A Sociological Analysis of Colonial Legacies and Developmental Inequality

Abstract

Platform capitalism has become the dominant paradigm of the digital economy, with user data becoming the primary source of value extraction. Within this paradigm, platforms precisely capture fragmented data such as users' browsing history, consumption preferences, and social interactions. With the rise of data-centric digital infrastructure, platforms have not only transformed markets but also labor patterns, social behavior, and identity. At the market level, platforms have broken the temporal and spatial constraints of traditional transactions, building decentralized supply-demand matching networks. However, they have also created new market monopolies by setting rules and extracting commissions. This article draws primarily on Nick Snicek's concepts, supplemented by sociological theories such as Granovetter's embeddedness theory and McLuhan's "electronic age," to explore how platforms operate not only as market participants but also as embedded sociotechnical institutions. Snicek's theory of "platform capitalism" reveals how platforms achieve comprehensive economic penetration through the integration of data, capital, and technology. This article examines how platforms commoditize user behavior, reshape individual identities, and, through algorithmic governance, reinforce new forms of social inequality. Every user's search, share, and stay is transformed by the platform into a data commodity, sold to advertisers or used to optimize algorithms, while users themselves struggle to gain access to the data's benefits. This article argues that platform capitalism has reshaped labor and identity, and future research could focus on worker subjectivity and digital resistance.