The rise of the platform economy has become a major source of debate in
both advanced and developing economies. Driven by the spread of mobile
devices, growing access to the internet, the availability of venture
capital, and the economic strategies of many governments, internet-based
economic transactions have rapidly grown during the last decade, a
period in which Uber, Airbnb, Upwork, Mechanical Turk and many other
platforms have risen to worldwide prominence. Though the effects of
platforms are as yet uncertain, there is widespread agreement that the
platform economy is likely to have far-reaching effects on the structure
of the retail sector (as e-commerce “disrupts” brick-and-mortar
stores), urban transportation (which is increasingly being shaped by
private, for-profit firms), and consumption patterns (as the discourse
of the “sharing economy” suggests). Social media platforms have enticed
users on sites such as YouTube and Instagram to compete for prominence
in the “attention economy,” performing “aspirational labor” as a means
of generating advertising revenues through their online activity (Duffy,
2016; van Dijck et al., 2018). Perhaps most far reaching are the
potential changes the platform economy is likely to have on work and
employment, as “gig” work becomes more prominent, even changing our very
conception of what it means to have a “job” (Davis, 2016). One can
glimpse the scale of these changes by comparing the most heavily
capitalized firms in the world today with their counterparts of a few
decades ago. Here one begins to see the growing prominence of the
FAANGs—Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google—firms that employ
relatively few workers, own relatively little in the way of fixed
capital, and very likely represent a new epoch in the development of
contemporary capitalism (e.g., Gottfried, 2013; Smith, 2016; Srnicek,
2016; Schor and Attwood-Charles, 2017; Kalleberg and Vallas, 2017;
Vallas and Kovalainen, 2019).