Platforms are the first business model with data extraction built into their core DNA

Evidence

We began this chapter by arguing that twenty-first-century capitalism has found a massive new raw material to appropriate: data. … The old business models of the Fordist era had only a rudimentary capacity to extract data from the production process or from customer usage. The era of lean production modified this slightly, as global ‘just in time’ supply chains demanded data about the status of inventories and the location of supplies. Yet data outside the firm remained nearly impossible to attain; and, even inside the firm, most of the activities went unrecorded. The platform, on the other hand, has data extraction built into its DNA, as a model that enables other services and goods and technologies to be built on top of it, as a model that demands more users in order to gain network effects, and as a digitally based medium that makes recording and storage simple. — Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 76

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that data is capitalism’s new raw material, extracted by platforms as an ‘apparatus,’ directly engages Zuboff’s surveillance-capitalism thesis — the central rivalry this reading is built around. — connects to: Platforms reconfigure human life to continuously produce extractable data streams. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 45; Platform executives speak as social theorists to legitimize their data extraction models — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 426; Data extraction principles predate social media by decades in globalized capitalism — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 48 (+2 more)
• DEFINE: Defines exactly what distinguishes the platform business model from Fordist and lean-production predecessors: built-in data extraction as constitutive feature.

Related

• Platforms are the principal infrastructure through which capitalist data appropriation is normalized (similarity 0.86)
• Falling manufacturing profits drove capitalism toward data extraction via platform monopolies (similarity 0.86)
• Sharing-economy platforms fuse data extraction with labor at unprecedented scale (similarity 0.86)
• Platforms reconfigure human life to continuously produce extractable data streams. (similarity 0.85)
• Traditional manufacturing was information-lossy, necessitating the platform model. (similarity 0.85)
• Data extraction principles predate social media by decades in globalized capitalism (similarity 0.84)
• Data extraction infrastructure was built decades before social media through relational databases and logistics. (similarity 0.83)
• Industrial platforms extract data to cement monopolies over global manufacturing (similarity 0.83)
• A platform’s structural position gives it privileged access to record interactions (similarity 0.83)
• Platform companies converge into similar forms as they compete for the same data. (similarity 0.82)
• Platform data extraction operates as a continuous cache-gathering of social life. (similarity 0.81)
• Falling recording costs turned data from peripheral to central capitalist resource. (similarity 0.81)
• Data colonialism’s extractive logic predates social media by decades in globalized industrial capitalism. (similarity 0.81)
• Platform work fuses data relations with labor relations at unprecedented scale (similarity 0.80)
• Data relations extend capital extraction beyond labor into all social life (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Data extraction principles predate social media by decades in globalized capitalism #contradicts (0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 48