Spatialization of Digital Platforms

Abstract

This article challenges the common tendency to pinpoint a “nationality” to a multi-national capitalist platform company. It calls for a close examination of how platform companies, as capitalist enterprises, organize themselves legally and spatially. The article first reviews how platforms have been studied in relation to space. I then use the case of the Sina model, also known as the Variable Interests Entities (VIE) model, to challenge the meaning of the “Chinese” prefix. This example illustrates that, Chinese or not, capitalist platform companies engineer a composite geography to guarantee maximum flexibility and mobility for the accumulation of private wealth and, in the process, generate great power differentials. In short, this commentary is a call to study digital platforms over the course of capitalism permutations as well as its interpolation and interdependence with existing systems of power.