Читать книгу Platforms and Cultural Production - Thomas Poell - Страница 16

On the surface, at least, platform Goliaths such as Google, Facebook, Tencent, Amazon, and ByteDance seem omnipotent, and their ever-increasing market capitalizations now total into the trillions. But despite platform companies’ ever-rising share prices and soaring profits, we should be careful not to overdetermine the impact of their financial prowess, nor should we consider the economic and financial position of platforms as either entrenched or unassailable. For instance, in most domestic markets, the revenue of telecom, internet, and media conglomerates is much higher than the revenue of, for instance, either Google or Facebook (Winseck, 2020).

Whether or not they choose to align their business models with platforms, at some point cultural producers are likely to be faced with globally operating conglomerates. And when that moment comes, they will notice how each of these industry sectors – telecom, consumer electronics, and media – is dominated by a handful of firms. For decades, critical political economists and media economists have attempted to measure the scope and impact of corporate concentration on cultural production (Bagdikian, 1983; Birkinbine et al., 2017; Noam, 2009). With these histories of capital accumulation in mind, such concentration is perhaps not surprising. After all, the economic principles that have propelled such instances of monetary accrual have not changed fundamentally.

Because of digitalization and globalization, transnationally operating conglomerates benefit from economies of scale – that is, the efficiencies derived from an increase in output. Likewise, by leveraging economies of scope – the efficiencies derived from product variety – corporate giants can capitalize on their access to finance capital by acquiring competitors or promising new start-ups. Indeed, the cultural industries have seen a rapid uptick in mergers and acquisitions – a fact that owes much to antitrust regulators stepping aside and trade agreements opening up domestic markets to foreign entrants. Together, these broader economic principles also help explain the current impact ascribed to platform companies. As we show in the next section, platform companies take economies of scope and scale to an unprecedented level. We should note that the financial prowess of platforms does have a historical precedent (Srnicek, 2017). Monopoly power or oligopoly competition – highly concentrated markets dominated by one or few firms – have existed since the dawn of the industrial age.

Next to corporate clustering, cultural producers are faced with socioeconomic drivers of concentration that are more specific to the cultural industries. One such driver concerns attention. Who among the millions of cultural producers are the “winners” and who are the “losers” of the rapidly evolving media economy? We can be brief about the winners: a lucky few. A very small percentage of cultural products tends to generate the vast majority of revenue and profit. The consumption of games, music, and movies has always been blockbuster-driven; hits are as much a sociocultural phenomenon as an economic one (Elberse, 2013). Not for nothing are the cultural industries described as a “risky business,” in which nobody can predict long-term trends and tastes (Hesmondhalgh, 2019: 32). The need to withstand losses, or vice versa, to secure access to finance capital to fund big-budget blockbusters, therefore, plays straight into the strengths of transnational media conglomerates (Fitzgerald, 2012; Mirrlees, 2013). At the same time, the value of existing brands, stars, franchises, and fan favorites puts small and medium-sized enterprises and new entrants in a disadvantaged position.

To be fair, so-called “winner-take-all” dynamics and the unequal distribution of resources underlies many – if not all – major industry sectors and societies (Frank & Cook, 1995). We point to these continuities here because two mitigating factors have been widely considered as antidotes to corporate concentration and a blockbuster-driven culture: digitalization and internet connectivity – both of which have been framed as instances of democratization. The accessibility to digital information and tools, legal scholar Yochai Benkler argued in the mid-aughts, has lifted “the central material constraints” associated with “industrial” (i.e., capital-intensive and proprietary) modes of production and distribution of culture, thereby increasing “individual autonomy” (2006: 133). Around the same time that Benkler published his influential monograph, a broad collective of media scholars, consultants, and pundits pointed to the blurring of boundaries between production and consumption, and the purported rise of “co-creation” and increase in “mass creativity.”⁴ In hindsight, such enthusiasm was understandable – if not myopic.

The cultural and economic power that record labels and news organizations accrued and held for decades was suddenly challenged by individuals who had the ability to easily distribute MP3 files or set up a blog to become citizen journalists. Then again, while such instances of “non-market” production had the potential to radically transform the information economy, and, in so doing, initiate a “substantial redistribution of power and money” (Benkler, 2006: 23), such a future has yet to be realized. As political economist Enrique Bustamante had already predicted: “digital change does not engender a revolution, an abrupt rupture with past history, because the new technologies cannot erase the core nature of the media within modern capitalist society” (2004: 805). While, in the abstract, the costs to create and distribute digital information have fallen drastically, this has not eradicated existing inequalities, such as access to capital, education, and access to internet connectivity (Hargittai & Walejko, 2008; Mansell, 2017). Nor has increased access to the means of production put a dent in the balance sheets of telecoms, consumer electronics, or media conglomerates (Winseck, 2017, 2020).

Indeed, despite all the cheering optimism surrounding “user-generated content,” the basic economics of information production and distribution did not change for legacy organizations, as producing a high-quality “first copy” of a game or song is still costly. Over recent decades, the blockbuster-driven parts of the game industry, for instance, have seen their production budgets increase, rather than decrease (van Dreunen, 2020; Whitson, 2019). Legal frameworks, particularly intellectual property regimes, erected to create artificial scarcity and to protect those significant investments, have not seen a drastic overhaul either (Cohen, 2019).

That being said, what did change is that digitalization and internet connectivity have made the “boundaries of the firm” – to use a turn of phrase popular among business scholars – more porous. Instead of engaging in costly legal battles, structurally acquiring suppliers, or merging with competitors, businesses in a wide variety of sectors decided to provide consumers, suppliers, and competitors with “toolkits for innovation” (von Hippel, 2005). This concept, popularized in the early 2000s by MIT business scholars, is a prescient description of how, a decade later, platform companies provided consumers and third-party companies with the means of cultural creation, distribution, marketing, and monetization. In the next two chapters we discuss how platforms have used these toolkits both to vastly expand their infrastructural boundaries and as a means to govern cultural producers. But first, we examine the main tenets of platform economics.