Platforms1 like Spotify are market actors that are culturally and economically relevant in ways that other capitalistic actors are not. The case for Spotify specifically is authoritatively made in Liz Pelly’s “Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist”.
Generally their lifecycle can be approximated through Cory Doctorow’s enshittification thesis. Early in their existence platforms generate value for all or most stakeholders. Then they iteratively begin to screw everyone until a critical equilibrium is reached that is just not terrible enough to make everybody leave.
The real product these platforms reliably produce2 are tech bro billionaires with delusions of grandeur. Unfortunately the externalities of their cultural preferences and political beliefs (be it neo-monarchism, fascism or any arbitrary thing associated with a firewall against asset redistribution) are dumped on most of us.
There is neither political will nor political capital to meaningfully regulate platforms (or billionaires). But I believe there is a potential in rebuilding platforms to escape the flywheel to enshittification.
Participants, not subjects
Such a rebuild will need to happen on the ground. It will not be granted or fall from the skies. Instead, it requires transforming platform users from passive subjects into active participants with real power.
The key question in every organisation is one of incentives. If I lead a company (representing shareholder interest) or own a company everything else but the maximization of profits (short- and / or long-term) is either cause for termination or requires a lot of energy to sustain against the cultural default.
That implies that the shitwall a platform can set up to prevent the road to enshittification needs to be the structure of the cap table. A Spotify that is owned fully by the musicians distributing (or producing) on the platform. Not labels. Not Daniel Ek or Mark Zuckerberg.
This is foundational. It cannot be fixed for existing structures. Ownership stakes are the only real currency of every company when it comes to decision making. Leaving the mediation of your product to anybody but yourself will end with you becoming poorer, disengaged from your audience or customers, replaced with AI slop or whatever soulless shit comes after that.
Open source is a very successful model of building software. But technology is just a very small part of any product and products are not deployed somewhere, they are continuously being built by organisations. However, building open source structures for companies, including processes and infrastructure is currently not being done.
There is a lot of potential lift in such an approach. Nobody else will pursue this because there is simply no money in building templates for equitable company with great processes. But such designs can be copied and improved in the open and subsequently become a differentiating factor in the success of an organization. And organizations can build products.
We have the ability to develop technology in an open, fair, distributed and equitable fashion. We need to do better to extend this approach to organisations, capable of shipping competitive products and platforms.
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Platforms are used here in the sense of a technical products’s business model under the terms of financialization. That implies a multi-sided market infrastructure that creates value primarily through facilitating interactions between distinct user groups, extracting rent from these exchanges while transforming traditionally illiquid assets or services into financialized data flows that can be commoditized, securitized, and leveraged for capital extraction. ↩︎
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They also tend to produce happy shareholders of course. ↩︎