Platform studies and the finance-technology nexus: For a “genetic” approach

From a historical political economy perspective, digital platforms are direct developments of the productive restructuring of capitalism emerging from the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) revolution within neoliberalism and globalization. In that sense, they are shaped by financialization, the still-leading orientation to capital accumulation in contemporary capitalism (Fine and Saad-Filho, 2017). Although the recent literature in platform studies acknowledges the relationship between platformization and financialization (Jia et al., 2022; Jia and Nieborg, 2022), it does not develop the shared historical origin and intertwined development of financialization and digitalization that makes platformization possible in the first place.

The political-economic perspective within platform studies has gradually begun to explore the relationship between finance and digital platforms. Two perspectives, in particular, offer valuable insights: the “assetization” and Marxist approaches. The former, drawing upon Science and Technology Studies (STS), examines how various entities (such as data) are transformed into assets in contemporary technoscientific capitalism through the mediation of platforms and digital features (Birch and Muniesa, 2020; Birch et al., 2021; Van Doorn & Badger, 2020). The latter emphasizes revenue transfers and value generation within platform capitalism, seeking to understand the key transformations and continuities in capitalism during the current digital era (Srnicek, 2017; Törnberg, 2023). Despite these important contributions, further scholarship is needed to explore the common origins of digitalization and financialization, as well as the shared conceptual logic underpinning these processes in relation to digital platforms. Understanding this intertwined origin can deepen our comprehension of platforms by unveiling the technical affinities between these processes and providing a “genetic” perspective on the coevolution of platformization and financialization.

By a “genetic” approach, I mean, on the one hand, a genealogical inquiry into the development of platforms in relation to finance. On the other hand, it refers to the “shared DNA” of platforms and finance, emphasizing how they evolve together, closely related, and perhaps even mirroring each other within contemporary capitalism. While the first orientation offers a historical lens to examine the rise of the platform model by incorporating preplatform practices from the finance industry, the latter reveals their shared characteristics today, shedding light on the trends of this interplay for future transformations in “platform capitalism.”

Finance, technology, and capital accumulation

As Sadowski (2019: 5) points out, “there is a long history of crossover between innovations in information technology and innovations in finance.” Indeed, finance and digital technology have long been interconnected (Ajji, 2020; Paraná, 2019). Technology is not merely an external infrastructure but a fundamental component of contemporary financial market dynamics (Knorr Cetina & Bruegger, 2002; Pardo-Guerra, 2013).

When it comes to platform studies, a fact that has largely gone unnoticed is that the implementation of mathematical models and algorithms in financial markets anticipates by a few decades their adoption in other fields of application that have become more popular, such as search engines and social media. Algorithmic governance (Katzenbach and Ulbricht, 2019), so dear to platforms, goes from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, and not the other way around, as is commonly thought. ¹ Finance has always been an early adopter of digital technologies (Paraná, 2019). Regarding AI, the Bayesian and inductivist logic of neural networks makes them particularly suitable for financial speculation (Joque, 2022).

Such anticipation demonstrates a crucial aspect: if finance operates in an increasingly “technologized” way, contemporary technological development is carried out more and more by mimicking the modus operandi of finance itself and its form of governance—leveraged and speculative, short-term, deterritorializing, deregulating. Therefore, it is not by chance that financial companies increasingly resemble technology companies, and vice versa (Cooiman, 2024; Hendrikse et al., 2024). The rise in prominence of the financial dimension of economies and the extensive digitalization of social life are intertwined processes in contemporary capitalism.

More specifically, finance and technology are both ways to discount the future in the present, flexing the barriers to capital valorization. As such, both are privileged vehicles for recomposing, reorganizing, and advancing productive forces (Albuquerque, 2023). Platforms should be analyzed through these lenses. While this has been partially explored in the literature through the discussion of rentiership and value generation in platform labor (Srnicek, 2021; Van Doorn, 2022), emphasizing this common origin, elective affinities, and shared economic logic will likely improve the contextualization of platform capitalism within the broader historical development of capitalism (Boyer, 2022), helping us to better discern future trends. Platformization must be viewed not only as a facilitator of the convergence between finance and technology. Platformization is itself a product of a new configuration for this relationship.

Rent extraction and the political economy of the platform model

What I am here referring to as a “genetic” approach prompts us to take a step back and consider why it seems no longer possible to address platformization without also considering financialization, and vice versa. Digital Platforms are a direct outcome of Internet dissemination through the economy and society. ICT are particularly prone to drive rearticulations of the spatial-temporal dimensions crucial to social experience and economic processes (Harvey, 1990). These technologies compress space in time, enabling new ways of shortening flows, leading to the emergence of sociotechnical arrangements such as digital networks. This allows for the growing codification of human interactions into binary data, facilitating target control and surveillance, which, in turn, enable further exploitation and expropriation that characterize the datafied approach to the economic activity of platforms.

Importantly, ICT and Internet-based digital economy make technically possible a sort of operational “decentralization” of almost everything: work and production, circulation and consumption, financial and communication flows. ² Such a technical decentralization only superficially and momentarily leads to the disintermediation of economic practices in favor of distributive self-governed settings. In reality, as capitalist social relations remain dominant, the informational copresence and the acceleration of flows that rearticulate production, circulation, and consumption in an increasingly shortened manner translate such a technical-operational decentralization into growing economic, political, and soon later, sociotechnical concentration. This manifests in the tendency toward polarization of the labor market and the expanded oligopolization within the platform economy, characterized by network effects. As well-documented by the political economy strand within platform studies, this informational integration allows platforms to strategically position themselves within economic coordination, enabling them to extract value from other sectors through rent-based arrangements (Sadowski, 2020; Tan, 2021).

Commodification and autonomization of value-forms

Platforms facilitate the relative autonomization of finance from production, a characteristic feature of financialization processes. By connecting various locations and social domains, accelerating processes, and capitalizing on economic gains from data and information, platforms imbue every socioeconomic process they touch with the same speculative drives that define them.

Financialization is about the liberation of the forces and powers of money and finance through the extension of the market into increasing areas of social life. In more abstract terms, it entails the relative autonomy of circulation vis-à-vis production, or the growing expansion of what Marx (1993) defined as “fictitious capital.” It drives the general logical reorganization of capital accumulation in favor of financial valorization, that is the subsumption of the productive process as a whole to the objectives, temporalities, and modes of operation of finance capital (Mollo et al., 2022).

As financial profits become a benchmark for other economic activities, rent-extractivist approaches gain prominence. Heterodox economists and political economists have long highlighted the rise of rentier activity resulting from neoliberal deregulation and financial-commercial liberalization ³ (Chesnais, 2016). Platforms provide a new sociotechnical base for these processes and can further deepen them. Contrary to any resemblance with (neo)feudal economic and social relations (Durand, 2020; Varoufakis, 2023), this points to a deeper capitalist dynamic of “autonomization of value,” as defined by Marx. This signifies the tendency of capital to create forms of wealth increasingly autonomized from the exploitation of productive labor (Rotta and Teixeira, 2018). In a nutshell, it represents a highly advanced form of capitalism where the immanent logic of capital is driven to its peak.

Directly related to such a role, platforms typically facilitate the enclosure of knowledge and information as commodities (Rotta & Paraná, 2022). Intangible products, such as information and knowledge, are difficult to adequately capture by the logic of the market and private property. This is because, once produced, entrance barriers and costs of reproduction tend to be zero. For years, since the expanded diffusion of the Internet, digital businesses have been dealing with this problem, testing varied models, and seeking, whenever possible, the support of the state ⁴ to legally impose the logic of private property in the realm of intellectual and informational goods (Cohen, 2004; Rikap, 2021). The platformization of the Internet (Helmond, 2015), which encloses it in spaces of flows and actions controlled by corporate borders, represents a new strategic step toward the enclosure and privatization for the expansion of the logic of capital to the digital-information world. ⁵

The new technical possibilities for the expansion of commodification and market domination to growing dimensions of social life underpin platforms’ explorations of renewed forms of profit and rent extraction. When pursuing that, platforms mimic the same temporal and portfolio structures of venture capital (Langley and Leyshon, 2017). As a result, short-termism, rentism, patrimonialism, and monopolization are trends observed across the board, blurring the lines between traditional financial institutions and technology companies, for example in fintech.

Where to go from here?

As I have argued, a comprehensive understanding of the finance-technology nexus is essential for navigating the complexities of digital platforms in contemporary society. These interconnected aspects can accelerate future outcomes, amplifying opportunities for capital valorization and the reconfiguration of productive forces. The early adoption of ICT, computation, and algorithmic trading systems in financial markets exemplifies this dynamic. Financialization, facilitated by neoliberal deregulation, has elevated financial profits as a key metric across various economic sectors, bolstering rent-extractivist practices that are brought to the fore and intensified by digital platforms. Serving as sociotechnical infrastructures, platforms act as contemporary and likely future conduits for these processes, marking a strategic shift toward expanding capitalist logic into the digital realm through the enclosure and privatization of knowledge and information. Platform studies have yet to adequately address these dynamics.

Drawing from my recent research on the digital economy in Latin America, I have suggested in this commentary that a “genetic” political economy theoretical approach to platform capitalism offers a promising path forward. This framework calls for examining platforms through the lens of the historically interconnected processes by which platformization and financialization materialize in each case. In doing so, it can provide a new basis for comparative analysis, highlighting both the diversity and particularities of individual cases as well as the common trends shared among them. Beyond focusing solely on the financial aspects of platforms or their relationship with financial markets, a “genetic” approach involves the following key dimensions:

- Theoretically, it integrates macroeconomic accounts of financialization, derived from heterodox economics, with more localized and situated studies of platforms from STS, economic sociology, and media studies. This meso-level perspective emphasizes the autonomization of value, speculation, and rent extraction.

- Empirically, it investigates shared business models, practices, institutions, infrastructures, politics, and subjectivities that emerge from these commonalities, analyzed from a historical perspective. Special attention is given to the conflicts and contradictions that arise from the interplay between continuity and change, as well as between micro and macro levels.

- Methodologically, it advocates for combining macroeconomic and population-level data with qualitative evidence from specific contexts through multimethod approaches.

- Geographically, it requires a global comparative perspective, exploring how these elements manifest differently across various regions.

While still preliminary and primarily focused on outlining a theoretical and conceptually oriented perspective—one naturally open to reevaluation with further empirical scrutiny—this approach offers a promising way to address a significant research gap in platform studies while constructively building on previous contributions.