The Internet of Landlords: Digital Platforms and New Mechanisms of Rentier Capitalism
By Jathan Sadowski. Antipode, 2020
321 citations recorded by the source corpus.
: Digital platforms are a nearly ubiquitous form of intermediary and infrastructure in society. By positioning platforms in the geographical political economy/ ecology literature, this paper provides a critical analysis of platforms as a dominant form of rentier in contemporary capitalism. In doing so, I extend this work on rent theory beyond applications to land and nature so that it also includes platforms and data. I argue that the rapid rise of the “ X-as-a-service ” business model across nearly all sectors of the economy is creating rentier relations by another name. This model is premised on the platform latching onto and inserting itself into the production, circulation, or consumption process, thus creating opportunities to capture value. To better understand the operations and implications of platforms, I outline three key mechanisms: data extraction
Subfields: Finance, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/329df94ffef64c8d766d421c26203ffa2192cd08
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In Finance
- Karen P. Y. Lai
- M. Samers
- Paul A. Langley
- Sarah Hall
- Andrew Leyshon
- J. Montgomerie
- S. French
- T. Wainwright
In Marketing
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Assets and assetization in financialized capitalism (2020, background): “For example, in the global digital economy that has boomed over the recent decade (see Atal, this volume), platforms appropriate rent due to their positioning as intermediaries who own and control the infrastructural assets of digital space (Sadowski, 2020).”
- Towards an economic geography of FinTech (2020, background): “Over time, could we perhaps consider a shift from GPNs as a form of capitalist organization and accumulation towards global production platforms, in which user-generated data, algorithmic framings of risks and markets, and digital intermediation become not only a key source of revenue but also signi”