Van Elteren

Today’s critics of big online platforms tend to consider privacy breaches, monopolistic practices, and the deployment of surveillance technologies as the main problems. Internet reformers suggest the answers to these issues reside in more--and better--regulations. While the questions of privacy, data, and size are indeed important, they are secondary however to a deeper set of concerns about platform ownership and control, and who benefits from the current status quo.

This book examines these issues and offers an historical overview and in-depth analysis of digital capitalism and its prevailing practices as it has become increasingly intertwined with various forms of online surveillance, behavior modification, and the delegation of managerial functions to algorithmic and automated systems in platform economies. The approach taken extends to the wider array of data-driven, internet-connected and automated systems that involve digital devices and technologies centered on three ＂smart＂ spaces: the smart self, the smart home, and the smart city.

Antitrust and other regulatory measures by the European Union and the United States that are aimed at restraining platform capitalism are also discussed. The focus in particular is on recent developments regarding artificial intelligence and their potentially harmful implications. This is followed by a critical look at proposals for more far-reaching institutional reforms revolving around the creation of forms of ＂platform socialism＂ that build partly on existing practices of platform cooperativism. The book concludes with a diagnosis of the global situation among the competing ＂digital empires＂ (the United States, the European Union, and China), and considers whether or not, under the present conditions, any form of democratic platform socialism could materialize on a wider scale in the near future.

Mel van Elteren is an emeritus associate professor of social sciences at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He has published several books and articles in sociology, social psychology and cultural studies, with special interest in American society, politics and labor.