The Role of Digital Platforms As Infrastructures in Platform Capitalism

The major digital companies (the American GAFAM and the Chinese BAT), as key actors of significant economic, social, and even political relevance, have become indispensable references in defining new power configurations in contemporary capitalism. Over the past two decades, social sciences and media studies have increasingly drawn on the concepts of platform and infrastructure to describe them. Although scholars do not use these terms in a consistent way, the various meanings can contribute to a broader understanding of the phenomenon.

It is considered possible to recognize new forms of power, understood as disciplinary force, technological unconscious, and indispensability of functions, exerted by digital platforms in competition with state power, through the comparison of the concepts of infrastructural power, originating from media studies, and infrastructural space, widely used in logistics studies. Both concepts look at infrastructure as a form of governance, which reflects a key characteristic of contemporary capitalism and is crucial for explaining the role of digital platforms within it.

By integrating these perspectives and bridging platform studies with logistics studies, it is proposed a more comprehensive definition of the infrastructural role of digital platforms. It can be achieved referring to the power relations generated by controlling logistical key nodes: the management of digital and physical spaces, the concentration of economic and functional power, and the monopolization of big data management.

By exploring not the architecture upon which platforms are built, but rather the power they wield through it, this leads to a definition of infrastructure not borrowed from technical sciences, but one that explains the platforms’ negotiated relationship with traditional state powers and their role as the nervous system of contemporary capitalism.