Wu Jing: Total Subsumption: New Features of Exploitation in Platform Capitalism
To elucidate the historical process through which capital's appropriation of labor transitioned from absolute surplus value to relative surplus value during large-scale industrial production, Marx creatively proposed the concepts of "formal subsumption" [1] and "real subsumption" in the Economic Manuscripts of 1861–1863. His primary objective was to characterize how capital transforms the labor process and to use this pair of concepts to clarify capital's differing modes of exploiting labor. Today, in the 21st century, following the popularization of the internet and cheap, high-capacity storage, technological leaps based on information technology and big data have profoundly altered the organizational forms of society, modes of labor, and the ways in which value is created and realized. As modes of production continuously break down the rigid divisions upon which Fordism was built and shift toward the blurring of boundaries in Post-Fordism, massive changes have occurred not only in the labor process itself—characteristic of the era of large-scale industry—but also in the relationship between capital and labor, as well as other social elements. Therefore, using the methodology of Marxist political economy to analyze the new problems in labor and production brought about by this technological leap, which has swept through nearly the entire society, is the theoretical mission of contemporary researchers of Marxist philosophy.
In recent years, the development of the digital platform economy has sparked multi-dimensional discussions involving forms of labor, configurations of capital, modes of exploitation, patterns of distribution, and even the discourse of power. In fact, digitalization has not only reshaped nearly every aspect of individual existence but also reconstructed the relationship between capital and labor; in certain dimensions, this reconstruction is even subversive. Beyond the continuous subsumption of labor within the sphere of production, capital has even achieved the subsumption of the public sphere. This has allowed capital to reach an unprecedented height in contemporary economic development: total subsumption.
I. Platform Connection: The Coexistence of Decentralization and Strong Centralization
Compared to all previous technological innovations, the impact of digitalization on human society—in terms of breadth, depth, and complexity—is beyond anything previously attainable. It has not only profoundly changed the way we confront the world but also reconstructed the world, humanity itself, and the cognitive pathways related to them. In the digital age, everything about a person is reduced to data. Mobile devices accessing the internet have not only made the "Internet of Everything" a reality but also ensured that all data traces can be recorded. Fragmented data is gathered into big data through recording, and the selection and possession of data becomes a proprietary power. The concentration of the power to record and analyze data must rely on a digital foundation, which gave birth to the platform. Today’s internet economy is a quintessentially platform-based model. A platform is, first and foremost, a mediator; it is an operational mode that uses digital hardware as infrastructure and relies on data and algorithms to guide and control the market and productive labor. It facilitates transactions by providing the possibility of exchange between different economic units, significantly reducing transaction costs. However, because it simultaneously possesses vast amounts of information from both parties to a transaction, the platform is not merely a mediator. It can exploit data asymmetry and utilize algorithms to covertly deprive the rights of decentralized users who are dependent on the network. It is a new economic phenomenon of the contemporary era, and more importantly, it has realized a restructuring of the system through highly interconnected digital pathways.
When describing the impact of the capitalist system on original economic structures, the economist Joseph Alois Schumpeter used the term "creative destruction" to emphasize holistic structural disruption and reconstruction. He wrote: "The process of industrial mutation... incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one... [In this process] we must see the role played by this perennial gale of Creative Destruction." Harvey later defined this term as the essential characteristic of modernity. In his book Paris, Capital of Modernity, he took the massive project of renovating old Paris carried out by Baron Haussmann in the mid-to-late 19th century as a concrete physical manifestation of this "creative destruction." Paris, as the capital of modernity, was not just a work but an event; it decisively and non-linearly overrode the smooth evolution of the past with a suddenly appearing vision of modernity. "It treats the world as a tabula rasa and inscribes the new upon it without any reference to the past—or, if the past happens to be in the way, by simply erasing it."
It is entirely appropriate to use such a revolutionary shift to describe the chain effect brought about by the platform economy. It has had a disruptive [2] effect on the original economic structure: old business models have been challenged and have declined (or even vanished), while systems of production, distribution, consumption, delivery, logistics, and control have been reshaped on the basis of new technology. The fundamentals of many enterprises and even entire industries have been shaken.
In Gilles Deleuze’s "rhizome" theory and Antonio Negri’s theory of the "multitude," the internet—with its "decentralized" characteristics—became a liberatory, ideal construct: it could permeate all dimensions and cross all boundaries. They treated the heterogeneity and irreducibility highlighted by the hypertext links of the internet as a force of the "One" [3] that could resist the subsumptive power of capital, thereby unfolding the possibilities of resistance by the multitude. The "unorganized organizational power" formed by network interconnection caused institutional and organizational costs to trend toward zero, making sharing and coordination possible on the broadest scale. On the surface, this claim seems to have a certain degree of rationality. In fact, however, it remains a manifestation of an unreflective optimism from the pre-platform era.
If the optimism held by Deleuze and Negri toward the internet was based on its characteristic of highly interconnected breakthroughs of hierarchy, then they clearly did not foresee the prospects brought by the advancement of this connection in scale and depth. In the modern industrial structure following the era of large-scale industry, the value-creation process is distributed linearly, with production being the primary core link. This top-down hierarchical structure, aided by a similarly linear supply chain, achieved efficient operation, reflected both in the organization and completion of productive labor and in the process of transferring final products or services to consumers. This is the object of study for traditional political economy. However, once the deep connectivity realized by the internet broke the functional organizational boundaries of stage-by-stage execution, this linear value-creation process—centered on production and aimed at products—was naturally forced into the entire decentralized network. Yet, the efficiency problems brought by this decentralization once again raised the issue of the "Coasean floor" [4] in the network era. Of course, this time "new tools provide us with methods for organizing collective action without resorting to hierarchical structures." Thus, the platform emerged as required by the times.
The platform model connects two or more independent economic units to achieve interaction and mutual benefit between them. In the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), this model ensures that "the aggregator of business strategy is no longer the internal supply chain or value chain of a company, but the ecosystem of the entire network." The core of value creation has shifted from product production to the realization of connections between fragmented producers and fragmented users, constructing an ecosystem with the platform as the core of transactions. This ecosystem strategy has changed the balance of power in value creation. A significant reason why Nokia lost in the competition against the iPhone and Google was that the Symbian system Nokia clung to was no match for the platform-building capabilities of the iPhone's iOS system and the Android system developed by Google. Regarding this, Nokia's former CEO Stephen Elop recalled with bitter regret: "We didn't even choose the right weapon for the fight; we were still trying to compete in various levels of the market in a 'device-to-device' manner. The competition of device products has now evolved into a war of ecosystems." And the platform is precisely the absolute center of the ecosystem it constructs. Moreover, because every node or unit in the distributed, flattened structure of the network possesses a high degree of autonomy free from hierarchical constraints, the center atop this decentralization possesses even stronger controlling power; its efficiency depends largely on the radiation range of its power. It is either the platform, or extinction.
Unlike traditional economic structures, a platform does not create its own economic units internally, nor does it manufacture its own products. The only thing it does is continuously expand external resources and dedicate itself to making every connection step smoother and maximizing the efficiency of core transactions (of course, this efficiency itself includes the sense of experience for different user ends). The assignment of this responsibility means that the user end cedes power and privacy to the platform. The greater the responsibility the platform assumes, the more power and privacy it demands. Whether it is Airbnb or Uber, they have easily achieved an "octopus-style" development: continuously shrinking the operational core while rapidly expanding. Taking Google, Uber, and Facebook as examples, they all completed scale expansions in a very short time that traditional enterprises would not dare to dream of. Even an enterprise like Amazon, which started in e-commerce, saw its growth rate after transitioning to a platform model far exceed its previous pace. One of the most prominent features of the platform model is being "both large and small": on the one hand, a massive user base is the core upon which it relies for survival and is the most intuitive expression of its value and market competitiveness (the emphasis on user numbers has always been the top priority for emerging platforms during the financing process); on the other hand, because the core competition between platforms is no longer a contest of the scale of assets they own, the scale of the operational hub of platform enterprises continues to shrink. "Capital loves monopoly; it likes the certainty brought by a monopolized way of working and living." "Unicorn" platform enterprises, with their continuously condensing centers, have firmly grasped the discourse power of the market.
Data is the platform’s most vital asset, a resource continuously enriched by every digital footprint left by users accessing the platform’s various terminals. Based on the requirements of transactions and the principle of profit, the platform uses algorithms to extract and analyze raw data, calling upon it as needed in an anonymized fashion. Meanwhile, as the producers of this raw data, users possess neither the right to be informed nor the right of ownership; furthermore, they lack any understanding of the various algorithms the platform employs. Whether it is the raw materials (data) or the productive technology (algorithms), both are exclusively possessed and monopolized by the platform. This constitutes a "one-way mirror" style of asymmetry: on one side stands limitless power, and on the other, limitless alienation [5]. Thus, despite the platform’s surface characteristics of decentralization and openness, its role as a "super-node" for the integration of social resources has actually become a new type of digital technological means for the continuous subsumption of capital. Within the process of digitalization, the production logic of platform capitalism has become a new mode of value valorization. The platform makes total control a reality, even becoming a more intensive form of capitalist monopoly. Through the deployment of power, it establishes an all-encompassing centralized ecosystem, ensuring that the "labor process, and thus labor and the worker himself, are in all these respects subject to the supervision and command of capital." Deleuze’s "desiring-machines" form a relational structure of social production through desubjectified connections; this is the very core of the platform ecosystem. Algorithmic control has become the structural core of platform manipulation—a new "invisible hand." As digital systems and services are embedded into all components of the political economy, "platformization" is the key principle of economic control and dominance in this era; its connectivity is capable of forming a seamless space of power. The platform model breaks the traditional monopolies of the value chain, establishing a new mode of monopoly based on core transactions. From the perspective of the collusion between capital power and technology in the context of social media, the weakening of privacy protection and the dilution of individual expression are also inevitable. The platform’s derivative law of "Online to Offline" (O2O) links the virtual and the physical into a single world. The virtual penetrates the real. In this sense, the rapid development of platform capitalism must profoundly affect the forms of labor organization and the social structures of the digital era. The platform no longer plays merely the role of a smiling multilateral intermediary, but acts as the builder of a decisive ecosystem within the market, serving as the central hub-control over decentralized, homogenous nodes. The platform not only achieves a monopoly over data through hardware and software infrastructure but also controls the "rules of the game" for production and the market by virtue of its algorithms and oligopolistic status.
In the early work Platform Capitalism, which takes the platform as its object of critical study, Nick Srnicek astutely pointed out that the platform—as a new business production model—has become the "darling" of the 21st century. Consequently, the focus of capitalist development has shifted toward platforms capable of acquiring and manipulating massive amounts of data. Strong centralization makes new platform monopolies more convenient and thorough than at any time in the past. "Platforms are usually born out of the internal need to handle data, and they become an effective way to monopolize, extract, analyze, and use the increasing volume of recorded data." This depends largely on the number of user-ends joined to the platform. A characteristic of the platform is its "shared" nature: the more users who use the platform, the greater its value; the more data the platform can extract, the more use-pathways it can generate. Today, it is difficult for most internet users to perform activities while bypassing platforms. This means that platforms seek to bind more and more users into their ecosystems to extract more data. Simultaneously, the richer the platform ecosystem, the stronger its power to retain users, and the higher its degree of occupation of the user's world of lived experience. Through the logic of "winner-take-all," the capitalist economic system has completed a structural digital transformation. Faced with such a behemoth business model controlled by a center, we must ask: what impact has it had on the traditional fields of labor and production?
II. The Gig Economy: Substantive Subsumption Deepening Layer by Layer
From a historical perspective, the gig economy is not a unique novelty of the digital era or the platform model; it is a product of the continuous development of the free labor market. However, in the era of the platform economy, this specific form of employment has leaped from a localized, compensatory mode of labor to become a major form of social labor organization. The gig economy of the digital era refers to freelancers—who can provide spare time and corresponding skills—using internet platforms and mobile communication technology to rapidly match supply and demand. It primarily includes two forms: "crowdsourcing" through intermediaries and on-demand work where individuals pick up orders via apps. It is a component of the modern economic structure that cannot be underestimated. This has been confirmed by economic data. A joint study by Harvard and Princeton Universities showed that in the ten years from 2005 to 2015, the proportion of workers in "alternative work arrangements" in the United States rose from 10% to 15.8%, an increase of over 50%. This figure continued to rise after the COVID-19 pandemic. The author of The Gig Economy even predicted: "Full-time jobs are disappearing; many companies will not choose to hire full-time employees unless they have no other choice."
The platform's greatest function is to provide the conditions for establishing a bilateral relationship between product or service providers and consumers. This means the platform always faces multilateral demands. It no longer plays the role of production organizer as traditional enterprises do; rather, it matches different types of customers by building physical or virtual spaces. That is to say, as a powerful middleman, the platform always faces dispersed user groups—dispersed producers and dispersed consumers. However, since a vital aspect of a platform’s competitiveness lies in the number of consumers and their sense of experience, the platform’s evaluation mechanism for transactions inevitably leans toward the consumer end. Under this constraint, it is difficult for the gig workers used by platform enterprises to avoid facing an intensifying iteration of exploitation. Slavoj Žižek refers to this as the "user-proletariat": "In the emerging 'internet politics,' the measure of power and social status is the ability to access key information. Money and material possession are both reduced to secondary roles. The ruled class is no longer the working class, but the 'user-ist' class ('user-proletariat')... This shift in power produces a completely new social logic and ideology. Because information is always circulating and changing, there are no longer stable, long-term hierarchies, but a continuously changing network of power relations."
The gig labor model constructed by platforms challenges traditional ways of generating labor value and organizing workers because it is achieved by "disassembling" the responsibilities undertaken by traditional corporate organizers. When workers are transformed into "users," not only is the labor paradigm shifted, but the form of labor organization is also changed. Dispersed labor directed at specific customers places the labor provider in a state of "de-organization," leading to intensified marginalization and turning them into "isolated islands." Ubiquitous algorithmic traps and information asymmetry further deepen the user’s existential dilemma: "Either the algorithm, or nothing." The so-called "freedom of choice" can only be a tragic gesture of negation and refusal. Simultaneously, through overt or hidden smart surveillance devices, the platform achieves more rigorous monitoring of the worker. Through the app’s positioning system and consumer feedback mechanisms, the platform party can monitor the worker’s labor trajectory and labor time in real-time. With the substantive subsumption [6] of gig workers by platform capital deepening layer by layer, "a complete (and constantly continued and repeated) revolution takes place in the mode of production itself, in the productivity of labor and in the relation between capitalist and worker." Once a gig worker attempts to "disembed" from the algorithms and technology, the risks and costs will be far higher than the benefits gained within the algorithm. "Science becomes an independent power serving capital, opposed to labor, and generally speaking falls into the category of the conditions of production becoming an independent power opposed to labor." In this process, all boundaries of labor in traditional factory production are eliminated. Due to the spatial mobility and temporal diffusion inherent to gig labor, not only is the boundary between labor time and leisure time broken, but the process of labor transfer is also strictly confined by algorithms to the path of optimal efficiency. Indeed, every time the algorithm is "optimized," the encirclement of the gig worker becomes one degree tighter. The "accumulation by dispossession" [7] of platform capital allows for the simultaneous completion of the exploitation of both relative and absolute surplus value, as formal and substantive subsumption compete to see which can go further.
Furthermore, the gig economy’s pursuit of efficiency continuously squeezes labor rights. In July 2020, a panel of the UK Supreme Court issued a "judgment capable of changing the gig economy." They ruled that drivers providing ride-hailing services through the app "Uber" are workers [8] of Uber, entitled to all protections provided by UK law for workers, such as the minimum wage and paid holidays. Previously, Uber had argued that drivers were not employees but independent contractors; their legal status was that of an independent undertaking or self-employed person providing services to passengers based on a contract entered into with the passenger, meaning the company did not need to provide them with employee benefits. Although this ruling would provide judicial protection to tens of thousands of Uber drivers in the UK, it did not end the dispute between platform enterprises and gig workers. The biggest problem with the "gig economy" is the lack of labor contracts. Marketized gig outsourcing in the platform economy blurs labor relations: workers have only a contractual relationship with the platform, while they have an employment relationship with an outsourcing company; many crowdsourced workers do not even sign employment contracts with the crowdsourcing party, in exchange for the "freedom to leave." Consequently, should an accident occur, the platform can shirk its responsibility not only toward the victim but also toward the gig worker, making it extremely difficult for workers to defend their rights. Moreover, due to the lack of labor union organizations found in traditional enterprises, workers find it difficult to obtain help from internal organizational forces or the industrial injury benefits they deserve; instead, they must bear all risks independently, with their efforts being disproportionate to their rewards. A specific mode of production—"a mode of production which has been changed in its real nature and the real conditions under which the labor process takes place"—namely, the mode of production of platform capitalism, has been established. In this way, capital achieves the substantive subsumption of social risk.
The obsession of platform enterprises with "zero marginal cost" makes them dedicated to "asset-light" models (including both physical assets and employees). While continuously expanding their user base, they try to minimize their number of employees. To a certain extent, this confirms the view advocated by Deleuze and Félix Guattari that "the tool presupposes labor." The de-organized form of the gig economy makes the subordination of the worker to the platform enterprise manifest as a bizarre contradiction, yet subordination is the core element in determining a "labor relationship." On the one hand, in the theoretical assumptions of traditional linear enterprise labor law, the enterprise enjoys absolute ownership of the means of production, most of which are physical; the worker uses the means of production owned by the enterprise and complies with the enterprise’s labor regulations. When current labor laws adjudicate whether a labor relationship exists, they often need to examine the factor of who provided the means of production. However, platform enterprises primarily use non-physical data as a factor of production, and the ownership relationship between data and the platform is difficult to define fully. Simultaneously, because the management of gig workers is also carried out through a mode of digital control—and the latter is still difficult to view as "management regulations" at the current stage—this leads to the difficulty of determining the gig worker's subordination to the platform enterprise within existing legal norms.
On the other hand, however, another firm relation of subordination has been established: the subordination of gig workers to algorithms. This subordination is not entirely manifested in the algorithm's monitoring of labor providers; rather, it primarily expresses itself as a social subjection [9] replacing the mechanical enslavement of the pre-algorithmic era. Deleuze and Guattari argued that this is the inevitable result of changes in the organic composition of capital. "All-automatic control machines and information processors... re-establish a mechanism of generalized enslavement: reversible and cyclical 'man-machine' systems replace the old relationship of irreversible and non-cyclical subjection between the two; any correlation between machines is realized through internal communication (and no longer through use or utility). Within the organic composition of capital, variable capital defines a regime of subjection of the worker (human surplus value), the primary scope of which is the enterprise or the factory; however, as the proportion of constant capital grows with the process of automation, we find a new enslavement, and at the same time, the labor regime changes, surplus value becomes machinic, and its scope expands to the whole of society." [10] Although Deleuze and Guattari did not witness the advent of the algorithmic era, they insightfully predicted the revolutionary impact of "man-machine" interpenetration on the composition and attributes of labor in the age of intelligence. It must be emphasized that when they claim "surplus value becomes machinic," they are referring to their unique definition of the "machine": a relational connection and production. Here, labor is no longer a discrete process demarcated by the completion of an independent product; instead, the data and information generated by continuous labor are constantly captured by the algorithm to achieve algorithmic optimization (maximum efficiency is merely one direction of optimization; it can fully achieve optimization in a much broader sense). Both the labor process and the algorithm are in a state of constant iteration. According to Marx’s judgment on the core characteristics of real subsumption [11], "the specific capitalist mode of development and the real subordination of labor to capital develop along with this mode of production." Algorithmic labor and its social consequences undoubtedly belong to real subsumption; it is a facet of both capital's subsumption of labor and capital's subsumption of society. This interpenetrating relationship of subordination stands in stark contrast to the ambiguous subordination between platforms and workers; together, they constitute a deeper and broader subsumption of labor by platform capital.
III. The Platform Effect Ladder: Total Subsumption
In the platform model, industrial capital, financial capital, and digital capital are entangled and collusive, capturing the entire process from production to consumption (the boundary between which is increasingly dissolving). Simultaneously, algorithms predict and guide human behavior through data mining and analysis, thereby evaluating and utilizing all originally non-productive fragments of experience, transforming them into significant sources of data production, and eventually integrating them into the commercial development of digital platforms. Algorithmic iteration provides a path with shorter cycles for social reproduction. The platform has become an essential bridge communicating between capital markets and social individuals/social life, positioned within a "total capitalist economy" as an inseparable part of capital circulation. Due to the inherent requirement for the expanded reproduction of capital, the closed-source nature of algorithmic control, the prioritization of efficiency, seamless monitoring, and the privatization and commodification of information, data, and social relations within social media will all push the internet-mediated society—characterized by information exchange—toward a monopolistic platform capitalism. Consequently, all social experience in the platform era essentially falls within the category of political economy.
Marx pointed out that regarding the labor process, capital "at first subordinates it to itself formally, without at all changing its technological characteristics," but with the development of capitalism, capital "not only subordinates the labor process to itself formally, but also changes this process, giving the mode of production itself a new form, thereby creating for the first time its own specific mode of production." Hardt and Negri affirmed the role of Marx’s concepts of "formal subsumption" and "real subsumption" in demonstrating the diversity of capitalist rule. [12] However, they also proposed that in contemporary political economy research, "the first thing that needs to be done is to extend from the real subsumption of labor under capital, as analyzed by Marx, to the real subsumption of society under capital," because this real subsumption has exceeded the multiple cycles of capital valorization, continuously expanding inward and encroaching upon previously non-capitalized domains. Specifically: "We must conceive of the functions of capital at the social level; at this level, we must identify the forms of value production, exploitation, and the extraction of surplus value; at this level and in this domain, we must understand the modes of struggle between labor-power and capital."
This formulation is certainly correct. In a broad sense, these phenomena belong to the real subsumption of society. However, on one hand, current algorithmic iteration and optimization often lead to the negative consequence of technical "disembedding" from society; on the other hand, if the reference to "social subsumption" is too broad, it is insufficient to accurately describe the structural restructuring and the totalizing trend of embedding brought about by the platform economy, nor can it reflect the hierarchical harvesting relationships formed within different forms of capital. Therefore, "total subsumption" (总体吸纳) is a more expressive concept that corresponds to the "total capitalist economy."
The first prominent manifestation of total subsumption is the control and partitioning of industrial capital's profits by financial capital. Unlike the way industrial capital directly subsumes labor, financial capital obtains indirect but decisive control over labor through claims on physical assets. This form of capital accumulation is not a new product of the platform economy. John Bellamy Foster pointed out in his article "Monopoly-Finance Capital" that the excessive development of financial markets has allowed financial capital to gain dominance over the economy, thereby subverting the structure and functions of the real economy previously dominated by monopoly enterprises, with the making of money increasingly replacing the making of products. This is a characteristic of monopoly capitalism. However, when this characteristic is combined with the platform model—which can theoretically achieve infinite expansion with zero marginal cost—its harmfulness to total social production becomes prominent. An extraordinarily paradoxical fact is that, contrary to the flourishing growth and record-breaking total revenues of internet platform companies, almost the vast majority of platforms are in a state of massive losses. If the nature of capital lies in the pursuit of profit, why do platform enterprises choose to continue? And on what basis do they persist?
Most internet platform economy projects undergo a highly similar growth history: At the beginning, a project captures potential market demand "hotspots" with keen market intuition, and financial capital (venture capital) likewise captures various projects with its own keen intuition. Once venture capital (VC) quickly benchmarks an investment target and completes financing, the project is launched into the market with a high profile in a short period. It adopts counter-profit methods such as price wars and high subsidies to rapidly expand market share and lock in a massive user base. This vast user base is the core competitiveness of the platform; these users and the resulting continuously rising total operating revenue are the key upon which the platform relies to continue obtaining VC in the financial investment market and even to go public on the securities market. In this process, the primary goal of the platform is not to profit from real transactions, but to use them as a means to profit in financial markets. This is essentially the same as the phenomenon Marx criticized, where capitalists do not care what kind of use-value they produce as long as they make a profit. The only difference here is that the absolute power of decision lies in the hands of financial capital. Although financial capital does not produce surplus value, it harvests the value created by industrial capital through the operation of intergenerational markets. Moreover, due to the speculative nature of financial capital to a certain extent, it prefers industries with short cycles, low marginal costs, and high profit margins—which is why the main target of venture capital in recent years has been concentrated on service-oriented e-commerce platforms. In contrast, traditional physical industries, especially manufacturing, are disfavored by VC due to high marginal costs and long investment return cycles. The role of this investment method in truly increasing total social value is clearly limited. The accumulation of capital through the increase of financial assets leads to the phenomenon of "high transactions, zero production," which Harvey summarized as "the production of ephemeral spectacles." [13] Accompanied by this phantom prosperity of production, financial capital completes the entire process from simple accumulation to the over-exploitation of surplus value across various industries even more rapidly.
Another manifestation of total subsumption is capital's subsumption of "the public" (公共性) via platforms. The reshaping of social relations by the development of the platform economy is reflected not only in many phenomena in the field of political economy but also in the reshaping of human existence and its relationship with the world. In addition to the previously discussed optimization of algorithms deepening control over gig workers, with the intensification of market competition, using possessed data to analyze and predict user behavior has become an essential tool for internet platform enterprises. Among these, data prediction is the core of big data methodology and the key to precision marketing by platforms.
Shoshana Zuboff, a professor of social psychology at Harvard Business School, proposed a more radical view in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. She argues that the omnipresent recording of data traces unique to the era of big data has led humanity into the "age of surveillance capitalism." Making users psychologically dependent on the platform is only the first step for platform controllers (whom she calls "surveillance capitalists"); their further goal is to make the target population conform to algorithmic inertia and automation, becoming qualified products of "instrumentarianism." Once a platform becomes familiar with user behavior patterns through massive amounts of data, it can adopt targeted induction strategies (timing, environment, content, method) to guide users into behaviors desired by the algorithm and correct their behavior, making them change their habitual patterns to fulfill the needs of others. Platforms can "use the surplus of personal information on Facebook to shape your behavior patterns, such as inducing you to buy acne cream at 5:45 PM on a Friday; or inducing you to click 'order' for a new pair of running shoes on Sunday morning when your run is over and endorphins are rushing through your brain; they can even influence your choice in next week's election."
This instrumentarianism has broken through traditional "customer-pleasing" strategies, turning instead to the control of user behavior and changing the composition and rules of social relations. The issues of "information cocoons" and "data sovereignty," frequently criticized by observers, are merely the tip of the iceberg first appearing on the surface. In the near future, this instrumentarianism may comprehensively rewrite social rules (for example, adjusting the periodic flow of customers to a coffee shop through time-limited coupons for coffee lovers) and reshape the reproduction of social relations. Relational production is precisely an extremely important aspect of "the public." A key point in contemporary society is that the production of the public status has become not only the main content of social production and reproduction but also the material basis upon which political subjects are shaped. Therefore, in reality, the public, as a "theory of articulation," is the relative relationship between individual existence and the world.
Platform capital utilizes the lure of profit and convenience to wrest the discourse power over rules from users, using the principle of calculability to continuously discipline needs that were originally diverse in form. The instrumentalism espoused by modernity has been polarized by algorithms and counter-disciplined into a "machine control-ism." Once these mechanisms are implemented, they enter a state of inertial operation, thereby leading to the maximization of capital interests. Personalized topics such as individuality, particularity, and even privacy—the subjects of humanism—have become "vintage" [14] artifacts that hinder the realization of data smoothness and freedom, and by extension, obstruct efficiency. It is foreseeable that the future of this machine control-ism will inevitably subject the entire world to technical authority; whoever masters data, uses data, and decides algorithms will possess the full power of discursive construction. It is precisely from this perspective that Bernard Stiegler denounced digital capitalism's destruction of human cognitive capacity, arguing that it will lead humanity into "systemic stupidity." In fact, however, it is not humanity that is stupid, but rather the behavioral mode that treats the algorithm as the sole pathway for facing the world.
It is undeniable that the platform economy model is the most dynamic and promising component of the contemporary digital economy. Although the technical characteristics and political-economic attributes of platforms themselves make it inevitable that they carry certain problems that have not yet fully unfolded, platformization has become the key principle of economic control in this era as digital systems and services are embedded into all components of the political economy. Its connectivity is capable of forming a seamless space of power, thereby creating a centralized ecosystem. The new mode of monopoly based on core transactions within platforms not only makes comprehensive control a reality but can even become a more intensive form of monopoly for the operation of capital. Furthermore, judging from the results of the collusion between capital power and technology within the context of social media, the weakening of privacy protection and the dilution of individual expression are also inevitable; the continuous iteration of algorithms further deprives laborers of their freedom of choice. These aspects, while continuously accelerating the expansion of platforms, have also become uncertain factors in the development of the platform economy.
(Author: Wu Jing, Department of Philosophy, Nanjing Normal University) (This article is a staged achievement of the National Social Science Fund of China General Project "Research on Western Platform Capitalism from the Perspective of Deleuze’s Critique of Capital" (20BZX011))
Online Editor: Tong Xin Source: Foreign Theoretical Trends (Guowai Lilun Dongtai), Issue 1, 2022