Abstract: The early Internet was a lawless place, populated by scam artists who made buying or selling anything online risky business. Then Amazon, eBay, Upwork, Apple, and other tech firms established secure digital platforms for selling physical goods, crowdsourcing labor, and downloading apps. These tech giants have gone on to rule the Internet like autocrats. How did this happen? How did users and workers become the hapless subjects of online economic empires? The Internet was supposed to liberate us from powerful institutions, but instead it has created some of the most powerful institutions in history. In this talk I draw on my new book Cloud Empires to explore the failure of the decentralized Internet, the rise of the platform economy, and what history teaches us about holding autocrats accountable.
Bio: Vili Lehdonvirta is Professor of Economic Sociology and Digital Social Research at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. His research into digital markets, online gig work, and artificial intelligence has been supported by the European Research Council, the UK Economic and Social Research Council, and other science funding agencies. He has served on the European Commission’s Expert Group on the Online Platform Economy and the High-Level Expert Group on Digital Transformation and EU Labour Markets. He is the author of Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis (MIT Press, 2014) and Cloud Empires: How Digital Platforms Are Overtaking the State and How We Can Regain Control (MIT Press, 2022). Lehdonvirta was born in Finland and worked as a software developer before embarking on a career in social science.