Nick Srnicek

Srnicek classified platforms — advertising, cloud, industrial, product and lean — and showed what they share: they neither manufacture nor deliver the service, they place themselves between those who do and those who use it, and they keep the record of every transaction.

In the city this shows up in delivery, transport and short-term rentals: the platform owns no cars, no couriers and no flats, yet sets the price and the conditions for all three. His uncomfortable thesis is that the tendency towards monopoly is not a flaw in the model but its natural form.

A Canadian philosopher and political theorist, lecturer in digital economy at King's College London, Srnicek became known in 2013 with the Accelerationist Manifesto, written with Alex Williams, and with Inventing the Future (2015), which argued for automation, basic income and a shorter working week as the programme of the left. Platform Capitalism (2016) is his most widely read book: platforms are a new business model that extracts data as raw material, tends toward monopoly through network effects and colonises whole sectors, from transport to housing.

His typology, advertising, cloud, industrial, product and lean platforms, is still used to understand what each company lives on, and his warning about lean platforms such as Uber, which own nothing and shift risk onto workers, anticipated the debates on delivery work. After Work (2023, with Helen Hester) takes the same question to domestic and care work. For urban studies he is the reference for understanding the economy of the platform city.