Lecture
Lecture: Rethinking Platform Capitalism
- Niels van Doorn (University of Amsterdam)
- Date
- Friday 22 May 2026
- Time
- Explanation
- Registration required
- Address
-
Wijnhaven
Turfmarkt 99
2511 DP The Hague - Room
- 3.60
The past decade has seen a proliferation of writing and debate on the rise of “platform capitalism”. This phenomenon has been narrated as a story in which the age of the amateur morphed into the creator economy while the casual side hustle became a precarious full-time gig – the disruptive outcomes of platform firms’ insatiable appetite for growth and their disdain for institutional norms and the rule of law. It is a story of network effects, data extraction, and algorithmic management. Yet by portraying platform corporations as agents of disruption and the primary culprits responsible for mounting socioeconomic inequities, this story hides as much as it reveals about the relationship between platforms and capitalism during a decade bookended by two major global crises that, quite literally, hit close to home.
Moving from the post-GFC (great financial crisis) era to the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath, the alternative account presented in this talk charts the unevenly distributed opportunities and costs associated with the platformization of capitalist social relations. Expanding beyond the point of production, it theorizes a social reproductive “platform fix” that provisionally sustains capital accumulation while also supporting households and public institutions – however tenuously and unevenly. This analytical shift ties the question of how capitalism survives to the question of who survives capitalism, thereby enabling a closer and more nuanced examination of how this social order’s distribution of life and livelihood chances – along lines of gender, race, and class – is impacted by platformization.