The Derivative Values of Platform Capitalism
The recently concluded General Election in India was not only its costliest ever, the overall expense nearly doubled over the previous iteration, in 2014. While the expense has gone up six times since 1998, in about two decades, the jump between the last
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The Derivative Values of Platform Capitalism Akshaya Kumar
The recently concluded General Election in India was not only its costliest ever, the overall expense nearly doubled over the previous iteration, in 2014. While the expense has gone up six times since 1998, in about two decades, the jump between the last two iterations is alarming for a number of reasons. Indian economy has been doing rather badly, particularly since the demonetization event, in which the government excluded nearly 86% of its active currency from legal tendering. Since then, there has been a remarkable fall even in official growth numbers. Unemployment is the highest it has been in decades, and small and medium enterprises have been struggling to stay afloat, by all accounts. How do we reconcile with the two contrasting set of graphics, then? While it may have increasingly become a common sense of ‘life in capitalism’, the paradox of a struggling economy confronted with the loudest, the most self-assured and blatantly self-congratulatory government should be a moment of reckoning. Particularly so, for those of us in media and communication studies who are left befuddled by the extraordinary convergence between advertising- led trajectories of electoral and entertainment platforms. This chapter A. Kumar (*) IIT Indore, Indore, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Athique, V. Parthasarathi (eds.), Platform Capitalism in India, Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and IAMCR Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44563-8_4
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makes an attempt to unpack a little of this convergence via the political economy of platform capitalism. There is a growing pile of recent literature which grapples with, and builds upon, the idea that the media audience metadata is hoarded and exchanged across platforms in the new scheme of things. Expectedly, the narrative typically begins with Google’s near-monopoly on search engine market enabling target advertising to be embedded across a vast number of platforms. Nonetheless, as Athique notes: ‘At one level, the mania for targeted advertising is simply a more sophisticated manifestation of America’s rejection of planned production in favour of guided consumption. What is more significant is the multiple vectors of ‘market information’ coming on stream, and their seamless automated operation’ (Athique 2019a). Hoarded data by itself does not qualify as a valuable commodity, as any real authority on data capitalism would promptly remind us. Rather, the value is added by analytics instead. That is why what we are confronted with is not data collection as the primary enterprise, but various manifestations of algorithmic governance. Let us take the example of Netflix. Not only has it been burning capital without charging the subscribers proportionately, its advertising-free content means that Netflix’s doors are shut even for the pre-eminent model of platform business—free content traded for attention to merchandise advertorials. While it
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