The Platform Economy and Geography: Restructuring the Space of Capitalist Accumulation

Abstract

Digital online platform firms are reorganizing the geography of how value is created, who captures it, and where. This essay argues that economic geographers have underestimated the power of platform and the firms that control them. We further demonstrate the remarkable concentration of these firms on the U.S. West Coast even while they organize global ecosystems. We suggest that a new spatial fix for the core of the global capitalist economy is emerging. We build upon a taxonomy of platform economy labor types and the location of the various types of labor and the implications of the ability of platforms to extract value from this labor. To illustrate, the impact on the geography of value creation, we undertake cases studies of two platforms, Amazon and Google Maps to explicate their effects upon the location of economic activity. Platforms are increasingly reorganizing labor and the location of value creation We argue that platforms are a new organizational form that is the result of an asymmetric power relationship between a platform and an ecosystem of complementers and users that interact and transact through platform. These platform leaders have the largest data sets and have created enormous teams of the best AI, machine learning researchers, and, finally, have enormous reservoirs of capital with which to capture new technologies that may threaten them.