*THIS EVENT HAS HAD TO BE CANCELLED DUE TO TRAVEL DISRUPTIONS CAUSED BY WEATHER*
Dr Nick Srnicek (Lecturer in International Political Economy, City University of London)
Title: ‘Platform Capitalism’
Politics after Poststructuralism Seminar Series
Venue: Keynes seminar room 17
Date and Time: 23 February 2017, 5pm
Lecturer in International Political Economy, Nick Srnicek co-authored with Alex Williams #Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics (2013), Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (Verso, 2015), and the recently published Platform Capitalism (Polity, 2016). His current research is on anti-work politics and social reproduction, and how the two separate areas can be fit together.
‘Platform Capitalism’
Abstract:
What unites Google and Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, Siemens and GE, Uber and Airbnb? Across a wide range of sectors, these firms are transforming themselves into platforms: businesses that provide the hardware and software foundation for others to operate on. This transformation signals a major shift in how capitalist firms operate and how they interact with the rest of the economy: the emergence of platform capitalism. This talk critically examines these new business forms, showing how the fundamental foundations of the economy are rapidly being carved up among a small number of monopolistic platforms, and how the platform introduces new tendencies within capitalism that pose significant challenges to any vision of a post-capitalist future.