Nick Srnicek • Platform Capitalism

2.4 - Nick Srnicek : Platform Capitalism
What unites Google and Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, Siemens and GE, Uber and Airbnb? Across a wide range of sectors, these firms are transforming themselves into platforms: businesses that provide the hardware and software foundation for others to operate on. This transformation signals a major shift in how capitalist firms operate and how they interact with the rest of the economy: the emergence of platform capitalism.
This talk critically examines these new business forms, showing how the fundamental foundations of the economy are rapidly being carved up among a small number of monopolistic platforms, and how the platform introduces new tendencies within capitalism that pose significant challenges to any vision of a post-capitalist future.
Particular attention will be paid to the geopolitical and capitalist competition emerging over AI, and what this means for the future of the economy more broadly.
Bio:
Nick Srnicek is a lecturer at City, University of London. He is the author of Platform Capitalism (016), Inventing the Future (2015 with Alex Williams), and is currently writing After Work (with Helen Hester).