Introduction: Digital Platform Labour and (New) Inequalities

This issue of Inequalities is dedicated to the impact and consequences of digital platform labor on inequalities and the system of inequalities. Platform capitalism is the result of long-term socio-economic transformations in the wake of the transition to a regime of flexible accumulation. Developments and innovations in the electronics industry, in ICTs, and in digital technologies have played a significant role in these transformations. With the advent of the second machine age and the digitalization of just about everything (Brynjolfsson, McAfee 2015), the pervasiveness of digital technologies in the various spheres and activities of social life has had multiple effects at the economic, social, cultural, and ecological levels. But the digital sphere is not neutral: its consequences on the entirety of social life and on the world of work do not derive directly from new technologies, but from the capitalist conception and application of them. Contrary to a perspective founded in “technological neutrality”, the digitalization of labor is not simply a technical matter in which technical means dominate over capital. In digitally driven labor transformation processes, the technological element appears on the surface to prevail over the social relations that actually subsume it.