Thomas Klikauer and Meg Young for BuzzFlash: Online Platformism Can Be Seen as Productive Units Located Within the Information Sector of Capitalism
February 12, 2020
By Thomas Klikauer and Meg Young
Today, platformization affects virtually all types of work and even many non-work related activities. Yet, the separation between platformization and non-platform work is not clear-cut. Beyond that, there is a great variety of productive mode which tests the validity of conventional concepts of work, labor, and exploitation found under traditional industrial capitalism.
One might define platform work as activities of laboring subjects who are directly involved in generating profits for corporate platforms. What justifies any grouping of them together is that they are crucial to the way how corporate platforms generate profits, and “makes” money – extracting surplus value from workers.
Platformization can also occur behind a platform (e.g. Amazon). This happens when, for example, through service workers (delivery workers, warehouse workers at Amazon), industrial workers (e.g. hardware builders at Amazon), and informational workers (e.g. software developers at Amazon).
Yet, platformization also takes place more direct. This happens when online platforms take on forms of self-employed owners of mini businesses selling physical goods and services such as, for example, via Airbnb, Amazon sellers, etc. These also work on informational goods. This occurs when, for instance, authors share music through Spotify or when App developers work for Pay Store or App Store.
Beyond that, there still is the infamous gig labor operating in services when, for example, delivering food for Deliveroo, drive for Uber, and do cleaning for TaskRabbit. Gig workers can also work on informational goods when developing software, write content, create audiovisual content but also do micro-tasking via Upwork. This also includes crowd workers working for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
Lastly, there are prosumers. In the area of informational goods, they create contents for Facebook, YouTube, etc. Yet, they are also found in what might be called “attention services” where audiences are paying attention to ads on Facebook, YouTube, etc.
Essentially, online platforms can be seen as productive units located in the information sector of capitalism. They employ informational workers but also industrial and services workers. Informational workers are unavoidable for the running and maintenance of platforms. Since this is regarded by management to be a “core business”, most of these workers are still employed in-house.
Some industrial workers are also needed, for instance, to develop hardware. Some platform corporations certainly require service workers, warehouse, and delivery workers. Meanwhile, industrial and services workers are often, or at least to some extent - outsourced. Most commonly, platform corporations are seen as having only a measly workforce. This is certainly true for some well-known and rather large platforms but, it is not the same in other cases. Amazon, for example, employed 1.3 million people in 2020.
The simple fact that platform companies typically profit from underpaid so-called independent-contractors (a fake form of employment) and unpaid prosumers, can obscure the fact that thousands and thousands of equally underpaid workers are employed under more or less formalized contracts laboring away behind these platforms. As an Amazon worker said, they resent the fact that I am not a robot.
In another setting, the so-called self-employed owners work for platforms on which physical and informational goods are bought, sold, and rented. Yet, it might still be somewhat controversial whether or not to see the work of these “owners” can be described as labor. But in the case of micro-businesses, it may well be justified to label those activities as platform work. This is particularly the case when their commercial activity entirely depends on Internet platforms run by corporations.
There are two types of self-employed owners working via platforms. Firstly, there are those providing services, renting, or selling physical goods. These are the people who sell commercial goods that they have produced themselves via commercial platforms. In other cases, they rent their houses through accommodation platforms.
Secondly, there are also people who are producing informational goods, for example, when musicians upload their recordings to Spotify and similar platforms. There are also individual software developers delivering Apps through Play Store or the App Store.
In this, the productive process prior to its commercialization takes place outside of corporate platforms. This aids the common hallucination that platforms simply enable commerce, instead of showing what they really do, namely production and consumption. Yet, the raison d'être of the productive process is set in motion via platforms for a profit.
The production of an App or the rental of an apartment, for example, is seen as part of a platform-governed work process. In this, small units of capital are subordinated to the near total control of platforms, their algorithms, and their rankings.
Prosumers perform the known combination of the production and consumption of informational goods. They work mostly during leisure time and without any necessary monetary compensation. To engage prosumers in helping the platform to be profitable, YouTube, for example, successfully appeals to fantasies of personal enrichment. Yet, in reality, a whopping 97% of the so-called creators do not even earn enough to pass the poverty line.
Beyond that, prosumers also consume content and, most importantly, they consume commercial ads. YouTube has about 2.3 billion monthly active users worldwide. They watch well over five billion videos per day. This is a valuable source of attention. And, it means that the audience is sold to advertisers.
When the audience becomes a commodity that can be turned into money, media and communication experts calls this audience commodity. The audience becomes the main product produced by media that earns their primary revenues from advertisers. Internet users consuming ads are laboring and, thereby creating value for corporations while being exploited.
Lastly, prosumers give away rafts of important data, simply by sharing personal preferences, locations, liking videos, ranking drivers, and so forth. The relevance of these seemingly minuscule contributions actually defines capitalist platforms when profiting from these data.
Prosumption quickly becomes the main activity carried out on specific platforms (e.g. YouTube, Instagram, etc.) This kind of activity must not be swept under the carpet when exploitation in platform capitalism is discussed.
To discuss platform capitalism, it remains imperative to distinguish between the capitalist platforms themselves and specific productive activities carried out by different subjects. There are various kinds of workers and prosumers involved in online productions.
Most platforms tend to resort to several different ways in the exploitation of labor. They also exploit different kinds of subjects in several different productive processes. YouTube, for example, generated close to $20 billion of revenue in 2020 – a 30% increase year-on-year through its platform. Monetization mainly takes place through ads displayed on the billions of videos uploaded daily by YouTube’s millions of content creators or prosumers.
Marxian theory would suggest that YouTube’s $20bn are achieved through the exploitation of its rather small workforce. The ratio between revenues and employees is sometimes used as a measure of labor productivity or labor exploitation. In the case of YouTube, the company is making several millions per employee per year.
This is a gigantic figure compared to McDonald’s (US$66,000), Starbucks (US$84,000), and even to Accenture (US$87,000). It becomes clear that either YouTube workers are incredibly productive and heavily exploited, or – more likely – there must be an alternative sources of value that the company profits from.
Firstly, there still is exploitation through alienating work supplied by workers employed by YouTube. They are paid for the development of software. This software is then used repeatedly without additional compensation for the workers who created it in the first place.
Yet, exploitation through reproduction remains the key to understand the contribution of YouTube’s millions of prosumers. Out of them, only a very small proportion receives some form of income if at all. In fact, this is rather measly. But it is camouflaged through the platform’s success in spreading the ideology that YouTubers get rich – a few do, but most do not.
Meanwhile, many of the “never-to-be-rich” prosumers give up their content – always under YouTube’s terms and service conditions. Even more perfectly, this will attract online users to YouTube’s platform where they, of course, consume YouTube’s advertising. YouTube also earns money through the asymmetric exchange between the low commercial value provided by the firm for offering videos and the value of attention of the users who consume them. In a near-perfect trap, this is exploitation through attention. It makes YouTube very rich!
In the end, YouTube and many similar online platform companies combine different methods of exploitation, namely, the exploitation of workers and prosumers but also the exploitation of users. Together, these shape a rather complex scheme – or scam – of capital accumulation under platform capitalism.
Platform capitalism’s exploitation through reproduction and through attention do not replace but complement exploitation. Exploitation through online reproduction and through attention are especially useful to platform capitalism. In short, seeing exploitation from this angle is highly useful to fill the gap where traditional Marxist’s explanations of exploitation fall too short.
To secure all this, capitalist platforms run particular ideologies. One of the main ideologies is to frame workers as so-called “independent contractors” or, worse, as “partners”. This ideology is designed to obscure asymmetric – non-democratic or even anti-democratic – labor relations, as well as the continued existence of exploitation. In platform capitalism, this is never detached from the ideological framework of the so-called entrepreneur of the self.
Platform capitalism’s ideology also includes the neoliberal theme of individual freedom. This comes despite the fact that, and in particular, during times of a reduction (if not outright destruction) of the welfare state – workers are forced to work. If not, workers – essentially most of us – are set to glide into utter poverty. Virtually, the same faked freedom applies to “choosing” their working hours. In reality, workplace despotism prevails.
Yet, there is next to no negative freedom – the freedom not to work does not exists under capitalism. As Nobel Prize Winner Anatole France said in 1894, under capitalism, the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread. Neither neoliberalism nor platform capitalism has changed that. If anything, it has become worse as inequality is on the rise.
Worse, under platform capitalism, working time is ultimately governed by algorithms. To camouflage the inhumanity of algorithmic management, for example, many platforms fancy the ideas and ideologies usually associated with the non-commercial lifeworld such as, for example, community (read: instrumental networks), creativity (read: expanding audiences), openness, affectivity, happiness, individualism, playtime, enjoyment, etc. (read: they help to trap unpaid and underpaid workers).
Noticeably, in most of the through-platform work, neither payments nor incomes are necessarily measured in terms of labor time. More important is, for example, piecework-based payment or per-click payments (e.g. click-baiting). This feature together with the relentless drive towards outsourcing resembles both the putting-out system, as well as piecework described by Karl Marx in 1867.
This indicates the formal subsumption of labor under capital (then) as it continues under platform capitalism (now). In today’s activities performed through online platforms, online workers and prosumers become owners of some of the means of production. Yet, there are, of course, enormous differences between owning a corporation and owning a house, a digital piano keyboard, a home office, etc. all of them alleviate online platforms from providing these means.
Under platform capitalism, workers’ ownership of some means of work (intellectual ability, creativity, etc.) and (to a very limited extent) some means of production (a home PC, laptop, etc.) aren’t enough for workers to end their dependency on the capitalist class that still owns platform companies and corporations. It is this class that continues to own online platforms and intellectual products like software, Apps, etc.
Yet, platforms themselves – in the form of software, hardware, storage capacity, and, more importantly, attention flows, etc. – have – to a large extent – become the new means of production under platform capitalism. All of them are controlled by capitalist firms, profit-making companies and large multi-national corporations valued at trillions of dollars: Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), Tencent, Alibaba, Netflix, Salesforce, JD.com, Booking.com, Baidu, etc.
In the end, exploitation under platform capitalism carries on to the benefit of online corporations. It has not ended – as capitalism continues. This relationship of capitalist exploitation continues to shape, and at times, even redefines work relations. Online workers and prosumers give their labor time while the ownership of most of the means of work remains with online platform companies and corporations. Yet, platform capitalism can also located exploitation outside of traditional work relations.
Platform capitalism has moved exploitation deep into leisure time. It often takes place in corporately- defined settings defining working time and value-creation for companies and corporations. These relate not all too straightforwardly to each other under platform capitalism. Despite all these changes to work, workers, prosumers, working time, exploitation, etc. under platform capitalism, this new variation of capitalism remains a thoroughly capitalist enterprise dedicated to the sole purpose of capital: profit-making. The appearance of online platforms has not changed this fact. Here is how to change all of this: WorkersCoop.
Follow BuzzFlash on @twitter
Continue the conversation at the BuzzFlash Nation group on Facebook