Reading recommendations

25 January 2025 By

Among the main objectives of the INCA project is to stimulate critical thinking and to provide citizens with information on the dangers and opportunities that underpin digital capitalism. With this objective in mind, in this publication, we suggest some interesting books that have digital platforms as their central axis. It is a selection of 6 titles, among whose authors you will find some members of the INCA team as well as other experts in the field who have engaged with our project through workshops or the production of the documentary.

We hope you like them! And if you have any reading suggestions that we can add to the list, don’t hesitate to share them with us!

Hegemony Now. How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (and How We Win It Back).

VERSO, 2022.

Gilbert and Williams offer a theory of power for the twenty-first century. The book explores how Big Tech came to control our world. The authors show how they have shaped the direction of politics and government as well as the neoliberal economy to benefit their interests. They also talk about opportunities for counter-hegemonic strategies to win back power. Hegemony Now outlines a dynamic socialist strategy for the twenty-first century.

Disruptive Digitalisation and Platforms: Risks and Opportunities of the Great Transformation of Politics, Socio-economic Models, Work, and Education.

Routledge, 2024

Edited by M. Béjean, J. Brabet, E. Mollona (INCA project coordinator), C. Vercher-Chaptal and with the participation of some INCA members (N. Cuppini, M. Frapporti, M. Pirone), this book provides an overview of the opportunities and risks of digitalisation and the platforms that embody it and constitute society’s new infrastructure. From a management point of view understanding this major socio-technical disruption is paramount. The book helps to comprehend its main players, such as the American GAFAM, their power and its sources, their architecture, and their impact on different industries and professions, labour markets, companies, and education.

Data Grab. The New Colonialism of Big Tech (and How to Fight Back).

Penguin Random House, 2024.

Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry talk about data colonialism. In the book, they express that in the new world order, data is the new oil and also that Big Tech companies are grabbing our most basic natural resources – our data – exploiting our labour and connections, and repackaging our information to control our views, track our movements, record our conversations and discriminate against us.
The book reveals how history can help us both to understand the emerging future and to fight back.

Capitalism in the Platform Age. Emerging Assemblages of Labour and Welfare in Urban Spaces.

Springer, 2024.

Written by INCA members S. Mezzadra, N. Cuppini, M. Frapporti and M. Pirone. Based on a three-year research project, this open-access book outlines a general theory of platform capitalism that conceives digital platforms not only as technical devices but as generative engines that operate at the interface of several aspects, such as digitalization of forms of social cooperation; algorithm-based management of labour and participation; and private and vertical appropriation of profits.

These elements are somehow iconic of the capitalist evolution of the last decades, and they open up a reflection on new forms of “primitive accumulation” (in particular regarding data), on the mechanisms used to capture and extract social surplus value, and on the logistic-financial dimensions of capital. Finally, in light of the transformations associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors examine how platforms can evolve into hegemonic organizational structures.

THE PLATFORM SOCIETY. Public Values in a Connective World.

Oxford University Press, 2018.

Van Dijck, Poell, and De Waal offer a comprehensive analysis of a connective world where platforms have penetrated the heart of societies—disrupting markets and labour relations, transforming social and civic practices, and affecting democratic processes. The Platform Society analyzes intense struggles between competing ideological systems and contesting societal actors—market, government, and civil society—asking who is or should be responsible for anchoring public values and the common good in a platform society.

The book highlights how these struggles play out in four private and public sectors: news, urban transport, health, and education.

PLATFORM CAPITALISM.

Polity Press, 2016.

What unites Google and Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, Siemens and GE, Uber and Airbnb? Across a wide range of sectors, these firms are transforming themselves into platforms: businesses that provide the hardware and software foundation for others to operate on. This transformation signals a major shift in how capitalist firms operate and how they interact with the rest of the economy: the emergence of ‘platform capitalism’.

This book critically examines these new business forms, tracing their genesis from the long downturn of the 1970s to the boom and bust of the 1990s and the aftershocks of the 2008 crisis. It shows how the fundamental foundations of the economy are rapidly being carved up among a small number of monopolistic platforms, and how the platform introduces new tendencies within capitalism that pose significant challenges to any vision of a post-capitalist future. This book will be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the most powerful tech companies of our time are transforming the global economy.