2.4 State Platform Capitalism
Rather than cutting against one another, the distinct logics of state and platform capitalism have coalesced in unanticipated and generative ways. The specific political-economic affordances that characterize the platform business model are increasingly recognized as a vital source of power by states. As such, rather than simply trying to curtail platforms’ growth, states seek to govern through platforms: to instrumentalize and mobilize them in pursuit of geostrategic objectives. At the same time, in a world characterized by competition and growing calls for platform regulation, home state backing is becoming indispensable for US and Chinese platform firms to maintain and expand the dominance of their digital ecosystems in the global political economy. It is this increasingly symbiotic relationship between states and platform firms that we refer to as state platform capitalism (SPC).
We conceptualize SPC as the collaborative and reinforcing individual efforts of states and platform firms – principally in the United States and China – to compete to establish and maintain control over the technology stacks that serve as the underlying infrastructure of globalization. The power exercised by digital platforms derives from their technical and corporate control over the computational infrastructures and business ecosystems upon which a growing share of global economic activity depends. For states, platforms represent potential ‘points of infrastructural control [which] can serve as proxies to regain (or gain) control or manipulate the flow ofmoney, information, and the marketplace ofideas in the digital sphere’ (Musiani et al., 2016, 4). Control over the technology stacks and socio-economic exchanges which platforms orchestrate is central the competitive dynamics ofSPC. Given the ongoing expansion ofstates’ definitions of‘national security’ and the geopolitical competition for network centrality, it is unsurprising that platforms have become central to great power rivalry between the United States and China (Gray, 2021; Shen and He, 2022).
State Platform Capitalism
19