Abstract
Athique and Parthasarathi’s edited volume on platformization in India is a collection of essays characterized by a novel approach. Its novelty is laid out in clear and unambivalent terms on the second page of the introduction and states that the approach
situate[s] ‘platform capitalism’ as a phenomenon emerging from the extension and convergence of long-term tendencies in media markets, state policy and the central pursuit of a technocratic solution to India’s development goals, paying attention to the widespread and multitudinous issues arising from those endeavours.
Platformization is usually understood as the transformation of conventional models of business models and production relations by placing and increased emphasis on the extraction of consumer data. In their sui generis approach to platformization in India, there is, thus, a strong emphasis on disagreeing with perceptions of platform capitalism as a dramatic rupture from existing forms of work organization and a radical refashioning of economic activity. They do agree that there is a novelty to it, but their approach builds on Srnicek’s work who sees the development of platform economy in a much larger context. For Srnicek, platform capitalism is not just a way of turning to data to ‘maintain economic growth and vitality in the face of a sluggish production sector’ (2016, p. 6) but also, a symptom of the dire state of global capitalism. Of platform technologies, he says that ‘these firms are parasitical on other value producing industries’ (2016, p. 56). Platform economies are thus understood as the grafting of a layer on top of existing configurations of market as they ‘rather than fashion[ing of] new objects of exchange’ (Athique & Parthasarathi, 2020, p. 25). Thus, rather than seeing platforms as formative of new social relations and a reimagining of the market, their approach sees platform economy as an inevitability that existing assemblages and long-term tendencies of the market were already inclined towards under the guidance of the state.
One of the key agendas in the Modi-led NDA opposition’s general election campaign in 2014 was the idea of global positioning of India as a ‘digital powerhouse’. After coming to power, there has been a concerted effort on the part of the newly formed NDA government to develop necessary infrastructure to create an ecosystem that thrives on the dissemination of digital ‘goods’ and logistical services. More importantly, these services are aimed toward the growing urban and middle-class consumers in India who have historically seen science and technology as the answer to problems in energy, agriculture, and land management. The difference between the Digital India drive and the earlier forms of techno-scientific policy-based solution seeking is a progressive decentralization and deregulation of control from the hands of the State. Under these new developments, the State sometimes builds public-facing infrastructures with taxpayer money only to hand it over to private ownership to run it. But this progressive decentralization and privatization of different sectors of Indian industries (especially media) have a long history of catering to the growing middle-class consumerist demands and fantasies of globalization that precedes both the 2014 NDA government as well as Platform technologies. Athique’s essay also points to how the state’s role in protecting local producer and regulating global platforms have been erratic (p. 25) because they ultimately rely on technology sectors for the realization of Digital India. At the same time, precarity and the gig economy is also ‘nothing new to India’s expansive pool of marginal and migrant labour, but the rating of their daily fortunes by digital brands threatens to make these entities curators of the informal sector’ (p. 26). This is a sector that, Athique and Parthasarathi remind us, employs 85% of the workforce and yet contributes very little to state revenue (p. 14). Thus platformization in India is constitutive of the ‘implicit transfer’ of certain sovereign rights (p. 16) spread across a whole host of complex socio-economic processes that are explored in the fifteen essays in the volume.
The first part or cluster of essays constitutes macro understanding of platformization in India. Athique’s essay uses the structural analogy of the emporium to understand the continuities and tendencies of capturing market share. Whereas Athique ends his essay with Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), Fitzgerald begins his with it. His essay explores the integration of Indian telecommunication companies and financialization of the networked media economy to comment on the state’s role of mediating between ‘regulator and champion of capital in the platform economy’ (p. 45). Fitzgerald’s essay gives a thorough policy overview of how the state’s recapitalization of private sector losses have heavily favoured the digital even though the costs of infrastructure have been very high. On one hand, the state has heavily sided with Reliance in their interest in data storage and mining, on the other, it has also forced international e-businesses like Amazon to restructure. Akshay Kumar’s essay makes use of the phrase ‘inter-evaluative dynamic’ to understand the function of tech affordances that holds the provider/creator and the consumer together into liking, sharing or rating each other. He then uses this concept to undergird the relationship between Modi’s election campaign advertisement and platform capitalism to show how ‘monopolistic growth of computational capital built on the mountain of debt procured from investor capital without any horizon of long-term profitability (as with Uber, Paytm, etc.) is proving conducive to a particular variant of state-form’ (p. 76).
The second part is a collection of essays that looks at specific case studies of the integrationist tendencies of platform businesses laid out by Athique’s essay. Ishita Tiwari looks at how Amazon has outmuscled Netflix in India by localizing its content and by providing a whole ‘ecosphere’ of services across several sub-platforms. Ithurbide’s chapter similarly looks at the platformization of the music industry in India to show that ‘the multiplication of music platforms in India, available essentially via mobile and smartphones, is the visible part of deeper reconfigurations of the industry in the digital context’ (p. 108). Bouquillion’s essay continues in the same vein of understanding OTTs as ‘insertion of capitalist logics within the existing media industries’ (p. 130). Bouquillon raises several important questions about the transnational stakes of the rise of India-based OTT platforms alongside North American or Japan-based platforms. Because of its preoccupation with remediation and shifts, the essay also provides the perfect segue to the third part of the edited volume which largely concerns itself with how reconfiguration has an impact both at an organizational level as well as at an individual level. This part very specifically looks at the question of labour with respect to the interventions of algorithmic curation of platforms. As Haneef and Khan’s essay points out, nowhere is this more evident than in the changing contours of journalism and newsroom politics in India. By undertaking case studies of Tamil language-based digital news platforms, they look at how audience capital is harvested and made use of by transforming it into a resource for free labour. Verma, Ilavarasan and Kar’s essay similarly details the exploitation of ‘driver-partners’ by taxi-aggregator apps like Ola and Uber. Their method is an interesting and unconventional one since alongside oral interviews, they also conduct a rigorous analysis of the driver’s ratings’ data which is again an instance of the ‘inter-evaluative paradigm’ that is invoked earlier in the volume.
Part four of the book returns to the political stakes of platformization. Pawan Singh’s essay, in particular, takes up the thorny issue of citizen biometric platform Aadhar and documents its rationale of existence over the years with respect to its exploitation by banking and other corporate entities. Pawan Singh’s historicization of the Aadhar bill and its shifting priorities and capriciousness shows how this is an instant of the state taking a leaf out of platform capitalism’s playbook. The way platforms are associated with restructuring and reshaping the way capital functions and use the extraction of data to increase efficiency of production is likened to surveillance capitalism.
Through a subsumption of the contra-narratives of surveillance, data misuse and inadequate data protection legislation within larger nationalist registers of collective, common good and citizen empowerment through real choices in a free and fair digital economy, the use of Aadhaar as an authentication platform is likely to accelerate. (p. 215)
Usha Rodrigues’ essay looks at how political and election campaigning has been grafted onto social media platforms with political parties employing data analytics departments to have a better understanding of voter bases. The platformization of election campaigns is also linked to a mainstream Hindutva identity being inculcated on social media. This is something explored in Pradip Thomas’ essay in part five. Rodrigues’ essay ends with a summarization of the growing erosion of public trust in traditional news and information outlets. The background and context to this mistrust are provided to a certain extent in the following essay written by Hrishikesh Arvikar who looks at the infrastructural organizations that provide the conduit for platform news and the portfolios of risk and fear associated with it. The volume concludes with Amit Rai’s essay on platform and datalogical ecology’s impact on subaltern forms of creativity and organization of ‘attention across continually re-segmented populations’ (p. 301).
To conclude, Athique and Parthasarathi’s edited volume is a strong start for a political-economic understanding of the impacts of platformization at the levels of state, culture, labour and the individual. It acts as a good sourcebook for narratives of and around platforms, their business models, rationales, objectives, integrationist tendencies and the involvement and complicity of the state and collective fantasies. The heuristics of understanding platform capitalism laid out in the introduction is a useful tool for researchers interested in a more in-depth study or deep dive into some of its reconfigured abstractions and affordances. It also covers extensive ground in documenting and analyzing not just the government’s role in making its territory accessible for platform businesses but also looks at different kinds of platforms like media entertainment, food and grocery as well as ride-hail platforms. Although it is not within the immediate purview of the book, one possible way to build on this work is to look for ways in which platformization has been made possible through physical and technological infrastructures, policymaking and land grant subsidies. Despite their ethereal appearance, internet technologies are very physical, often complex meshes of material, infrastructural and geographical entanglements. Therefore, scholarly work can build on this volume to ask questions about how worker compensation, data protection rights and civil liberties are shaped and continue to be shaped by such material realities.