We began this chapter by arguing that twenty-first-century capitalism has found a massive new raw material to appropriate: data. … The old business models of the Fordist era had only a rudimentary capacity to extract data from the production process or from customer usage. The era of lean production modified this slightly, as global 'just in time' supply chains demanded data about the status of inventories and the location of supplies. Yet data outside the firm remained nearly impossible to attain; and, even inside the firm, most of the activities went unrecorded. The platform, on the other hand, has data extraction built into its DNA, as a model that enables other services and goods and technologies to be built on top of it, as a model that demands more users in order to gain network effects, and as a digitally based medium that makes recording and storage simple.

Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, loc. 76