced act. Against all odds the confessor eventually falls in love with a woman--this is a "pure" love without the hungering desires of the flesh. The novel ends with a powerful confrontation between the two contradictions.  Second reading. François is a renowned scholar of Joris-Karl Huysmans whose life (intellectually, physically, social relations, etc.) has been in a steady fall since his greatest accomplishment, his doctoral thesis. Now in his forties, his daily routine consists of eating microwave dinners, watching YouPorn, and reading novels in the company of a lot of alcohol.
Submission is written alongside Huysmans' oeuvre. To confront despair, decline, and suffering due to dyshidrosis, hemorrhoids, and other ailments, François follows Huysmans and attempts a conversion, only to fail. (Houellebecq commented somewhere in a lecture that his original title of the novel was "The Conversion.") Meanwhile, it is the time of the elections, and a fierce political battle unfolds: the centre quickly dissolves and the race is between the Islamic party led by the charismatic Mohammed Ben Abbes (in partnership with the socialist party) and Marine Le Pen's party. On the ground, radical elements of both parties--Islamic extremists and French nativists--engage in violent conflict. The Islamic party wins the election; this victory starts to be replicated by other Islamic parties in numerous other countries in Europe. There are a few alt-right like elements with Houellebecq that I think is reflected in the novel: an othering gaze is directed from early on in the novel to "a small knot of chillingly serious Chinese women who rarely spoke to one another..." (p. 16) as well as "veiled North Africans, all just as serious and inscrutable" (p. 17). There are elements of nativist anxiety--there is the discourse of civilizational conflict between Islam and the West and the anxiety of cultural and demographic capture by the growing Muslim population. I also noticed that the well-connected and formidable Marie-Françoise (specialist in Balzac) is relegated to the role of housewife in the second half of the novel. Now retired and in charge of the kitchen, she is described as "thriving" and wearing "an apron bearing the humorous phrase 'Don't Holler at the Cook--That's the Boss's Job!'" She is mute and allows the men to talk. Despite these elements, Houellebecq's main target of critique is the incompetent self-serving elite that has led the decline (in civilizational terms) in France and in the West. The title Submission refers to this submission by the French elite and intellectuals, who submit easily to the new political party, as well as submission as a core concept in Islamic religion (this is explained near the end of the novel through the character of Robert Rédiger). Unlike the previous elites in power, the new and competent Islamic government becomes a revitalizing force for France, François, and, by extension perhaps, Europe. With hopes for a religious redemption abandoned, François also submits to the new regime and gains bourgeois happiness. His own reading of Huysmans changes accordingly: François concludes that the topic of Huysmans' novels is really bourgeois happiness.  One of Kawabata's masterpieces. An account of a Go match between the Master and his challenger Otaké of the Seventh Rank, which, back in those times, was played over several sessions. This particular match is played over several months.
The story ends with the defeat of the Master--Kawabata takes enormous liberties with the dimension of time in his narrative. This is, however, a mere symptom of a larger formal decision, one which shows how inventive Kawabata could be as a writer. Kawabata writes his story through first-person narration as a journalist covering the Go match: the narrative is given the veneer of journalistic objectivity. In one instance, Kawabata intertwines portions of the newspaper articles that he himself wrote about the match. Only after page 25 is the first-person narrator's name revealed--Mr. Uragami--and additional personal details are sprinkled in subtly throughout the narrative, as if they are besides the point. Such was my surprise at a minor expression of subjectivity by the first-person narrator on page 18, when the narrator is with the Master outdoors on a late-autumn day: "'Newlyweds, all of them, I suppose,' I said to the Master, feeling an envy that approached resentment" (p. 18). For the careful reader, the semblance of journalistic objectivity begins to fade as the narrative continues. This happens in two ways. Mr. Uragami, as an acquaintance of both players, actively intervenes and plays a crucial role as a mediator to ensure the continuation of the match. On a second and more important level, despite the pretensions to an objective journalistic account, Kawabata--through the humble and unobtrusive Mr. Uragama--is the great creator who is actively shaping a particularly Kawabatan conflict between Japanese tradition and modernity. For Kawabata, Go is a definitive expression of the Japanese spirit--through the foil of a foreign Go player, Kawabata extricates Go from its Chinese roots and claims it for Japan: "It is clear that in Go the Japanese spirit has transcended the merely imported and derivative" (p. 118). For Go qua the Japanese spirit, modernity is presented as a wholly antagonistic approach: "It may be said that the Master was plagued in his last match by modern rationalism, to which fussy rules were everything, from which all the grace and elegance of Go as art had disappeared, which quite dispensed with respect for elders and attached no importance to mutual respect as human beings. From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation. The road to advancement in rank, which controlled the life of a player, had become a meticulous point system. One conducted the battle only to win, and there was no margin for remembering the dignity and the fragrance of Go as an art. The modern way was to insist upon doing battle under conditions of abstract justice, even when challenging the Master himself” (p. 52). And so, the match between the Master and the challenger Otaké of the Seventh Rank is transmogrified into a symbolic battle between two contrasting approaches. In the writing of this battle, Kawabata reveals himself to be the great Master of Japanese literature, who tells a story of Japanese tradition and modernity by, ironically, combining his exemplary typical Japanese prose with modern literary formal inventions. |
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