Marx famously described capital in gothic terms, a ghoulish horror show composed of phantasms, vampires, werewolves and animated monsters feasting on the flesh of labour. In this system Frankenstein's monster is out of control and driven through the ‘grotesque corpus’ of capital. Bodies and brains have become mutilated into commodities. A werewolf-like hunger for surplus labour describes the extension of the working day in the nineteenth century. Phantasmal bodies stalk the world while their master sleeps.

Marx uses gothic imagery here as a rhetorical device to describe the lived experience of capital. But what if platforms were described in similar terms and as part of the same animated monster? The focus of platforms is an almost vampiric commodification. A tech-bro-revived Nosferatu devours data to feed on the living, mechanises dead labour and is at times driven by inordinate sums of venture capital. Workers and users of platforms become inorganic parts of a monstrous apparatus capable of limitless rejuvenation.

More specifically, vampiric platforms can be seen as creating new vistas of commodification by violently generating layers of management and additional bureaucracies within existing hierarchies through technoscience. Ursula Huws, Professor of Labour and Globalisation, has shown how, historically, successive waves of commodification involve a cycle of job destruction and replacement. Commodification becomes driven through economic breakdown and subsequent accumulation that extends capital’s scope, including new processes of standardisation, new technologies and an enlarged global reach. Referencing the development of car manufacturing, Huws illustrates how this process works:

‘The invention of motor cars displaced workers from coach-building but created jobs in car manufacture. As car manufacturers substituted mass production technology for manual labour, jobs were lost in car-making but created in the production of services needed for mass production – layers of management, design, research and development, accounting, record-keeping, advertising, marketing, finance and insurance, legal services. These in turn were industrialised and commodified, again displacing clerks, managers, accountants, etc, but creating new jobs in information technology, computer-assisted design, call centres, financial management.’

In the current wave of commodification through platform logic this becomes further directed towards functions previously in the domain of the state (a process that has been described as ‘automated neoliberalism’).[1] An obvious example would be Alphabet (Google), which, after devouring an inordinate amount of everyday software systems while creating new hierarchies within advertising, print, digital media and countless other industries, turned its blood lust to urban planning with its Sidewalk Toronto proposals. Here, appeals to take over segments of municipal urban planning from a Toronto government stricken by a decade of austerity are met with promises of streamlined automation.

But Alphabet is not alone. Other vampiric platforms, including Huawei, Siemens, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Cisco, Huawei, Microsoft and Alibaba, all have stakes in lucrative contracts for municipal management systems, which form one element in their armoury. While these are examples of how platforms are working at an urban scale, the underlying logic of a parasitic drive to expand fields into all aspects of everyday life remains: one that finds an impetus for accelerated accumulation with the global Covid-19 pandemic.

The social impacts of this process are not spread evenly. As Huws states, people displaced through this process do not necessarily find new jobs. Often if they do, the job is more precarious. And often this commodification has uneven gender and racial impacts. Vampiric platforms are not then ahistorical and asocial technological abstractions but are part of the animated monster of capital which is continually reshaping the various worlds we inhabit. Turning back to Sidewalk Toronto, ultimately its failure was the well-organised success of grassroots campaigners saying no to aggressive commodification. Drawing on this, a wider clarion call to de-commodify the world and rid it of these flesh-eating ghouls and other animated monsters is urgently needed, opening a space to collectively ask the question: are any of these structures really worth salvaging?