A Platform Society

Abstract:
This chapter seeks to define the developing platform economy from a societal perspective, including the aspect of proprietorship, which forms a challenge both regarding transparency and accountability, but also fundamental aspects of datafication, scalability, automation, centralisation, and commercialisation.

The societal effects of a few platform-based corporations (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) are analysed, including the relationship to smaller, newer, platform-based companies that occasionally try to compete with them while often being dependent on them, or getting acquired.

The importance of studying the type pf business model on which a platform’s growth or administration is based is here argued for, in order to be able to understand the logics of its growth, for example into multiple branches. Not only does an increasing number of social sectors and industries become dominated by digitally originated platform operators; also traditional institutional actors are increasingly adopting data-driven platform logics – utilising and analysing consumer data in order to predict particular outcomes in order to automate and outsource decision-making.