Platform Politics: Corporate Power, Grassroots Movements and the Sharing Economy

This is a book about the power of grassroots movements, narratives, and modern corporations to change the way everyday life is organised, provisioned and governed. From 2008, a new wave of Silicon Valley corporations refined a ‘platform’ business model, providing digitally mediated versions of a number of existing services. A number of companies including Airbnb and Uber, and a host of allies, advocates and alternative economic projects, created a story about a new economy with ‘sharing’ and ‘collaboration’ at its centre. These lean platforms, holding few assets but playing a coordinating role between workers, owners, and consumers, started to be presented as the answer to the problems of contemporary neoliberal economies. In the political struggles that followed, platform businesses developed a repertoire of political tactics for engaging with states and societies around their initial incursion, the politicisation of the platform, and enforcement. Especially important are the mobilisation of users and allies, platform power, and the narrative framing by platforms of themselves, their political activity, and democracy per se, platform rhetoric. The key tactics by which platforms pursue their aims, it is argued, are very distinctive, yet they are also multi-faceted, bearing their own histories in corporate and civic culture. Important similarities link platforms and contexts in the use of these tactics. Lean platforms practise a common repertoire of contention when seeking to avoid regulation. Platform politics shapes how and to what extent platform businesses are adopted, rejected, reasserted, and reimagined in our societies.