Platform capitalism : boon or bane to society ?

Abstract EN

In this essay, the rise of platform capitalism and its claims to a utopian economic world is explored.

Using the tawḥīdī worldview, I trace its emergence within the context of the growth of modern capitalism itself.

The study reveals that there are certain core elements within the institutional framework of the modern economy that empowers capitalism to hegemonize society and its structures.

In its drive to create and capture value, it grows rapidly, but destroys other institutions, including its own in the process.

However, it always protects its inner core so that it is able to reincarnate itself in some new form.

Platforms and its basket of newly emerging technologies thus represent this next frontier in the capitalist agenda, subsequent to its spectacular collapse in 2007-2008.

Though some have hailed the emergence of platform capitalism as the dawn of a new age in material prosperity for all, this article demonstrates that this claim is nothing but subterfuge to deceive the world into embracing the digital age wholeheartedly.

Global capitalism recognizes only one agenda: the need to feed its insatiable appetite to accumulate material wealth; all else is irrelevant.

It is only an ethically-based Islamic system of economy, which embraces the precept of tawḥīd, i.e., an ontology and epistemology of systemic oneness in everything, that can offer hope to the world at large.