Defining Labor and Exploitation in Platform Capitalism: Exploring the Socio-Technical Challenges in Digital Transformations

Platform Capitalism has extended the ¿traditional¿ capitalist class-relations in production, where its imperatives have been reapplied to new sources of labor. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are essential tools in these processes, where digital platforms play central roles. These have facilitated a reorganization of labor, where value is drawn from a variety of users in multi-sided markets. It includes formal and informal employment, but also platform users' activities, expressions, and social relations. These, whether paid or not, all supply digital work that capitalist platforms alienate as digital labor. The exploitation of labor in Platform Capitalism can then be viewed as the exploitation of work, where class relations allow platforms to gain advantages from digital workers. Capital has helped maintain and progress the dependencies that enable platforms to exploit workers' social and economic needs. The unfairness of this exploitation depends on the outcomes and processes of the acts, but also moral forces, and how capitalist platforms (as the exploiters) avoid responsibilities related to workers' needs. The conditions and modes of exploitation can, therefore, vary while informational asymmetries seem to be important tools to exploit work in Platform Capitalism.