van Dijck, J., Poell, T., & de Waal, M. (2018). The platform society. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190889760.001.0001
Summary
The Platform Society argues that online platforms have not simply disrupted Western economies but have penetrated the core of society itself, reshaping economic transactions, social practices, and public institutions. Rejecting the celebratory “platform revolution” and “sharing economy” discourse, van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal reframe platformization as a contested struggle over public values — a negotiation between private corporate interests and the common good. Their central move is conceptual: platforms do not merely reflect the social but produce the social structures we inhabit, and they carry specific (largely US-based, neoliberal) values inscribed in their architectures that clash with values embedded in existing societal structures, particularly European ones. Through sector case studies in news, urban transport, healthcare, and education, the book develops a vocabulary for analyzing how platform power accumulates and how public values might be anchored in its governance.
Key Contributions
- Introduces and theorizes the concept of the “platform society” to stress the inextricable entanglement of platforms and societal structures.
- Offers an analytical “instrumentarium” built on three mechanisms — datafication, commodification, and selection — for studying platformization across sectors.
- Provides a functional taxonomy of platform roles (infrastructural vs. sectoral; connectors vs. complementors) aimed at helping legislators update antitrust and competition frameworks.
- Reframes platforms as performative constructors of value regimes rather than neutral technological or economic enablers.
- Advances a normative agenda for anchoring public values (fairness, equality, solidarity, accountability, transparency, democratic control) in governance, with special attention to the European context.
Methods
A multidisciplinary theoretical synthesis drawing on science and technology studies, political economy, media studies, business/management studies, and legal scholarship. The analysis works across three levels — micro (the anatomy of a single platform, decomposed into technical, economic, and sociolegal elements), meso (the platform ecosystem), and macro (the geopolitics of platform societies). These frames are applied through sector-based comparative case studies in news, urban transport, healthcare/health research, and education, using examples such as Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Coursera, AltSchool, 23andMe, PatientsLikeMe, and Parkinson mPower.
Findings
- Platforms deliberately blur boundaries — infrastructure/sector, market/state, consumer/citizen, private/public — adopting hybrid status to bypass regulation and professional norms (Airbnb refusing “hotel” status, Uber rejecting “taxi business,” Facebook long refusing “media organization”).
- The Western ecosystem is dominated by the US “Big Five” (Alphabet-Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft), whose opaque, centralized infrastructural services are counterbalanced globally only by a state-linked Chinese ecosystem.
- Infrastructural and sectoral platforms are increasingly integrated technologically and economically, letting the Big Five accumulate cross-sectoral power via sector-agnostic data streams.
- The ecosystem is riddled with paradoxes: it appears egalitarian but is hierarchical, appears to serve public value but is almost entirely corporate, appears neutral but is ideologically loaded, appears local but is global.
- The Amsterdam Airbnb case shows how platform adoption triggers clashes over fairness, level playing fields, safety, taxation, affordable housing, and inequality.
- Because Western online infrastructure is now fully privatized, governments, NGOs, and public institutions depend on Google or Facebook for login, search visibility, and reach — undermining their autonomy.
Connections
This book is a foundational statement of the political-economy critique of platforms, extending the classic argument that platforms are not neutral intermediaries but value-laden architectures developed in Gillespie2010-as and later in Gillespie2022-jx. Its infrastructural-vs-sectoral analysis and concern with the concentration of platform power resonate with work on platform infrastructures such as Helmond2026-ll. As an anniversary-era touchstone for platform critique, it provides the normative and conceptual backdrop against which more recent essays in this register position themselves.