Platforms in Time of Pandemic

The recent and still ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has been described both as an extraordinary event transforming our lives and as a tipping point in a shift towards labour digitalisation. The activity of platforms has acquired more and more scholarly interest because their business has been considered as the future of work. In this chapter we will try to enlarge the perspective and place the current wave of digitalisation within a longer-term process. From this perspective we consider the pandemic as an event highlighting and accelerating some structural features of the platform economy and, more generally, of contemporary capitalism. The aim is to understand how such general tendencies have changed after, and because of, the Covid-19 outbreak.