GOVERNMENT AND ACCUMULATION IN THE ERA OF PLATFORM CAPITALISM

Abstract

The article analyzes contemporary transformations in forms of governance and processes of accumulation within the context of platform capitalism, articulating a critical reading of the transition from biopolitical governmentality to algorithmic governmentality. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s contributions, governance is understood not as the sovereign exercise of power, but as a set of techniques aimed at conducting conduct, managing life, and orienting behavior. Within this framework, the article demonstrates how the informational revolution and the centrality of digital platforms reconfigure both the mechanisms of truth production and the forms of power, relocating social life into a regime of permanent calculation based on data, statistics, and algorithms. It is argued that algorithmic governance does not replace biopolitics, but rather radicalizes it by converting lived experiences into abstract data flows and by operating predictive modeling of behavior. In parallel, the article examines the restructuring of value accumulation processes, marked by the capture of the digital commons, the datafication of everyday life, and the subsumption of subjects’ cognitive, affective, and relational capacities. Finally, it points to the need to politicize digital infrastructure and to rethink subjectivities as a condition for the emergence of practices of resistance in the face of the algorithmic order of power.