Cloud Empires: How Digital Platforms Are Overtaking the State and How We Can Regain Control

Lehdonvirta, VILI

  • 出版商: MIT
  • 出版日期: 2024-02-06
  • 售價: $1,110
  • 貴賓價: 9.5$1,055
  • 語言: 英文
  • 頁數: 296
  • 裝訂: Quality Paper - also called trade paper
  • ISBN: 0262548380
  • ISBN-13: 9780262548380
  • 海外代購書籍(需單獨結帳)

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商品描述

The rise of the platform economy into statelike dominance over the lives of entrepreneurs, users, and workers.

The early Internet was a lawless place, populated by scam artists who made buying or selling anything online risky business. Then Amazon, eBay, Upwork, and Apple established secure digital platforms for selling physical goods, crowdsourcing labor, and downloading apps. These tech giants have gone on to rule the Internet like autocrats. How did this happen? How did users and workers become the hapless subjects of online economic empires? The Internet was supposed to liberate us from powerful institutions. In Cloud Empires, digital economy expert Vili Lehdonvirta explores the rise of the platform economy into statelike dominance over our lives and proposes a new way forward.

Digital platforms create new marketplaces and prosperity on the Internet, Lehdonvirta explains, but they are ruled by Silicon Valley despots with little or no accountability. Neither workers nor users can "vote with their feet" and find another platform because in most cases there isn't one. And yet using antitrust law and decentralization to rein in the big tech companies has proven difficult. Lehdonvirta tells the stories of pioneers who helped create--or resist--the new social order established by digital platform companies. The protagonists include the usual suspects--Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Travis Kalanick of Uber, and Bitcoin's inventor Satoshi Nakamoto--as well as Kristy Milland, labor organizer of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, and GoFundMe, a crowdfunding platform that has emerged as an ersatz stand-in for the welfare state. Only if we understand digital platforms for what they are--institutions as powerful as the state--can we begin the work of democratizing them.

商品描述(中文翻譯)

平台經濟崛起,對企業家、用戶和工人的生活產生類似國家般的支配。

早期的互聯網是一個無法無天的地方,充斥著詐騙藝術家,使得在線買賣任何物品都充滿風險。然後,亞馬遜、eBay、Upwork和蘋果建立了安全的數字平台,用於銷售實體商品、群眾外包勞動和下載應用程序。這些科技巨頭已經像獨裁者一樣統治著互聯網。這是怎麼發生的?用戶和工人如何成為網絡經濟帝國的無助主體?互聯網本應解放我們免於強大機構的束縛。在《雲帝國》中,數字經濟專家Vili Lehdonvirta探討了平台經濟如何在我們的生活中崛起並實現類似國家般的支配,並提出了一種新的前進方式。

Lehdonvirta解釋說,數字平台在互聯網上創造了新的市場和繁榮,但它們由矽谷的暴君統治,幾乎沒有任何問責制。工人和用戶都無法“用腳投票”並找到另一個平台,因為在大多數情況下根本沒有其他選擇。然而,使用反壟斷法和去中心化來約束大型科技公司已被證明是困難的。 Lehdonvirta講述了幫助創建或抵制數字平台公司所建立的新社會秩序的先驅者的故事。主角包括眾所周知的人物,如亞馬遜創始人Jeff Bezos,Uber的Travis Kalanick和比特幣的發明者Satoshi Nakamoto,以及亞馬遜機械土耳其的勞工組織者Kristy Milland和眾籌平台GoFundMe,後者已成為福利國家的替代品。只有當我們將數字平台視為與國家一樣強大的機構時,我們才能開始民主化它們的工作。

作者簡介

Vili Lehdonvirta is Professor of Economic Sociology and Digital Social Research at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. A former software developer, he is the coauthor of Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis (MIT Press).

作者簡介(中文翻譯)

Vili Lehdonvirta是牛津大學牛津互聯網研究所的經濟社會學和數字社會研究教授。他曾是一名軟體開發者,也是《虛擬經濟:設計與分析》(MIT Press)的合著者。