This is the first event of Platforms & Labour speaker series, coordinated by Assistant Professor Rafael Grohmann and Associate Professor David Nieborg. The event is open to all students, faculty and staff.
Speaker:
Dr. Niels van Doorn is Associate Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and one of the founding editors of the Platforms & Society journal. He led the ERC-funded Platform Labor research project (2018-2023) and is currently working on a related book project: The Platform Fix. He has published widely on how platforms and platformization are implicated in the reproduction of capitalist social relations.
Description:
Analyses of platform capitalism tend to adopt a narrow conception of capitalism as an economic system rooted in the relentless drive for capital accumulation. These critiques mostly focus on platform business operations, highlighting the logics and impacts of data capture, algorithmic labor control, and value extraction that afford platform companies their competitive advantage, market-making power, and rentier-like status. While these accounts have been illuminating and necessary, they are also incomplete and prone to universalizing conclusions. As an alternative, our research team has introduced the analytical approach of “actually existing platformization” (AEP, see Van Doorn, Mos & Bosma 2021) to show how platforms – despite being digital and frequently transnational in scope – are embedded in specific geographies, social worlds, and institutional settings. Methodologically, as I will discuss in this talk, AEP advances a “platform-adjacent” research agenda that analytically prioritizes the situated reproductive practices and relations which sustain platform firms as well as their various user and “stakeholder” groups (Van Doorn & Shapiro 2023). To this end, the notion of the “platform fix” suggests that platforms offer provisional and partial solutions to these groups, which to different degrees and in specific ways face capitalism’s intensifying reproductive crises (Van Doorn 2022). A platform fix does not only offer new avenues for capital accumulation – i.e. the common focus of geographical political economy scholarship mobilizing the “fix” concept – but also provides (often tenuous) infrastructures for the reproduction of capitalist social relations. I will discuss how, by marketing their tech-driven reproductive “fix” to urban households, municipal governments, and local businesses, platforms across sectors have sought – with varying degrees of success – to gain institutional legitimacy and embed themselves in the everyday political and moral economies governing cities.
Co-Sponsored by: Platform Work Inclusion Living Lab (P-WILL), FLOURISH and DigiLabour
Save the dates for upcoming events in the Platforms & Labour Speaker Series:
- Friday, October 4: Digitizing Mental Health Work, with Pablo J. Boczkowski
- Tuesday, November 19: Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labour Powering AI, with Mark Graham, James Muldoon and Callum Cant
