This helps to explain why Google, ostensibly a search engine company, is moving into the consumer internet of things ( Home/ Nest), self-driving cars ( Waymo), virtual reality ( Daydream/ Cardboard), and all sorts of other personal services. Facebook is a master at using all sorts of behavioural techniques to foster addictions to its service: how many of us scroll absentmindedly through Facebook, barely aware of it?Īnother way is to expand the apparatus of extraction. One way is to get people to stay on your platform longer. At the heart of platform capitalism is a drive to extract more data in order to survive. ‘Google, ostensibly a search engine company, virtual reality, and all sorts of other personal services.’Īnd this poses problems.
FACEBOOK GOOGEL PERSON DATA GUARDIAN HOW TO
Monsanto and John Deere, two established agricultural companies, are trying to figure out how to incorporate platforms into farming and food production. Siemens and GE, two powerhouses of the 20th century, are fighting it out to develop a cloud-based system for manufacturing. Uber is the most prominent example, turning the staid business of taxis into a trendy platform business. We often think of platforms as a tech-sector phenomenon, but the truth is that they are becoming ubiquitous across the economy. More and more companies are coming to realise this. In this sense, platforms are the only business model built for a data-centric economy. Every interaction on a platform becomes another data point that can be captured and fed into an algorithm. Platforms, as spaces in which two or more groups interact, provide what is in effect an oil rig for data. Data is quickly becoming the 21st-century version of oil – a resource essential to the entire global economy, and the focus of intense struggle to control it. These companies’ power over our reliance on data adds a further twist.
FACEBOOK GOOGEL PERSON DATA GUARDIAN DRIVERS
Likewise with Uber: it makes sense for riders and drivers to use the app that connects them with the biggest number of people, regardless of the sexism of Travis Kalanick, the former chief executive, or the ugly ways in which it controls drivers, or the failures of the company to report serious sexual assaults by its drivers. Ello’s rapid downfall occurred because it never reached the critical mass of users required to prompt an exodus from Facebook – whose dominance means that even if you’re frustrated by its advertising and tracking of your data, it’s still likely to be your first choice because that’s where everyone is, and that’s the point of a social network. Reaching a critical mass of users is what makes these businesses successful: the more users, the more useful to users – and the more entrenched – they become. Instead, Facebook connects users, advertisers, and developers Uber, riders and drivers Amazon, buyers and sellers. None of them focuses on making things in the way that traditional companies once did. The platform – an infrastructure that connects two or more groups and enables them to interact – is crucial to these companies’ power. Monday brought another giant leap as Amazon raised the prospect of an international grocery price war by slashing prices on its first day in charge of the organic retailer Whole Foods. Their business model lets them siphon off revenues and data at an incredible pace, and consolidate themselves as the new masters of the economy. Yet Ello’s rapid rise and fall is symptomatic of our contemporary digital world and the monopoly-style power accruing to the 21st century’s new “platform” companies, such as Facebook, Google and Amazon. The hype fizzled out as Facebook continued to expand. Whole Foods price cuts are at center of Amazon-Walmart online war According to the manifesto accompanying its public launch, Ello would never sell your data to third parties, rely on advertising to fund its service, or require you to use your real name. Ello, amid much hype, presented itself as the non-corporate alternative to Facebook. For the briefest moment in March 2014, Facebook’s dominance looked under threat.