#platformcapitalism — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #platformcapitalism, aggregated by home.social.
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Why your fare cost so much, and uber drivers get paid so little:
It is the result of a highly calculated corporate strategy known as surveillance pricing (or algorithmic personalized pricing).
In a genuine free market, prices function as transparent signals shaped by open supply and demand. Both buyers and sellers see the market rate, ensuring fairness. If a business overcharges, consumers walk; if it underpays, workers leave for a competitor.
Surveillance pricing completely subverts this dynamic by weaponizing information asymmetry. Using a massive hoard of data, the platform creates an invisible digital partition between the customer and the service provider. Instead of a shared, transparent marketplace, the algorithm isolates both sides into separate, closed-door negotiations where the platform holds all the cards.
For the passenger: The algorithm calculates the exact upper ceiling of what you will tolerate paying at that specific second—factoring in everything from your immediate location, time of day, and urgency, to your historical behavioral trends.
For the driver: The platform acts as an electronic monopsony (a market with many sellers but only one dominant buyer of labor). It isolates the worker and calculates the absolute structural floor of what that specific driver will accept to keep their car moving. By dangling unpredictable, variable incentives, it extracts hours of uncompensated labor (waiting and idling time), leaving the driver to absorb all the capital risk, vehicle depreciation, and fuel costs.
By blinding both sides of the transaction, the platform acts as a centralized command structure rather than a passive matching service. It systematically strips away the "consumer surplus" (the extra value and savings a buyer gets) and the "producer surplus" (the fair profit a worker keeps) and absorbs that wealth entirely for itself.
This mechanism is profoundly anti-free market because it replaces transparent competition with a proprietary information monopoly. True markets thrive on decentralized, shared knowledge; this system relies entirely on keeping everyone else in the dark.
#SurveillanceCapitalism #GigEconomy #PlatformCapitalism #FreeMarket #Economics #monopsony -
Fear and Loathing of AI (Part IV): Automation Doesn’t Kill Jobs — It Cheapens People
By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News
The popular story about automation is that it destroys jobs.
That story is comforting, because it suggests a clean line: a job exists, a machine replaces it, the job disappears. Tragic, but understandable.
What actually happens is worse.
Automation rarely eliminates work outright.
It cheapens the people who do it.The quiet downgrade
Most jobs don’t vanish overnight. They are degraded.
Pay drops.
Expectations rise.
Staffing thins.
Monitoring increases.Workers are told they should be grateful, because “AI makes you more productive now.”
Productivity, however, is not shared.
It is captured.The job remains, but dignity erodes.
From skilled labor to managed output
Before automation, skill carried bargaining power.
After automation, skill becomes assumed.AI-assisted work quickly shifts from:
- expertise → throughput
- judgment → compliance
- craft → metrics
Once the machine is involved, human contribution is reframed as a cost center rather than a value source.
The worker doesn’t disappear.
The status of the worker does.The speed-up without the pay
Historically, when tools made work faster, workers fought for:
- shorter hours,
- higher wages,
- better conditions.
AI flips that script.
Now speed gains are treated as justification for:
- heavier workloads,
- constant availability,
- reduced compensation per unit of work.
You are not paid more for producing more.
You are expected to produce more for the same or less.This is not innovation failure.
It is policy choice.Surveillance masquerading as assistance
AI is often introduced as a “helper.”
In practice, it becomes a manager.It tracks:
- keystrokes,
- output rates,
- response times,
- behavioral patterns.
What begins as assistance quietly becomes supervision.
Automation does not just change what you do.
It changes how closely you are watched while doing it.The moral inversion
When work becomes cheaper, people are treated as more replaceable.
That inversion is always justified with the same language:
- efficiency,
- competitiveness,
- inevitability.
But none of those are natural laws.
They are decisions made by those who benefit.Automation does not have ethics.
Institutions deploying it do.The real danger
The greatest risk of AI-driven automation is not mass unemployment.
It is a world where:
- work still consumes most of your life,
- pay no longer reflects effort,
- and dignity is treated as a luxury benefit.
A world where jobs exist, but people inside them are hollowed out.
A line worth drawing
AI can reduce drudgery.
It can assist judgment.
It can remove unnecessary friction.But if productivity gains are not paired with:
- stronger labor protections,
- shared gains,
- and limits on surveillance,
automation becomes exploitation with better branding.
Automation doesn’t kill jobs.
It kills leverage.
And without leverage, workers don’t disappear.
They endure.
For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com
#ArtificialIntelligence #automation #economicInequality #futureOfWork #Labor #Occupy25 #platformCapitalism #productivity #technologyCritique #workerRights #workplaceSurveillance #WPSNews -
"Instead of thinking about fixing existing platforms - that's done, they're not going to fix themselves - I think it's about developing new platforms. Voting with your feet, getting to places where you want to be."
#KateStarbird, University of Washington, 2024
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#podcasts #TechPolicyPress #SundayShow #SocialMedia #PlatformCapitalism