Global cloud giants are absorbing Southeast Asian small-trader platforms.
Evidence
Bukalapak, an Indonesian cloudalist firm, is taking over three and a half million warungs, digitising their services with a view not only to uploading their multifaceted local markets to the cloud but also to financialising the local communities who depend on them via usurious micro-credits, expensive digital cash transfers and basic banking services. Never too slow to cotton on, Jeff Bezos dispatched Jeff Bezos Expeditions to Indonesia and in 2021 began to invest in a competitor of Bukalapak’s. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 488
Categorization
- SHARE: Bukalapak’s 3.5 million warungs is a niche fact for anyone tracking global platform expansion into informal economies.
- SEED: Angles into the ‘platform extraction in the Global South’ story and how local marketplaces are being financialised as rent extraction.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 488
- XREF: connects to: Colonial-style ownership extends to device production and cloud computing capacity — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 92
Broader Connections
- Colonial-style ownership extends to device production and cloud computing capacity
#expands(0.72) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 92