Introduction: Platformization of Work and Platform Capitalism

This chapter examines the platformization of labor as a central feature of 21st-century capitalism, highlighting both its celebrated narratives of technological innovation and its underlying structures of exploitation. While platform companies are often portrayed as engines of disruption and inclusivity, their success is largely fueled by concentrated capital flows, network effects, and the strategic use of surplus informal labor, particularly in the Global South. Drawing on global and Indonesian cases, the chapter shows how digital platforms reproduce long-standing patterns of precarity by externalizing risks onto workers, intensifying algorithmic control, and circumventing labor protections through misclassification. Far from fostering empowerment, platform capitalism embeds itself in economies already marked by informality, weak regulation, and surplus labor, thereby creating structural asymmetries that deepen workers’ dependence and vulnerability. Yet, this dependence is not uncontested: across diverse contexts, gig workers have engaged in strikes, protests, and collective mobilizations against declining wages and exploitative policies. By situating Indonesia within the broader dynamics of platform capitalism, this chapter establishes the book’s analytical foundation: an interrogation of cheap labor regimes in the gig economy. Through labor regime theory, the book advances beyond existing scholarship by explaining why workers remain disciplined and committed under conditions of super-exploitation, and by identifying the interplay of market competition, state policy, labor process, class struggle, and labor reproduction as constitutive elements of platform labor regimes.