States and platform capitalisms: A conversation

Introduction

This conversation emerges from a series of discussions we had in the wake of an earlier publication where we argue that platform capitalism is in fact composed of platform capitalisms. In “Platform Capitalisms and Platform Cultures,” Marc, Lin, and Rahul foregrounded the heterogeneity of platform capitalism (Steinberg et al., 2024), arguing that attention to the role that states play in the processes of “actually existing platformization” (van Doorn et al., 2021) is crucial, and that platform capitalisms would best be described as “actually existing platform capitalisms.” Pluralizing the term “platform capitalism” (Srnicek, 2017) makes visible the ways in which “states and cultures impact the markets, corporate forms, and institutional organizations that make up capitalisms” (Steinberg et al., 2024).

Our accounts of platforms and platformization processes must contend with their inherent heterogeneity and internal plurality. The initial article examined China, India, and Japan to identify three analytical “axes” for understanding how platform capitalisms shape cultural production: state–platform symbiosis, platform precarity, and the informal–formal relation in cultural production. The state–culture–platform nexus offers a conceptual direction that resists abstracting from Euro-American history or thinking in terms of ideal types—such as “liberal market states” or “state capitalisms”—and allows a renewed inquiry into the specific manners in which platforms articulate relationships among states, firms and conglomerates, markets, cultural worlds, and systems of capitalist valuation.

Following on the publication of “Platforms Capitalisms and Platform Cultures,” Hatim and Joe reached out to discuss its implications, initiating the dialogue that we reproduce here. Our collective starting point, and Hatim and Joe's invitation, was that to treat Asia as an exception would be a mistake. Hatim and Joe's work on digitization and platformization in the Middle East already signaled the importance of states, and “Platform Capitalisms” highlighted the need for a more holistic, cross-regional dialogue. Thus began a series of discussions among the five of us that culminated in the more formal conversation that follows. While “Platforms Capitalisms and Platform Cultures” was an important starting point, we all realized this was part of a growing chorus of voices, expressing similar concerns from different perspectives and a plurality of locations (including, for instance, Brady, 2025; Foster, 2024; Papaevangelou and Siapera, 2025; Pollio, 2025; Qiu, 2023; Rolf and Schindler, 2023; Seto, 2024; Soeiro et al., 2025; Weigel, 2025). This shared thematic confluence is at the heart of this discussion. We stage it as a set of cascading responses with the hopes that each contributor extends, reframes, or complicates the contributions that precede them.

In this “Conversations” piece, we build on our initial discussions and the scholarship noted above—and on the productive frictions inherent to comparative analysis—to argue that current debates in platform studies have much to gain from more explicit attention to how states and state projects (rather than the more abstract notion of “the state”) have shaped, and continue to shape, platform cultures and platform capitalisms. A critical understanding of the role of state projects and their entanglements with the institutional, technological, and cultural dimensions of platforms clarifies how markets and platform governance are often organized at national and subnational levels. In turn, by traversing geographies, this conversation aims to counteract some of the limitations of methodological nationalism and leverage our respective national and regional expertise to track specific, transregional, state–platform–capitalism formations. We foreground the role that states play in platform capitalisms, and revisit how culture is transformed, instrumentalized, and contested in particular local, regional, and global arenas.

We find the term “platform capitalisms” productive insofar as it foregrounds the specificity of its articulation, and the role of states in shaping the institutional, infrastructural, and geopolitical contexts that define platforms. Our intention is not to introduce yet another neologism (digital capitalism, data colonialism, platform imperialism, and other terms abound, as in Nothias, 2025) or obscure the underlying commonalities inherent to capitalism as a global system, but rather to sharpen critical perspectives on the relationship/s among states and platforms. Across this conversation, we argue not for a singular pronouncement on “the platform state” per se, but rather for a self-reflexive analytical framework capable of synthesizing insights from the study of states and platform capitalisms. Attending to the heterogeneity of the state–culture–platform nexus, we suggest, enriches our understanding of platform capitalisms. Our reflections while varying in their conceptual emphasis and particular in their situated understandings, share some common concerns regarding sociopolitics (state governance and cultural production), historical regional specificities (platform histories intersecting with regional geographies), and institutional–infrastructural relations (intrastate dynamics and financial infrastructures).

Adopting a dialogical approach, we highlight how the vantage points of our research sites, analytical foci, and methodological approaches allow for a comparative conceptualization of the global diversity of platform capitalisms. Rather than a series of brief exchanges, we present individual contributions, grounded in our current research, that combine empirical data (around which our conversation developed) with broader analytical reflections. Concrete global examples are key to substantiating the claim that platform capitalisms are heterogeneous in forms and functions. This exchange moves across distinct “platform situations” (local, national, or regional) and their entanglements with global capitalist logics and formations.

Joe

While dominant narratives may sometimes exhibit a presentist bias, platforms do not emerge ex nihilo. They arise through successive waves of globalization that reflect evolving market conditions and state regulatory priorities. Globalization, commonly understood as economic, technological, and cultural integration, serves as the broader backdrop. Throughout this process, local or regional conditions intersect with global capitalist logics to yield varied forms of platformization.

Prior scholarship demonstrated that, contrary to Western-centric assumptions, platformization is not only or even primarily corporate-driven and guided by minimal state intervention. Many Global South contexts demonstrate significant government involvement in shaping, facilitating, or restricting platform expansion (see contributions below and Silva et al., 2024). In the Arab Middle East, these dynamics are complicated by the region's geopolitical positioning and by state roles that often blur the lines between regulator, investor, and corporate actor (Zayani and Khalil, 2024).

To explore these dynamics, this intervention examines three illustrative cases—Maktoob, Souq.com, and Anghami.

Maktoob, an Arabic-language internet portal, exemplifies the digital globalization of the late 1990s and early 2000s, a period driven by speculative investments, internet expansion, and an ethos of experimentation. Maktoob responded to the neglect of Arabic-language internet users, adapting Western internet models to non-Western linguistic and cultural contexts. This process of localization, or “technology transfer,” demonstrates the early fusion of global capitalist expansion with local adaptation. Maktoob's 2009 acquisition by Yahoo! revealed the asymmetry between global and regional platforms. Though the deal indicated significant investment, Yahoo! failed to develop a coherent integration strategy. Maktoob's decline highlights the extractive logic of early platform globalization, where local platforms gained initial prominence only to be absorbed by global firms focused on short-term returns over regional sustainability.

The rise of Souq.com from a small auction site to the Middle East's leading e-commerce platform signals a second phase of platform capitalisms marked by mass consumer adoption. Drawing from global models—especially Amazon's—Souq.com introduced innovations like cash-on-delivery to accommodate low credit card penetration. This hybrid strategy of applying global practices to local needs illustrates the complexity of regional platform development. Amazon's acquisition of Souq.com in 2017 marked the region's deeper integration into global platform monopolies. While the acquisition brought capital and technological expertise, it also erased Souq.com's regional brand, now rebranded as Amazon.ae and Amazon.sa. The case underscores how global hegemony can override local specificity.

Launched in 2012, Anghami presents a different trajectory. As a leading Arabic-language music streaming platform, Anghami chose a NASDAQ listing over acquisition. This decision reflects a shift toward regional platforms maintaining operational autonomy while engaging global markets. Anghami's move from Beirut to establish its global headquarters in Abu Dhabi illustrates the state–platform nexus in the Gulf, where governments promote digital growth through direct investments and supportive infrastructure. These governments provide not only financial incentives but also regulatory support, streamlined licensing, and strategic state–corporate partnerships, distinguishing Gulf states’ strategies from more regulatory-heavy contexts elsewhere in the region. This active state involvement challenges binary views of public versus private sector roles, revealing how Middle Eastern governments function as active facilitators—and sometimes direct partners—in shaping the direction and scope of platform development.

These cases reinforce the need to closely examine the relationships between states and platforms. The plural—platform capitalisms—captures diverse temporalities, institutional frameworks, and geocultural conditions. Instead of viewing platformization as a linear process of Western mimicry and market expansion, these cases reveal a multipolar digital economy in which regional players navigate global market imperatives and localized needs. Moreover, these trajectories show that platform capitalisms are not strictly market driven. The consolidation trend, illustrated by the cases of Maktoob and Souq.com, highlights the structural imbalances in global capitalism. Global giants typically overshadow local platforms. Yet Anghami's independent path offers a glimpse of alternative models, particularly when state strategies align with regional entrepreneurial ambitions. Analytically, this calls for a pluralized understanding of platform capitalism. Precisely because nonmarket rationalities, distinct regulatory regimes, and cultural contexts fundamentally reshape platform logics, the plural form highlights meaningful structural divergences rather than mere variations of a single capitalist standard.

Based on the above, the lens of platform capitalisms calls for ongoing interrogation of how states craft or constrain digital futures, how global corporations adapt or overlook local nuances, and how regional contenders might help reshape the contours of digital capitalism itself.

Marc

Joe highlights historical and geopolitical dynamics of platform capitalisms above, showing how local or regional digital firms have unequal if sometimes independent relationships to global giants. He also points to two sites of inquiry: intra- and inter-firm dynamics; and the relation between the state and platforms. I continue these two threads in what follows.

The context in which we first wrote our “Platform Capitalisms and Platform Cultures” piece was in response to existing, initial figuring of platforms and platform capitalism in terms of firms (or companies) and markets. We instead focused on states. But there are two further organizations of state intervention that I want to highlight here (and that complements Hatim's attention to Neom, below).

The first is intrastate or what we would generally call the national. This can be done via regulation, guidance, forms of state control, or subtle combinations of the three. To this I can add a fourth manner of action via incentivization. The Japanese government had, since the late nineteenth-century modernization period, operated according to a model of “administrative guidance” (Johnson, 1982). National champions were chosen and state projects were determined by governmental agencies, particularly Ministry of International Trade and Indusry (now the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry). Consensus suggests that the system of administrative guidance faltered after the burst of the economic bubble in 1989 (Anchordoguy, 2005) in the wake of the state's inability to restart growth. Shibata (2020) describes this as a shift from a coordinated to a more disorganized national model of capitalism. The state continues to play a role in national planning, though, and offering incentives seems to be part of its post-1990s toolkit. Indeed, it may even come from the rise, since the early 2000s, of Japan's so-called “points economic zone” (Nagoya, 2024)—large-scale, multibrand loyalty points schemes that are not linked to any particular brand but are interoperable and function more like parallel “economic zones,” organized around large-tech conglomerates.

As an example, I’d like to turn to payment platforms in Japan. Payment platforms are particularly potent sites where the relations between state and transnational capital play out. In the late 2010s the Japanese government made a push toward a cashless society. This was in anticipation of the 2020 Olympics and the assumed rush of tourists coming into the country, particularly from Asia; and partly, too, out of the anxiety that “Japan could be left out as an underdeveloped country in terms of cashless payments if it fails to catch up with this international trend” (Playing Catch-up, Japan Forges Ahead with Cashless Payments, 2018). From 2018 onward, METI and the Japanese government sought to increase citizens’ use and merchants’ acceptance of QR-code based apps. The keyword here was not so much convenience—how these apps are so often branded—but rather incentives, offered to merchants, consumers, and payment operators (Fujiki, 2023). This culminated in the 2018–19 “payments war,” resulting in the dominance of SoftBank's PayPay which now aims to become a super app (Steinberg, 2025a).

Here, we see METI's crucial role as a “pilot agency” (Johnson, 1982) within Japan's postwar economy; a role that persists in modified form into Japan's state-guided model of platform capitalism (Steinberg, 2025b). Japan's incentive approach can be contrasted to more compulsory approaches taken elsewhere, notably the shock demonetization in India in 2016 that fueled the rise of app-based payment platforms like Paytm (Athique, 2019). One is a platform capitalism made by incentives and incitements; another by sovereign fiat combined with a push to payment apps.

The second organization of state intervention is via trans-state actors—a term I use in contrast to transnational capital, which suggests no national ties or belonging. Here trans-state is both intrastate and transnational. Above we see SoftBank operating in concordance with the Japanese state to promote payment platforms, advancing the cutting edge of platformization via fintech and the quotidian payment encounters this enables. Yet SoftBank is only able to do this because of its transnational connections. SoftBank was an early backer of Alibaba, which now operates the largest payment network in China (Alipay) and Asia (the interoperable Alipay+) (Wang 2025); and it's also a large investor in Paytm of India which stepped into the breach during the demonetization episode of 2016. SoftBank draws on its deep knowledge of Alipay and the code for Paytm in setting up PayPay. SoftBank's region-spanning venture capital Vision Fund, powered by sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia (notably its Public Investment Fund (PIF) fund about which Hatim writes below) and Abu Dhabi, has been promoting payment apps across Asia and beyond, including Paytm (India), PayPay and LINE (Japan), Grab (Southeast Asia); Gcash (Philippines); and more. Sovereign wealth funds are arms of state expansion as well as stewards of future returns. They are also crucial in connecting platform firms, nations, and regions into specific rearticulations of platform capitalisms. As Qiu and Chan (2025) argue, SoftBank builds on the legacies of the Japanese empire and capitalism. The key difference they find is that instead of Japanese national banks, SoftBank taps the new rent-seeking financial reserves of sovereign wealth funds to fund their projects—alongside some institutional investors. It thereby constructs new organizations of capital and technology networks in Asia, the Middle East, and around the globe.

Platform capitalisms operate as much through the novel (incentives as state policy in Japan; sovereign wealth funds for SoftBank) as through historical accretions and geographic sedimentations. The new geographical orientations with SoftBank (Asian investments with Gulf State funds), speaks to both Joe's mapping above and to Hatim's interest in state megaprojects below—and to new geographical formations that upset the familiar geographies of area studies (such as “East Asia”).

Hatim

I’d like to highlight a thread linking Joe's insights into regional mergers and industry sector consolidation in SWANA/MENA, and Marc's nuanced perspective on the nature of Japanese firms and payment systems and the transnational character SoftBank's approach to state-driven investment. There are two points of connection to my current research on the Saudi Neom project that come to mind. The first point has to do with the way that platform capitalisms in general, and state megaprojects in particular, have been taken up as means to the end of bolstering state capacities. The second point has to do with the importance of discursive formations and aesthetics to the financial engines that drive such projects. More than just a means by which the Saudi state pursues its domestic and international economic goals, Neom demonstrates how state involvement in platformization can have far-reaching social impacts, even if those impacts are not equal to the promises of tech hype.

Briefly, Neom is a state megaproject at the scale of a regional province, which combines aspects of a special economic zone, a logistics hub, luxury real estate and resorts, and a smart city called “The Line” (which is the component most often in the news). Neom is a key part of the Saudi government's “Vision 2030” national plan whose stated goals are to lay the foundation for economic diversification to a postoil economy, premised on linking the country with the global platform economy, building up local data infrastructure, and fostering relationships with the financial, tech, and media sectors. The project's massive investment in data infrastructure contains a logic that exceeds the anticipated needs of these sectors, or the resource-intensive requirements of the “platform urbanism” (Akbari, 2022; Barns, 2020) that the plan lays out.

Neom, like other state-led megaprojects, can offer insight into how states and platforms calibrate their institutional structures and infrastructural forms to shape their relationship with platform capitalisms. This process is one in which states, like platforms and platform conglomerates, remake existing social, economic, and infrastructural arrangements in a way that builds their capacity to manage transformation. Put differently, Neom is not just about building state capacity, but a project that builds the state capacity to build state capacities. By building the state capacity to build state capacities, I am referring to all of those institutional, economic, and managerial components that allow the state to pursue state projects or developmentalist goals such as fostering local industry and talent or building infrastructure. For example, rather than getting a specific state-of-the art data center built, it is developing the capacity to get data centers built, and more generally, the capacity to steer a course in economic conditions we name here as platform capitalisms.

Neom is possible because of a newly consolidated Saudi governmental apparatus with far more direct control in the hands of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman than any previous leader, and with a more prominent role for the Public Investment Fund (or PIF, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund). The PIF plays a particularly important role in Vision 2030, and its portfolio reflects an express interest in the tech, real estate, finance, and media industries (Al-Rasheed, 2021). This particular moment of financialization continues a long-standing practice whereby the Saudi state and factions in the royal family forge clientelist relationships with a national business elite. Part of what pursuing a project like Neom enables is the creation of a new relationship between this sector and the PIF, the platform economy broadly understood, and local and global financial systems. It is not just that the PIF in the late 2010s was turned into a strategic and active investment vehicle with a transnational remit, but that financial investment became a vehicle to steer the relationship between Saudi and global capital—resulting, for example, in the ties to SoftBank that Marc analyzes above. Neom is one way to turn transnational in-flows into a concrete and manageable form.

Which leads me to my second point—that the at-times fantastical promises made about what Neom will be and what effects it will have on the country and on the world, by the state agencies working on it and their private sector partners, are not merely hype. Dismissing the feasibility of any one specific claim is to misunderstand the public-making role that claims to the future have, which shore up a temporal horizon in which value will continue to increase indefinitely, safeguarded by a state with the capacity to support it. Neom is often in the news for the big claims that are made about what it will eventually become, such as a fully automated floating logistics hub on the Red Sea (the Oxagon), or a carless green metropolis that is 170 km long, 200 m high, and a 5 min walk across (The Line), wholly powered by AI-driven urban infrastructure. Working toward those goals and iteratively revising them along the way is the model of speculative investment, and “hype” is the fuel.

Other features are fairly common and not that technologically far-fetched—the construction of advanced data centers, a less-restrictive civil/social code and a streamlined commercial legal system separate from the rest of the country, and tax breaks and other forms of financial support for transnational corporate partnerships in key industry sectors. The platform urbanism (Akbari, 2022) of The Line looms large in the visual language of Neom, particularly the way its design will create a new way of living for a new humanity. This Neomian subject is one who desires the techno-utopic comforts, professional fulfillment, and security and political stability that the project will offer, and who may be Saudi or come from around the world. The Neomian subject is expressly not the people who already live in the region being cleared from the land to make way for the future, nor is it the racialized construction worker building it. The figure of the Neomian subject is an ideological embodiment of a future-to-be whose articulation in the present helps bring particular futures into being, encapsulating how visual and discursive phenomena can play a key role in the process of platformization.

To return to the terms of our analytical frame above, mega-projects such as Neom allow states to calibrate the historical–territorial, institutional–infrastructural, and social dynamics that underpin platform capitalism. In considering the specificity of how platforms, states, and capitalism come together, projects like Neom embody how domestic economic and infrastructural imperatives become merged with political goals. The aestheticization of the future is no less ridiculous when it emanates from Riyadh than Palo Alto or Shenzhen, and just as important to the temporalities of their operation. It turns out that optimization (Halpern and Mitchell, 2022), surveillance, cultural policy, state development goals, variegated citizenship, oil extraction, real estate interests, and digital infrastructure are all highly interoperable, and are being stitched together in a way that more fully integrates Saudi capital with platform capitalisms.

Rahul

To continue the conversation about the state–platform nexus in discussing platform capitalisms, I elaborate on how state-facilitated platformization reconfigures the informal–formal relationship. Marc, Lin, and I had discussed “state visibility as marker of the formal” (Steinberg et al., 2024) and with initiatives such as the unique identification (Aadhaar) project and the demonetization shocker, the Indian state has sought to entrust itself with citizens’ data regarding their biometrics, social media interactions, and financial transactions. India Stack, a set of cloud­-based application programming interfaces (APIs) built atop the Aadhaar database has been described as infrastructure and public goods. Through India Stack, the state has also provided selective access to corporations to connect and relate data regarding citizens’ behavioral activities across economic and noneconomic (health, entertainment, and socialization) realms. Beyond national concerns, India Stack has been a crucial constituent of India–Japan digital partnership conversations as the Japanese state and society undergo digital transformation (Channel JAPAN, 2022). That said, formalization as an effect of platformization drives with the end goals of surveillance and monetization may not be all that the Modi government's “Digital India” initiative envisions and enacts. I parse the varied meanings of the “formal” and “informal” to point out certain incongruences and paradoxes within platform capitalisms.

Examples of continuing informality marking platform capitalisms abound: the role of kinship in how Reliance Jio manages a megacorporation's ownership or the way migrant Uber drivers in cities like Bengaluru find support from their friends based on caste affiliations and regions where they hail from (Athique and Kumar, 2022; Raval and Lalvani, 2022). Uber has brought a formalization as Uber drivers have become habituated to receive digital payments. In doing so, erstwhile taxi drivers who the government of India considered to be in the gray informal sector are now countable, tax-paying citizens whose car loans, credit data, and weekly payments can be digitally traced. That said, Uber in the so-called First World countries has been associated with a certain informality (associated with flexibility) because it enlists the worker as a micro-entrepreneur and not employee, thereby sidelining considerations of welfare benefits or retirement savings (Surie, 2017: 13). This suggests the need for a site-specific understanding of informality.

Even with regard to increased financialization, the normative framings by global financial organizations like World Bank and International Monetary Fund and the Indian government that dub any use of cash as informal while pronouncing digital payments and lending as formal should be contested. Whether it is informal or formal lending, the fundamental question is always whether the borrower can be trusted to repay. In informal lending, this assessment is based on whether a person in a locality is known by others, or knows friends who can vouch for them. Based on fieldwork in the Govindpuri resettlement colony in Delhi, Tripta Chandola (2018) argues: “the informal nature of these monetary exchanges does not imply an informality of the social structures and networks within which they unfold. In fact, these informal monetary exchanges have a history in the slums, which in turn accords them their longevity and robustness as a viable and reliable economic practice, as also accruing the ‘trust’ both amongst the borrowers and the lenders.” At one level, we are told that financial technology (fintech) supported payment and loan apps are formalizing monetary exchanges because they are digitizing them and there is a record of these transactions. At another level, when first-time borrowers are undergoing the loan onboarding process, the loan app has little idea of the history of social structures and networks that this borrower is part of. The behavioral activity tracked on smartphones contains noisy data as shared phone ownership, especially among women, complicates assessments. These social structures might be repressive, or can be networks of care, trust, and reciprocity for them. Even with the intense surveillance brought by platformization, the machine learning algorithms of loan apps cannot completely ascertain user's historical background and future financial behavior: the state and corporations even with India Stack cannot “see” their citizens at times. These indeed are the contradictions or “double binds” of platform capitalisms’ reconfiguration of formal–informal relations (Zayani and Khalil, 2024).

In a situation where the state is unable to provide conventional employment to its citizens, platformization is considered a way for the state to solve the job creation problem The Indian government along with corporations has been keen to create “10 million digitally enabled microentrepreneurs” (Chandrashekar, 2022). In several countries like the United States and China, the trend of self-employment through entrepreneurial pursuits has been accepted as the norm. Premier Li Keqiang launched a nationwide campaign in 2014 extolling Chinese citizens from various socioeconomic backgrounds to espouse entrepreneurship and thereby lay the ground for bottom-up innovation (Zhang, 2023). The solution according to the state is to make micro-entrepreneurs out of its citizens who can advertise and sell their varied services through platforms. These include not just cultural producers in creative media industries but the incredibly cheap labor available in India that is now made part of hotel and home services as well as beauticians, make-up artists, and finfluencers creating their digital selves on InstaReels and Moj. The state is targeting new-to-mobile phone users (neomobile) as idealized distribution subjects of platformized governance in a somewhat similar refashioning of digital/smart subjectivities as discussed by Hatim in relation to the Neomian subject. The formal–informal dynamic as inflected by platform capitalisms needs to be understood, then, as converting erstwhile informal laborers into potential entrepreneurs who are told to reinvent themselves so as to adjust to and survive within neoliberal market volatilities (Paunksnis, 2023). So, the discussion of informality in studies of platformization inflected by platform capitalism(s) suggests that processes of platformization currently underway continue to be marked by both formalizations and informalizations, and that our understanding of this should be anchored in the place and relationships in which they occur.

Lin

To advance our analysis of the state–platform–culture nexus, I position our approach in relation to a growing discourse that frames American and Chinese Big Tech as rival empires in geopolitical conflict. My aim is twofold: to move beyond a binary US–China lens in theorizing global platform capitalism (Chen, 2010; Poell et al., 2024), and to expose how this discourse of rivalry obscures global unevenness and the divergent paths nations follow in navigating the shifting world system (Wallerstein, 1997). This discourse often hinges on “competing models,” contrasting the United States' market-driven platform economy with China's state-driven one and the European Union's rights-driven approach (Bradford, 2023). Another variation highlights the rise of state capitalism as a global trend marked by growing state–platform interdependence (Rolf and Schindler, 2023).

By emphasizing temporal–spatial specificity (Joe) and carefully parsing both intrastate and trans-state dynamics in platform capitalism (Marc), we problematize the essentialization of nations into static cultures embedded in the discourse of “competing models.” Instead, we trace the historically situated co-evolution of states and platforms—both internally within nations and externally through global platform expansion and the circulation of platform-backed capital. In the Gulf countries, as Hatim and Joe show, state power consolidated in the 2010s, forging new relationships with capital. This shift enabled an alternative, more autonomous trajectory for local platforms like Anghami and spawned megaprojects such as Neom to further enhance state capacity. In late-2010s Japan, according to Marc, the state's promotion of a cashless society extended the country's postwar developmental path while also leveraging the trans-state power of SoftBank. Rahul's analysis of India shows how the Modi government's platformization of the economy reconfigures existing informal–formal dynamics—whether through the enduring importance of kinship in ridehailing or efforts to convert informal laborers into digital entrepreneurs.

Let us now situate China in comparison. As an authoritarian Leninist state seeking legitimacy without democratic electoral mechanisms, the Chinese government continuously adapts to domestic and global market dynamics and shifting (geo)political conditions in pursuit of its multifaceted goals: economic growth, social equity and stability, and national security (Zhang, 2023). This pursuit is complicated by the deeply fragmented nature of China's polity (Zhang and Lan, 2023; Zhou, 2019), rendering earlier theories of China's “market-in-the-state” in need of update. I have elaborated on this emerging model of the “market in the fragmented state” elsewhere; here, I will briefly outline its features and trajectories in post-Mao China (Zhang, 2025).

While the two waves of power decentralization in the 1980s (beginning of the reform and opening up) and the 1990s (the deepening of globalization following Deng Xiaoping's “Southern Tour”) facilitated China's reintegration into the American-led global capitalist system, its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 deepened this integration. However, this process also intensified central concerns about losing political and economic control. The 2008 global financial crisis served as a wake-up call, exposing the vulnerabilities of China's investment-driven, export-oriented growth model. Private internet companies like Alibaba—products of China's increasing involvement in global financial markets—emerged in the early 2000s as both opportunities and threats to the central party-state's economic dominance.

On the one hand, the state initially tolerated their rise and later sought to leverage their infrastructural power for broader economic and political restructuring. This pivot entailed a move away from GDP-centered strategies toward prioritizing domestic consumption, indigenous innovation, environmental sustainability, redistribution, and public services (Zhou, 2017). On the other hand, the monopolistic scale, infrastructural significance, and relative autonomy of these firms disrupted the delicate balance of China's market-in-state system, where the state aims to instrumentalize and contain market power simultaneously (Zheng and Huang, 2018: 319). Their integration into global financial networks and expanding international reach present complex challenges to the Chinese party-state: how to boost global competitiveness and national influence while safeguarding state authority from domestic and foreign capital.

This hybrid political–economic system helps explain the Chinese state's regulatory pendulum swing: from a relatively laissez-faire stance before the mid-2010s, to an assertive crackdown on Big Tech between early 2020 and early 2022, and more recently to a moderated posture. The rapid sequence of actions—from abrupt initial public offering (IPO) cancellations and antitrust fines to corporate restructuring and conciliatory meetings with tech CEOs—reveals the pragmatic Leninist state's balancing act (Zhang, 2024). This balancing act shapes and is a product of the emerging “market in the fragmented state” governance model.

The contradictions at the heart of China's state–platform relations have only grown sharper as homegrown Big Tech firms expand globally and enter direct competition with American giants. Time and again, the state has prioritized financial and social stability (as in Ant Financial's aborted IPO), data security (DiDi), and technological sovereignty (the US pressure campaign to force TikTok's sale) over the global ambitions of Chinese Big Techs (Li, 2024). Notably, the state has maintained a more consistent and promotional stance toward companies aligned with its long-term strategic vision—so-called “hardcore technology” firms like Huawei and EV maker BYD. These exceptions further underscore the state's active role in shaping the future of China's platform economy.

A quick sketch of the Chinese state's evolving role in platform capitalism reveals both parallels to and situated specificities vis-a-vis the rising infrastructural and financial prowess of the Gulf states, the reinvention of the postwar developmental state and global financial capital in Japan, and the contradictions and paradoxes in India's platform capitalism as another populous late developing Asian country undergoing concurrent industrialization and platformization.

We stand at the cusp of a new historical conjuncture in 2025. The second Trump administration is accelerating the dismantling of the postwar liberal order and its global free trade architecture, while reshaping the US nation-state in the image—and to the benefit—of Silicon Valley's tech elite. This shift in comparative reference destabilizes the binary discourse of US–China competition I began with. Beneath the seemingly convergent rise of state power lie divergent visions for platform capitalisms’ futures. Recognizing China's growing influence globally must not distract us from persistent global inequalities and the distinct national pathways shaping platform capitalisms.

Conclusion

Across this conversation, we have expanded on the ways states articulate their roles in relation to platforms, forming new variations of platform capitalism in the process. Platform capitalisms, as a term and conceptual opening, allows us to illuminate the plurality that research, fieldwork, and analysis must engage. To briefly summarize, we have highlighted several key aspects to consider in thinking through platform capitalisms both in their specificity and in comparative terms:

Platform histories and regional specificities; including successive waves of globalization, marked by changing patterns of investment, technological transformations, cultural imperatives, and state regulatory regimes. This underscores the need to understand platform capitalisms as context-dependent and historically contingent—how platform development in the Middle East, for example, reflects distinct phases of globalization. The state operates as regulator, financier, and ecosystem architect (from infrastructure to investment mechanisms), thereby challenging the notion of market-led platform growth or a detached, passive state.

Intrastate and trans-state dynamics, including the role of connective firms like SoftBank that operate across regions, forming capital connections and indeed forming the regions themselves. Adapting Thomas Lamarre's concept of “media process geographies” (2015), we might think of SoftBank as a kind of capital process geographies, wherein the Vision Fund renders practices and technologies portable across regions, while simultaneously producing the very regional formations it traverses.

State recalibration or adaptations; states are actively working to calibrate their relationship with platform capitalisms, often through initiatives aimed at building the capacity to govern and steer digital economies.

At one level, platform capitalisms might be seen as an attempt by capital and state trying to incorporate the vast surplus or informally engaged population into the so-called formal economy and thus distribute the benefits of neoliberal growth in the informal sector. At another level, platform capitalism can be conceived as the latest instance of capitalism expanding and dismantling the informally based subsistence economies, in acts of predatory inclusion (McMillan Cottom, 2020).

Building on the above, there is a pressing need to shift our reference points to produce new knowledge about platform capitalisms. This is perhaps the key takeaway of our generative series of conversations, and this Conversations & Debates piece. Rather than positioning the American “platform capitalist model” as the normative benchmark—and viewing other national or regional experiences as either “successful” rivals or “unsuccessful” deviations—we should work to deprovincialize platform capitalisms (the focus of our piece) while at the same time to provincialize American platform capitalism (a task that remains ongoing). One productive approach, as we attempted in this piece, is to theorize and compare the experiences of non-US platform economies as distinct yet comparable trajectories, each situated within an uneven and constantly evolving world system. Such a shift not only diversifies the empirical base of platform studies but also reorients its conceptual foundations.

There is certainly more to be said about this intertwining of states and platform capitalisms. For now, we conclude with these reflections, in the hopes that our conversation sparks further dialogue with other scholars, regions, and bodies of work.