The state capitalist tools to which states have turned in pursuit of security and/ or geoeconomic leverage have deeper roots in the decades-long downward trend in global economic growth. The aforementioned neoliberal market reforms which drove globalization were supposed to allocate resources more efficiently and revive economic dynamism, but the results were underwhelming. The 2008 global financial prompted dramatic and long-lasting fiscal and monetary interventions to stabilize their economies and maintain liquidity. The quantitative easing undertaken by the US Treasury, combined with China’s stimulus spending, came to represent more of a new paradigm than stopgap measures. State-owned enterprises have experienced a comeback as states sought to pursue strategic investment programmes (IMF, 2020), and well-endowed sovereign wealth funds have purchased large stakes in leading private firms. Large-scale infrastructure investment also made a revival (Schindler and Kanai, 2021), in part as a way of mopping up surplus capital, while the complex central bank financial engineering required to prop up stock markets in 2008 never went away – resulting in perennial asset price inflation (Adkins et al., 2020). The economic and financial crises driven by the COVID-19 pandemic simply deepened these interventionist trends in both countries and beyond (van Apeldoorn and de Graaff, 2022).
Taken together these trends have been labelled as a ‘new’ form of state capitalism (Musacchio et al., 2015; Alami and Dixon, 2020b), most notable for the way in which it goes far beyond simple state-ownership to encompass a variety of novel interventionist strategies. And state capitalism has become wrapped up with geopolitical competition, as states vie to secure their economies against rivals through ever greater and deeper interventions (Alami et al., 2025). The emergent result is the rise of an increasingly multipolar world order, both increasingly geopolitically-fragmented while nevertheless marked by ‘deep’ forms of international economic integration both inside and between blocs (Lewin, 2024; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2024; Wijaya and Jayasuriya, 2024). State capitalist practices and their geopolitical corollaries have begun to remake the platform economy in dramatic new ways.
1.3 Platforms in the Ascendancy
State capitalism wasn’t the only major development to grow out of the 2008 global financial crisis. In the years of stagnation which followed, investment capital flooded en masse into the US tech sector. This fuelled an unprecedented investment boom, as start-ups sought to ‘hyperscale’ their way to market dominance by leveraging freely flowing venture capital (Klinge et al., 2023; Varoufakis, 2024).
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Reinventing Capitalism