A proto-metaphor for the emerging system of ‘social credit’ in China? They’re rediscovering, at scale and at great expense to their users, the ways in which a society is more than a bazaar, and the pitfalls of allowing human attention to be sold and resold as a commodity. If a platform is addressing a collective […]
Do platforms work?
The distributed network has gobbled the hierarchical firm. Only by seizing the platform can workers avoid digital serfdom Why do corporations exist? These hierarchical, self-contained assemblies of labour, capital and know-how have been with us for so long that by now they seem almost ‘natural’. But apart from what they make or do or sell, […]