Platforms extract data as a form of unpaid payment from users

Evidence

Platforms are structured online spaces, made possible through elaborate software, that offer services of various sorts: a space to sell things, meet people, share information, find specialist resources, and so on. But they are also fundamentally spaces for data extraction. As Tarleton Gillespie puts it, platforms are “built on an infrastructure … for processing data for customer service, advertising, and profit” that makes them “oriented toward eliciting more data, and more kinds of data, from [their] users.” Platforms generally operate without explicit payment. The actual “payment” that the platform operator receives is usually based directly on the data extracted, though often also in part on data-driven advertising. The data “payment” is more interesting than the advertising payment. It can be either the value that the operator generates by packaging and selling to third parties the data it gathers about transactions and users (the commodity value) or the value that the operator raises by giving others access to its data (what we might call the rent value). — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 128

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the core definitional move: platform ‘payment’ is data extraction, split into commodity value and rent value.
• XREF: Connects to Zuboff-style surveillance capitalism and to the attention/surveillance school’s extraction framing; useful for mapping overlap. — connects to: Social media participation constitutes unpaid labor from which platforms extract value — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 505; Platforms extract value from each transaction without absorbing employment obligations — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 220; Platform users become unpaid servants who train algorithms. (+16 more)

Broader Connections

• Platforms extract value from each transaction without absorbing employment obligations #corroborates (0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 220
• Voluntary user content creation constitutes unpaid labor enriching platform owners #corroborates (0.85) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 338
• Platform users become unpaid servants who train algorithms. #corroborates (0.82)
• Users freely did unpaid labor that increased Facebook’s own value #corroborates (0.82) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1011
• Platforms extract free labor from users in exchange for recognition and perks #corroborates (0.80)
• Platform profit comes from commodifying user data by-products rather than selling ads #expands (0.80) — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 40
• Digital capitalism profits from unpaid pleasurable user activity. #corroborates (0.78) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 197
• Sharing-economy platforms fuse data extraction with labor at unprecedented scale #corroborates (0.78)
• Google frames users’ unpaid data contributions as an investment in personalized services. #corroborates (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 764
• An everything app charges vendors rent and extracts free labor from users #corroborates (0.72) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 513
• Platform ‘gamified’ labor substitutes token payments and rankings for wages #corroborates (0.72) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 1034
• Platforms extract surplus value produced elsewhere without producing any themselves #corroborates (0.70) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 872