A reiterated mantra warns us about the profound transformation of our lives driven by the digital economy. Along with it, a repertoire of expressions proliferates with the intention of capturing the meaning of these mutations. Shared economy, surveillance economy, app economy, immaterial economy, fourth industrial revolution, are some of the many terms that try to mystify the virtues or point out the dangers of the new technological landscape. Distancing from this metonymic rhetoric for the diagnosis of the present, this Marxist-inspired essay focuses on the raw material around which 21st century capitalism orbits –data–, and on its most efficient extraction apparatus: platforms.

The thesis of this book is that capitalism turned to data to regain vitality after the prolonged crises of overcapacity that have plagued Fordist production of goods and its employment regime since the 1970s. The purpose of this essay is then to situate the accumulation model embodied by Google and Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, Siemens and General Electric, Uber and AirBnb, in the context of a larger story, to demonstrate that data and platforms perform a number of key capitalist functions, most notably its ability to promote the relocation and precariousness of the workforce.

Co-author of the Accelerationist Manifesto, Srnicek presents us here with a precise taxonomy of these sophisticated profit-producing machines that are shaping a new digital infrastructure. The effects of this hegemony also spread to the offline world on which these business models project their ethos: governments and cities must be “smart”, companies “disruptive” and workers “flexible”. The ability to interpret the trends that regulate the behavior of these agents, and the effectiveness in identifying incipient areas of conflict between work and capital, make this essay a valuable tool to guide us in our situation.