This is a story about the power of grassroots movements, narratives and modern corporations to change the way everyday life is provisioned and governed. From 2008, a new wave of Silicon Valley corporations refined a ‘platform’ business model, providing digitally mediated versions of a number of existing services. Several companies, including Airbnb and Uber, and a host of allies, advocates and alternative economic projects, created a story about a new economy with ‘sharing’ and ‘collaboration’ at its centre. These lean platforms, holding few assets but playing a coordinating role between workers, owners and consumers, started to be presented as an answer to the problems of contemporary neoliberal economies.

Yet it has become widely recognised that the predicted benefits of the platform economy are not materialising. This book charts the rise and fall of the morally laden narratives generated early on in terms such as the ‘Collaborative’ or ‘Sharing Economy’, identifying the popular stories told about platforms and the dynamics of change associated with them. It explores the growing context of growing resistance to platforms and attempts to transform or regulate them, and it analyses and theorises the tactics platform businesses use to try to consolidate their advantages.

In doing so, the book works with a unique set of interviews with ex-workers of the lean platform business Airbnb, who were responsible for designing and implementing platform political strategies, particularly around the political mobilisation of platform users and allies, platform power. The book brings in a supplementary body of statements and documents which demonstrate how platform political tactics work in practice. The book also makes use of such public documents and statements such as those of Airbnb's former Head of Global Community, Douglas Atkin, who in his role spearheaded the company's political strategy to avoid regulation: the mass mobilisation of thousands of landlords since 2010, deploying ‘Community Organisers’ trained in electoral campaigning, non-governmental organisations and charities. An excerpt from a speech by Atkin characterises the combination of rhetorical and mobilisation tactics at the centre of platform politics: