Mein Vortrag für den #39c3 wurde wieder mal abgelehnt, aber diesmal sticht es etwas härter, weil ich wirklich fühle, etwas wichtiges zu sagen zu haben, weswegen ich mir diesmal extra Mühe gegeben habe, einen verständlichen straight forward Talk einzureichen. Schade.

Controllable Standards. An Introduction to the Political Economy of Platform Power

China’s strategic interest in Taiwan, the Trump-TikTok negotiations, the drone warfare in Ukraine, Jimmy Kimmel’s dismissal, the race toward artificial general intelligence, Nvidia’s global datacenter expansion, the rise of the „Broligarchy“, cryptocurrency dynamics, Elon Musk’s transformation of Twitter into a geopolitical instrument, and his calculated development of the Starlink satellite constellation — these seemingly disparate phenomena share a common thread: our contemporary world is governed by platform power.

Unfortunately, we are semantically ill-equipped for this new reality. Our analytical vocabulary remains inadequate; our conceptual frameworks — whether invoking „market concentration,“ „techno-feudalism,“ or „surveillance capitalism“ — fail to capture what’s actually happening, leaving us functionally blind to the mechanisms shaping our political and economic landscape.

I spent the last fifteen years developing a framework to better understand and articulate platform power, culminating in my dissertation „The Power of Platforms: Politics in the Age of Internet Giants.“ This work conceptualizes platform power as a distinct force that emerges from and operates through our interconnections — a force that Silicon Valley has progressively learned to harness and leverage for profit and, increasingly, for political ends.

Since the book’s publication, the implications have intensified exponentially. Platform power now aggressively threatens democracy world wide in tangible, immediate ways. The imperative to comprehend platform power has evolved from academic interest to existential necessity.

But to grasp the nature of platform power — its mechanisms, its strategies, its implications, its potential for violence — we must first revolutionize how we talk about economics and how we think about our place in the world.