Mazzucato’s approachable Mission Economy attempts to rethink and reform capitalism, presenting an alternative to its current (perhaps on the sunset) neoliberal orientation. This new capitalism sees the public sector take back its role as a key partner and shaper of the economy.
 
Our current political-economic structures are unable to address the global problems facing the world today, most important of which are problems related to the environment. She identifies four sources of our dysfunctional capitalism.
 

1. The short-termism of the financial sector, which finances itself (e.g., stock buybacks, real estate, etc.) rather than financing productive sectors—in the U.S.A. and the U.K. “only about a fifth of finance goes into the productive economy” (p. 16). The system leads to debt-driven speculative bubbles, which the public has had to pay for when the bubble bursts.
2. The financialization of business, where business profits go to focusing on short-term imperatives of the financial sector rather than investments into workers, capital investments, research, etc. Cheap interest rates and debt is used to maximize short-term shareholder value, instead of investing into stakeholders and preparing for emergency situations like COVID: Boeing spent 74% of free cash flow on stock buybacks and ended up requiring government assistance when COVID-19 struck the U.S. economy.
3. The climate emergency and our fossil fuel-based economy.
4. The role of the government under the dominant economic framework, where the government is left to be a tinkerer rather than a shaper of the market. For Mazzucato, it is important to rethink the role of the government, as it is the only institution with enough capacity to spur on changes at the scale necessary to solve our current problems.

 
Given the responsibility of dominant economic frameworks on our troubled status quo, Mazzucato looks to dispel erroneous myths about the government, naming five myths in particular.
 

1. Businesses are value creators and risk takers, while the government should only facilitate and de-risk. Through investments in high-risk ventures, the government has funded numerous innovations that the private sector was too risk-averse to invest in (e.g., experimental drugs, renewable energy, and most recently, fusion technology). The private sector tends to socialize the risks while privatizing the gains
2. “The purpose of the government is to fix market failures”: in Market Failure Theory (MFT), markets fail due to information asymmetry, positive externalities, or negative externalities, and the government should only step in to fix inefficient allocation.
3. “Government needs to run like a business”: governments should reduce the scope of their activities and sell off public domain services and programs to the private sector by privatization or contracting these activities out.
4. “Outsourcing saves taxpayer money and lowers risk”: Outsourcing and privatization leads to gains in efficiency—better services at a lower cost; instead, costs have increased and the public has ended up private sector beneficiaries (e.g., consulting companies)
5. “Government shouldn’t pick winners”: “picking winners” refers to government shaping the economy through industrial policy, investments, etc., due to a supposed inability to pick winners wisely—historically, this is inaccurate (e.g., Ha-Joon Chang’s Kicking Away the Ladder).

 
In place of these myths, Mazzucato writes that value is the cumulative result of the public sector, private sector, and civil society. She asserts a new vision of the economy, one which confronts and addresses our contemporary grand challenges through collaboration and innovation—the mission-oriented approach.
 
Using the case study of the Apollo programme, which directly contradicts the aforementioned myths and put a man on the moon almost 60 years ago, Mazzucato extracts six key attributes: 1. Vision and leadership with a sense of purpose; 2. Innovation through risk-taking and experimentation; 3. Organizational agility and flexibility (as opposed to governmental siloes); 4. Unpredictable and serendipitous spillover effects (a whole host of innovations from portable computers, wireless headsets, baby formula, camera phones, and home insulation were enabled by the Apollo programme); 5. Budgets based on outcomes and not costs; and 6. Partnership between the business and the government. She then looks to apply these learnings to some of current grand challenges of today, elaborating at some length on the application of the approach on the Sustainable Development Goals, the digital divide, and health and wellbeing.
 
Mazzucato ends by proposing seven new principles to spur on the mission-oriented approach:

1. Value is something created collectively: Value is created collectively by various stakeholders in the public for the public interest, and are not the result of self-interested individuals trying to maximize utility; public goods are not corrections to market failures. Current frameworks only assign value to things with a price; in this new framework, we need to assign value to the production of public goods.
2. Governments shape markets and do not just fix markets: Contra MFT, governments should begin by asking “what sort of markets do we want? (p. 173) and design policy to shape such markets.
3. Organizations need to have dynamic capabilities: Organizations (particularly governments) should be dynamic, agile, and not be afraid of experimentation. Organizations should encourage development of internal human resources through a culture of learning.
4. Outcomes-based budgeting: Missions require a longer-term horizon; instead of budgeting based on costs, budgeting should be based on outcomes.
5. Distribution should share risks and rewards: Current approaches socialize risks and privatize rewards for the private sector; in Mazzucato’s framework, value is created collectively and should be distributed more equitably. Mazzucato calls for pre-distribution instead of re-distribution through taxes or benefits. This can be done with a public-wealth fund that distributes a citizen’s dividend, government equity in firms that benefited from public funding, conditions that come with government funding (e.g., training for employees), all which connects value creation with value distribution.
6. Partnerships benefit all stakeholders: The current focus is on maximizing shareholder value, but we need an approach that benefits all stakeholders and a new framework that benefits the common good; this is particularly important with the environmental challenges on the horizon.
7. Participation and open systems: Mission-oriented approaches require engagement with the wider public to have discussions about societal values and to get public buy-in for missions. They require active public engagement to co-create and imagine futures together. An open system needs to be in place to reflect external feedback.

​Quite a landmark study in the literature that redirects the current narratives on automation into a new direction. I’m not sure how the “automation theorists” (as Benanav calls them) will respond to his study. I’m sure the academics will be forced to engage, while the consultants and pop theorists will continue to spew brand-market content (“research”).
 
I begin with a brief summary of the automation discourse, although it has, in recent years, been widely propagated in the public sphere: technological developments are disrupting the labour market, displacing workers, and threaten to (or promise to, depending on ideological inclinations and positionality) automate a large portion of jobs. For some writers in the field, these technological developments are exponential (e.g., Kurzweil), promising vertiginous changes in the near future. The outcomes will disrupt the basic functioning of capitalism, leading to “a new form of life that does not organize itself around wage work and monetary exchange” (p. 7).
 
Supported by data and rigorous scholarship, Benanav shows that the cause of job loss is the lack of growth in productivity, not the uncontrollable growth of productivity that is the result of technological development and automation. Benanav proposes a simple equation to capture the relationship between rates of employment growth, productivity growth, and output growth, which is true by definition: Δ output - Δ productivity = Δ employment, or the rate of growth of output minus the rate of growth of productivity equals the rate of growth of employment.
 
In the narratives of automation theorists, the rise of labour productivity was responsible for negative rates of employment in the manufacturing sector, leading to de-industrialization; in fact, de-industrialization happened due to slowing rates of output beginning in 1973. De-industrialization began as a phenomenon in the Global North and soon spread throughout the world not because of technological growth, but because of worsening overcapacity. In the post-WWII era, the U.S. shared its technologies with countries like Germany and Japan, which pursue export-led national development, leading to overcapacity in the global market, and depressed prices worldwide. In this context, firms responded by globalizing production as more countries competed to enter into the global supply chain. In an interesting reversal, the countries that have suffered less from de-industrialization are those that have robotized more rather than less—high degrees of automation have led to competitive advantage in world markets, helping workers retain their jobs.
 
The manufacturing sector is important due to the sector’s importance in the overall economy. Benanav shows that manufacturing output rates are closely related to the overall national GDP growth rates, given that “in terms of gross output—which unlike value added includes the costs of intermediate inputs (that is, the goods and services consumed by firms)—manufacturing’s “footprint” on the wider economy is significantly larger” (p. 35). The current sluggish growth in the global economy is due to the lack of another sector to replace the manufacturing sector (despite the hype around the ICT sector, I suppose). Overcapacity and decline of manufacturing output has led to a decline in levels of investment, and subsequently, a decline in demand for consumption and reduced levels of hiring. The historically low interest rates in the previous decade and a half have led mostly to financialization, stock buybacks, dividends etc., that characterize financialized capitalism. Due to the growing bubbles of financialized assets, Japanification is a looming threat.
 
With this said, Benanav does acknowledge the potential of technology to affect the demand for labour, but low levels of investment and low costs of labour in a slow economic growth environment make technological automation a secondary cause, and not the primary one. Additionally, in the current ecosystem of technological development, firms incentivized by profit are unlikely to invest in full-automation technologies. Instead, leading tech companies are driven more by the logic of surveillance capitalism—“rather than focus on generating advances in artificial general intelligence, engineers at Facebook spend their time studying slot machines to figure out how to get people addicted to their website, so that they keep coming back to check for notifications, post content, and view advertisements” (p. 40).
 
Theories of automation predict high unemployment rates. But instead of high unemployment rates, there is underemployment and precarity as a larger number of workers crowd into the service sector. The service sector exhibits different characteristics than the manufacturing sector, as there are lower rates of productivity growth and less opportunities for expansion. In fact, only by industrializing the sector has productivity increased, demonstrating the importance of the manufacturing sector once more. The service sector is a stagnant sector in the economy, reliant on the growth the overall economy. And without productivity growth, service sector workers are forced to accept suppressed wages to work, unless there is concerted political action to change the playing field.
 
In light of his diagnosis of the under-demand for labour, which again, is due to industrial overcapacity, de-industrialization, and underinvestment, Benanav re-evaluates some of the popular policy proposals discussed in public discourse. Speaking on Keynesian policy proposals, he notes that, contrary to historical (common sense), “the era of counter-cyclical spending began in earnest in the 1970s” (p. 67); prior to this, the manufacturing sector in the post-war era was already characterized by strong labour demand. (An aside: it may be for this reason that Benanav holds an unorthodox view on financialization, particularly for someone on the left—it seems to me that in his view, financialization occurred due to the lack of productive investment opportunities, and not due to the neo-liberal turn.) He does return to Keynes and his discussion on economic maturity or the “secular stagnation,” in which “it would make more sense to intervene to shrink the labor supply rather than to stimulate labor demand, increasing leisure rather than output” (p. 69). However, this would require socialization of investment levels, as opposed to the current system where private investment can threaten a capital strike. The only way out of this conundrum would be through strong social movements, which is lacking in the current environment.
 
Benanav is also skeptical of UBI as a policy proposal. In a low-growth environment, he fears that UBI will likely take on the right-wing variant that dismantles the remains of the welfare state without reorganizing production. With current environmental problems, one is unable to outgrow the problem of labour surplus—“only a conquest of production, which finally succeeds in wresting the power to control investment decision away from capitalists, hence rendering the capital strike inoperative, can clear the way for us to advance toward a post-scarcity future” (p. 79).
 
In the final chapter, Benanav sketches out his vision of a post-scarcity world of co-operative production, where there are greater individual freedoms in the form of more free time for all. As he notes, “ for a post-scarcity society to come into being, a literal cornucopia is not required… abundance is a social relationship, based on the principle that the means of one’s existence will never be at stake in any of one’s relationships” (p. 89).
 
Additional notes:
 

1. How can economically undeveloped countries pursue development without the manufacturing sector?
2. In the post-COVID-19 world, marked by a decline in globalization and neo-liberal economic orthodoxy, there are debates about repatriating of supply chains and returning manufacturing jobs to the Global North. How might this interact with the problem of over-capacity in global markets on the national level?

 

 

​Great study exploring micro-work and a new class of micro-workers, both of which have emerged from the needs of AI, mediated by crowdworking platforms.
 
These new workers are the digital equivalents of the petty proletariat, doing all forms of precarious piecemeal work to sustain bare life. They bear the burden of stagnant economic growth, deindustrialization, and the neo-liberalization of the economy from the 1970s and the subsequent growth of subemployment and informal employment. While informal employment was the norm for the global South, it is now becoming the norm for the Global North as well, and with microwork sites, Jones writes that “platform capitalism brings both the logic and realities of informality to the very heart of accumulation as a new norm” (p. 29).
 
Micro-workers are a necessity for the functioning of AI, but are obscured and ignored beneath the glitzy, hype-based, human-less promise of AI. AI and machine learning requires a large number of data labellers to make the data legible for AI algorithms and microwork platforms step in to redistribute the work to a growing army of precarious micro-workers. A vicious cycle governs this relationship—AI automates portions of jobs, leading to a growing number of micro-workers, who are involved in the further development of AI algorithms. In the process, good jobs turn into unregulated, informal, and badly paid work that is not bound by legal frameworks.
 
The general consensus from neoliberal organizations like the World Bank frames micro-work as a developmental opportunity for the developing world—Jones’ account demonstrates that this is anything but the case. Wages are often unpaid or are gamified into tokens and rewards, long fallow periods of time are spent hunting for jobs rather than completing them, and after all of this, power asymmetries allow employers to withhold wages for workers. In some cases, unbanked workers are paid in gift cards, and “the platform comes to resemble a kind of digital company town” (p. 53).
 
In this new labour arrangement, work undergoes a transformation: just as the artisanal craftsperson in the past turns into a commodified modern worker with limited contributions to the entire production process in the industrialized economy, with micro-work, modern professions “dissipate into a cloud of tasks” (p. 59). As this shift occurs, there is hyper-alienation of workers, “divesting workers of the capacity to know what they are doing and to what end” (p. 65). A troubling conclusion, given the use of microwork platforms by organizations like the Pentagon—some micro-workers in war-torn areas may be involved in the digging of their own figurative graves.
 
Jones ends the book thinking about the form that labour struggle could adapt to in this new world, where there is “a capitalism without unions, worker culture and institutions” (p. 72) and fluid and geographically dispersed working arrangements (p. 84). To this end, he examines a wide variety of global wageless movements, blockades, and strikes that diverge in form, action, and demands from the unions of the past.
 

A short manifest that presents an alternative vision for society centred on “universal care,” which is “the ideal of a society in which care is front and centre at every scale of life” (p. 26) and in which we are all responsible for care. The definition of care, in this context, is not only hands-on physical and emotional care, but also “a social capacity and activity involving the nurturing of all that is necessary for the welfare and flourishing of life” (p. 5). By putting care at the centre, the Care Collective puts themselves diametrically opposite of our current neo-liberal political-economic system, which focuses on the care-less pursuit of maximizing economic growth. The manifesto demonstrates how care could be at the centre of multiple levels of our society.
 
On the level of the family, the dominant model of the family is the patriarchal nuclear family form, where care providers are gendered and care recipients are confined to family members. Drawing on alternative models of kinship—African American communities, LGBT movements—and the ethics of care of groups like military medics, the Care Collective advances the concept of “promiscuous care” (p. 33). In their words, promiscuous care “is an ethics that proliferates outwards to redefine caring relations from the most intimate to the most distant” that is “extensive and experimental” and “indiscriminate” (p. 41). It recognizes that care can be provided by and for people of varying kinship relations, and, speaking to the climate crisis, recognizes that non-human entities are also deserving subjects of care.
 
On the wider level of the community, the Care Collective suggests that there are four core characteristics of caring communities. The first characteristic is mutual support, which refers to the localized and neighbourly forms of mutual care. The second characteristic calls for reclaiming public spaces and combatting neo-liberal privatization. The third characteristic is resource-sharing and offers the idea of a “library of things.” The last characteristic states that caring communities are democratic communities; specifically, the Care Community calls for support for local co-operatives, municipalism, and in-sourcing (as opposed to out-sourcing) of critical functions.
 
Care needs to be supported by the state. The Care Collective defines the caring state as “one in which notions of belonging are based on a recognition of our mutual interdependencies, rather than on ethno-cultural identity and racialized borders,” where “their first and ultimate responsibility should be to build and maintain their own sustainable infrastructures of care” (p. 59), which directly critiques current state formations based on identity-based forms of belonging and liberal capitalist ideology. Importantly, the caring state is also a reimaging (and not a mere return to) the Keynesian welfare state. Instead of a paternalistic state that deepens dependencies, the caring state “enables everyone to cultivate… ‘strategic autonomy and independence’” (p. 64) and create conditions for democratic participation. The caring state will also help to advance some of the other aspects of caring communities; for example, it could create the conditions of a shorter work week to further the capacity of individuals to care.
 
In terms of the economy, the Care Collective makes a clear distinction between the market logics and care logics. They argue that the two are incommensurable; commoditized care through the market distribute care unequally and the values of individual self-interest do not align with the mutuality and patience associated with the values of care. To restore care logics, the Collective calls for demarketising care infrastructures and re-regulating markets and defetishization of commodities through more localized, democratic forms of production.
 
Finally, the Care Manifesto ends with a call to care on a global scale for the non-human world through an ethics of everyday cosmopolitanism, which is “promiscuous care on a global scale” that “moves our caring imaginaries… to the furthest reaches of the ‘strangest’ parts of the planet” (p. 95) and recognizes our condition of interdependence with other human and non-human beings.  

​An amazing, accessible work of scholarship. Wood’s The Origins of Capitalism contests the dominant “commercialization model” of economic development, which “begs the question” by assuming the development of capitalism as an inevitable result while recounting the origins of capitalism. In the “commercialization model,” rationally self-interested individuals exchanged goods and services with each other for all of human history; a specialized division of labour develops; this is supplemented by technological development in production. Capitalism becomes the end stage of a natural evolution in the narrative—a quantitative increase and not a qualitative break—when homo economicus is liberated from “unnatural” limitations (i.e., feudalism). Free from political, cultural, societal, etc. obstacles to economic rationality, the market and commercial society signifies “the perfection of freedom” (p. 16) for the rational self-interested human being.
 
Towns and their inhabitants—the town-dwellers or burghers (bourgeois)—occupy a special place in the commercialization model. In this narrative, towns and their rational bourgeois inhabitants are thought to have been relatively autonomous; their pursuit of mercantile activity is said to have slowly broken through and overcome the unnatural imposition of feudalism on “human nature.” Following this logic, a strange slippage occurs and the bourgeois (town dweller) becomes conflated with the capitalist, as it is in the contemporary usage of the word.
 
In her history, Wood locates the origins of capitalism in a specific time and place: in the English countryside. Prior to capitalism, rural peasants had their surplus labour appropriated from them through extra-economic means, or “by means of direct coercion, exercised by landlords or states employing their superior force, their privileged access to military, judicial, and political power” (p. 95-96). Extra-economic appropriation can be distinguished from appropriation under capitalism, which happens by “purely ‘economic’ means” (p. 96). In the latter system of appropriation, direct producers must sell their labour-power on the market for a wage to access the means of production and for their own reproduction (basically, to live); in this system, capitalists do not need direct coercion (or extra-economic powers) to appropriate surplus labour.
 
Very specific structural aspects of English agriculture weakened the extra-economic powers of the English elite class while giving them increased economic powers of surplus extraction. Additionally, in English agriculture, a large tenant farmer population was dependent on renting land, which increasingly became priced according to the market, not tradition. Given these circumstances, tenant farmers competed on the market for access to land and for access to consumers; these market imperatives obligated tenants to improve productivity. As Wood remarks, the market is an imposition, not a vehicle for liberty. Tenant farmers who were more productive gained additional access to land while others lost access completely; rural England became a society of larger landowners and the dispossessed, leading to the “famous triad of landlord, capitalist, tenant, and wage labourer” (p. 103).
 
The concept of “improvement” (the word “improve” finds its origins in acting for profit—one can think of it roughly as “into-profit”) formed alongside the new ideology of agrarian capitalism. The new ideology brought forth its philosophers and philosophy. Wood demonstrates this with an extended discussion of John Locke’s Theory of Property, which justifies enclosure of the commons if it is done to improve the property in terms of exchange value, or commercial profit.
 
Contrary to prevalent histories, agrarian capitalism then supported the development of industrial capitalism—the former preceded the latter. Dispossessed wage labourers (without access to land and social reproduction) sold their labour in the market and formed the first market of mass consumer goods and were sustained with a more productive agricultural sector. As capitalism and its exigencies for profit and productivity spread outward from England, Wood claims that this “compelled other countries to promote their own economic development in capitalist directions” (p. 142). A single spark can start a prairie fire.
 
After her rereading of the origins of capitalism and her dismantling of the commercialization model, Wood devotes the final section of the book to discuss the implications for studies on capitalism and imperialism, capitalism and the development of the modern nation-state, and modernity and post-modernity (she wants to salvage the Enlightenment tradition)—this goes beyond the scope of the present book review

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.

​I keep hearing this phrase 'the Fourth Industrial Revolution' being thrown around without knowing exactly what if refers to so I decided to read a book about it. This book is written by Klaus Schwab the Founder of the World Economic Forum, the organization that hosts the ultra exclusive Davos Conferences, so one has a sense of how he is positioned in society, and how his positionality influences his views.

Schwab claims that the Fourth Industrial Revolution will "entail nothing less than a transformation of humankind" (p. 1) through technologies that bridge across the "physical, digital, and biological worlds."

It is unlike the other industrial revolutions due to the "size, speed and scope" of the transformations, and he makes a good case for believing so. The transformative potential of the Fourth Industrial Revolution can either be an opportunity or a disaster for contemporary society. (We can already see the signs of the transformation in the form of precariats who may have been middle class workers a generation ago.) However, as he points out, access to the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution will not be equally distributed: 17% of the global population lack stable access to electricity and half the global population lack access to the internet, which means that they do not experience the second and third industrial age.

Schwab divides technological innovations of the Fourth Industrial Age into three categories: physical (autonomous vehicles, robots, new materials), digital (IoT), and biological (CRISPR). The Fourth Industrial Age is disruptive because of the potential combination of these technologies.

These technologies have vast implications for the economy, for society, for individuals, nation-states etc. One interesting thing I've noticed is how apolitical his POV is. Schwab writes about issues like climate change as a matter of negative externalities that can be solved through technology. His explanation for wealth inequality is the destructive effect of new technologies and automation, which substitute capital for labour. One can compare his narrative with David Harvey in his book on neo-liberalism for a completely oppositional narrative.