MARKETS HAVE THE FLOOR

Most formal economic exchanges are now mediated one way or another by digital technologies. For those that are not, few remain that are not facilitated by, or at least accounted for and archived in, digital systems. Yet the rapid growth of digitized exchanges is not only about new modes of mediation. Digital intermediation has replaced face-to-face and other pre-digital exchanges, but, more importantly, digital technologies have afforded new kinds of work and commodities, new kinds of firms, production and consumption and – most importantly for this chapter – new kinds of markets for exchange.

In this context, how might we conceptualize the geographical political economy of markets or marketization? One possibility is in the nascent literature on digital platforms and platform capitalism (Langley & Leyshon 2017; Srnicek 2017). Platforms have deservedly attracted quite a lot of attention, not least in the ways they organize or constitute new socio-economic spaces in and through firms such as Amazon, Google, Facebook and Airbnb. Firms such as these are particularly relevant, as they tend not to produce easily discernible commodities but, rather, serve as web-based marketplaces for goods and services produced by others. At the same time, these new market places have expanded the division of labour, allowing a new class of workers and capitalists to manipulate, buy and sell information about people and commodities, and even to commodify that information itself. To date, however, the relationship between what I will call this new merchant class, space and the process of marketization has received little attention.

My approach to these problems begins with asking whether the geography of platforms is unique to the internet age. And, if, as I argue, the spatial transformations that accompany digital platform economies are not entirely new, what might we learn from the historical geographies of platformed market exchange? In fact, we can learn quite a lot about digital commerce in general and digital platforms in particular by looking back to a previous revolution in information and communications technologies – the development of the electric telegraph – and its relationship with the reorganization of commercial space in the middle to late nineteenth century.