Are We All Fungible?

In considering this week’s readings on platforms, I was the most struck by Nick Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism. Srnicek situates the platform as a particular kind of business model that develops in the consolidation of various tech industry survivors after the dot come bust, but that really takes form in the after math of the global financial crisis of 2008. I appreciate the ways in which he consistently reads both the platform as a typology for various business ventures centered on the ownership of data and infrastructure, along side the shifting political economy of precarity as it seeks to absorb both surplus labor and surplus capital. For Srnicek the platform becomes "an efficient way to monopolise, extract, analyse, and use the increasingly large amounts of data that were being recorded.” (Srnicek 25). One of their key features is that they work as intermediaries for brining together various types of stakeholders, while simultaneously diminishing their need to maintain certain overhead startup costs. In this respect I think Srnicek does a good job of showing the ways that platforms working in both material and immaterial ways create new markets and services through their ability to extract and monetize data from the sources that they intercede between. He covers this nicely stating, " Platforms, in sum, are a new type of firm; they are characterised by providing the infrastructure to intermediate between different user groups, by displaying monopoly tendencies driven by network effects, by employing cross-subsidisation to draw in different user groups, and by having a designed core architecture that governs the interaction possibilities. Platform ownership, in turn, is essentially ownership of software (the 2 billion lines of code for Google, or the 20 million lines of code for Facebook) 18 and hardware (servers, data centres, smartphones, etc.), built upon open-source material (e.g. Hadoop’s data management system is used by Facebook).” (Srnicek 27). While Srnicek details various types of platforms (advertising, cloud, industrial, product) he seems to spend the most time discussing lean platforms. Contrasting with the previous models he discusses, lean platforms own the platform of software and data analytics but outsource the other material and labor costs to those that they precariously employ. Srnicek sums this up well stating, "Why are they ‘lean’ platforms? The answer lies in an oft-quoted observation: ‘Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles […] and Airbnb, the largest accommodation provider, owns no property.” (Srnicek 39). Srnicek shows the ways that this model builds from previous capitalist endeavors in outsourcing labor and migrant seasonal employment. However, the scale of lean employment is notable, as “alternative arrangement jobs” has become the net increase of U.S. since 2005. These numbers have grown steadily since 2008. Taking these figures out of the narrative that equates growth with economic health Srnicek points to this shift as endemic of a much larger troubled global economy. Given the control over interest rates by global central banks, surplus capital is seeking investments with higher rates of return. Srnicek argues that the tech industry and lean startups in particular are propped up by venture capital investments over actual revenue returns. He argues that "Yet the profitability of these lean platforms remains largely unproven. Just like the earlier dot-com boom, growth in the lean platform sector is premised on expectations of future profits rather than on actual profits. The hope is that the low margin business of taxis will eventually pay off once Uber has gained a monopoly position. Until these firms reach monopoly status (and possibly even then), their profitability appears to be generated solely by the removal of costs and the lowering of wages and not by anything substantial.” (Srnicek 44-45). This can be seen most recently in the ways that We Work has become significantly devalued. Because these businesses themselves become holdings for surplus capital they are speculatively valued by their potential to grow and hopefully monopolize. Yet, because actual revenue retention is an afterthought their success is extremely risky, especially now that there is such saturation for on-demand services. Though if these companies are just speculative investments for a few highly concentrated capital holders I wonder to what degree their success is premised on their ability to continue operating? If the logic (and I use that terms loosely) that gave rise to turning one of the most stable investments, federally backed mortgage securities, into a game of speculative returns is now doing that same just with another asset, what is the time frame for the next coming crisis? As we know that the limits to growth within capitalism create a paradox that ensures crisis, then we know that crisis is closely related to surplus that doesn’t move. As the material attachments for platforms simultaneously diminish from traditional business models and concentrate in fewer hands, our data becomes a form of capital in of itself, in that it can be valued and sold, but also used as a material basis for the means of production. This is where I was hoping for more thinking from Srnicek regarding data and free labor. Srnicek seems to be arguing under traditional Marxist analysis that the social generating of data that is then captured by platforms and built into their business models is not free labor. Instead he argues that work needs to be done to the data to make it valuable to then be sold as commodity. While this is true, I think this points more to the limitations of Marxist analysis as it regards labor. This is in no way a new argument as there are countless critiques of Marx’s limited view of labor. In this argument users of platforms are natural resources equated to raw goods which then need to be finished and turned for a profit. This shows some of the limitations of Marxist labor in that it cannot account for how to value this form of exchange other than in Lockean notions of work. What Srnicek describes is much more closely related to the ways that Saidiya Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson talk about fungibility as the primary way that black people are subsumed under capitalism rather than labor. Fungibility in this sense means the removal of the subjectivity of individual black people and rather the making of blackness into a raw material to be constantly mined of value, both in the free labor that is extracted as well as the psychoanalytic value by which white people become human. Thinking about fungibility over labor as the ways that we are consumed as data bodies then begs us to ask what forms of abolition are needed as we orient ourselves to platforms?