platform capitalism (nick srnicek)

Nick Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism is a pithy breakdown of trends in capitalism, the internet and the shape of the future. There are other books which tackle these subjects in more detail, but Srnicek’s is a straightforward overview which is great for the layman, like myself. It pinpoints the development of internet platforms (the usual suspects) and explains how a website which originally set out to sell books is now selling just about everything and probably taking your temperature at the same time. The book details the varied platforms breaking them down into five groups: Cloud; Advertising; Industrial; Product and Lean, before going on to outline how, as the behemoths of the internet struggle for dominance, these platforms begin to elide and overlap. The book is also very astute in explaining how a surplus of capital with nowhere to go has been allocated to the development of these platforms. The Victorians used surplus capital to build railways and sewers; the 21st century builds ever more complex internet architecture. Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is undoubtably more extensive in its description of the way in which advertising revenue drove the growth of Google and Facebook, but I have to confess it was too detailed for me. Srnicek isn’t trying to write a history of the internet, he’s giving a succinct breakdown of where we are now in a process that is evolving so rapidly, affecting the way in which each and every one of us lives, that the general public inevitably lag behind any capacity to grasp how the earth is moving under our feet. The only point perhaps worth noting is that the book, originally published in 2017, could probably do with an update already, above all in this year where our on-line existence has evolved to compensate for the decline in our off-line access.