Platform Capitalism

What is the relationship between emerging technology and the future structure of our economy? Is contemporary capitalism unwittingly breeding the technologies that will herald its own downfall? In this cutting-edge new book, rising star of the accelerationist movement Nick Srnicek addresses these questions, showing how contemporary innovations in automation, cybernetics and manufacturing represent a theoretical and practical challenge to the very economic system that bred them.

Historically, thinkers on the left demanded reduced work hours, economic democracy, and freely available abundance. Paradoxically, just as such demands seem as elusive as ever at a political level, they are becoming encoded into the very technological foundations of neoliberalism. Srnicek examines technologies such as automated logistics, cybernetic planning, and additive manufacturing in order to re-interpret older debates about worker control over the means of production, the ‘fetters’ of capitalist development, and situationist concepts of détournement. In so doing, the foundations and future of neoliberalism are brought under intense scrutiny.

Nick Srnicek (born 1982) is an American writer and academic. He is currently a lecturer in Digital Economy at King's College London. Born in 1982, Srnicek took a double major in Psychology and Philosophy before completing an MA at the University of Western Ontario in 2007. He proceeded to a PhD at the London School of Economics, completing his thesis in 2013 on "Representing complexity: the material construction of world politics". He has worked as a Visiting Lecturer at City University and the University of Westminster. Srnicek is associated with the political theory of accelerationism and a post-scarcity economy.