IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/jculte/v16y2023i2p203-220.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Platform sabotage

Author

Listed:
  • Aaron Shapiro

Abstract

Why are unprofitable gig work platforms so highly valued? Recent scholarship argues that gig platforms configure their data and computational infrastructure as financial assets, and that this speculative valuation offsets monetary losses on ride-hailing and food-delivery services. At the root of this valuation, however, is a narrative of efficiency and optimization that has little bearing on platforms’ on-the-ground operations. In practice, gig work platforms are remarkably inefficient. I build on Veblen's work on the business enterprise to argue that platforms’ financial exceptionalism owes to their unique capacity to strategically insert inefficiencies within and beyond the market encounters they broker, a pattern that I call ‘platform sabotage.’ The paper offers five vignettes of platform sabotage at work, illustrating how platforms target their strategic inefficiencies across various constituencies of market actors. The paper concludes with discussion of sabotage as a modality of platformization.

Suggested Citation

  • Aaron Shapiro, 2023. "Platform sabotage," Journal of Cultural Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 16(2), pages 203-220, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:jculte:v:16:y:2023:i:2:p:203-220
    DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2022.2159495
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17530350.2022.2159495
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/17530350.2022.2159495?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:jculte:v:16:y:2023:i:2:p:203-220. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RJCE20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.