Rethinking Platform Technologies: Moral Values, Politics, and Radical Technologies

Digital platforms have transformed the way we share, rent, lend, and access goods and services. While corporate mainstream platforms present themselves as drivers of sustainability, community building, and economic growth, they are often criticized for exploitative labor practices, their negative impact on local communities, and the promotion of a neoliberal agenda. But there’s another way: platform cooperatives, built on shared ownership and democratic decision-making, offer an alternative vision for the digital economy.
The dissertation examines the politics of the platform and sharing economy and asks what moral and political values are built into digital platforms. It shows that platforms are not neutral tools: their design embodies moral and political values that shape the social and economic interactions they facilitate, as well as their impacts beyond direct platform use. By combining approaches from the philosophy of technology—especially the embedded values approach and the politics of technology—with insights from empirical investigations of different platforms as case studies, the dissertation research uncovers how mainstream and cooperative platforms embody struggles over values and competing visions for the digital economy, and how each platform model relates to platform capitalism as a social order. Through the example of platform cooperatives, the dissertation also conceptualizes the political character of “radical technologies”: technologies that not only operate within particular social and political conditions but actively resist and strive to undermine them. In this case, the conditions of platform capitalism.