Cities, as Van Doorn (2019) and then Marrone and Peterlongo (2020) have argued, are extremely important for platform capitalism because cities provide platforms with an ideal base for customers and remain in a mutually dependent symbiotic relationship with each other. Both platforms and cities get mutual benefits from each other in the form of increased customer base and more avenues for profit accumulation. Because of such interconnections between platforms and cities, urban spaces have begun to be characterised by a growing predominance of data-driven structures that have been shaping urban infrastructures (Barns, 2020). It is popularly assumed that gig workers have control over the conditions of their work, but it is rarely emphasised that the control that they have is only tokenistic in nature. They remain, as Wu et al. (2019) and Rachmawati et al. (2021) argue, far from independent and cannot determine the behaviour and work conditions as these are mostly controlled by the platforms.
The integration of the digital ecosystem with the physical ‘brick-andmortar’ framework of profit accumulation is essential because digital capitalism today, co-exists with ‘finance capitalism, hyper-industrial capitalism, crisis capitalism, authoritarian capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, mobility capitalism, global capitalism, etc.’ (Fuchs, 2019, p. 3). Markets have become, in the contemporary digital age, omnipresent in human lives. They have become deregulated and globalised (Castells, 1996; Sassen, 1999), often at the expense of public services (Harvey, 2014) which have caused the emergence of alienation on a mass scale (Fuchs,
122
S. D. ROY