Cultural platform capitalism: extracting value from cultural asymmetries in RealTech

Abstract

This paper contributes to the ‘digital turn’ in geography and to conceptualizations of cognitive capitalism by focusing on how changing forms of cultural representation in the digital world constitute new forms of value extraction. It takes as a key case study the RealTech company Juwai; one of the largest transnational digital platforms connecting international estate agents and Chinese buyers. Positioning the digital platform as a site in which multiple cultural and geographic knowledges are produced and articulated as a condition for value extraction, the paper analyses a suite of textual and visual content in both English and Mandarin produced on Juwai that targets Chinese buyers and the Australian real estate industry. The core argument is that the production of cultural difference or cultural asymmetry is not simply a by-product of Juwai’s form of platform capitalism, rather mediating cultural asymmetries is a process of value extraction that is a central component of their business model. We point to a business model of ‘cultural platform capitalism’ where the technology exceeds its conventional connective and extractive functions (i.e., data as value) by translating cultural knowledge as a key business practice (i.e., cultural risk as value).