Bernard Miège 32 3. Platform, a concept to be discussed and yet to be characterized That is why it is important to be cautious about claims to the universality of the phenomena considered; the social log- ics of communication, which emerge from research and analysis, remain situated. Paradoxically, the platforms (hereinafter PF) are as- sociated among specialists with: 1° advanced capitalist devel- opment, in reference to the large PF organized by digital companies that dominate markets on an almost globalized scale (the Big Five and other more or less allied groups, on the one hand, BATX3, on the other) giving rise to, what some even call the phase of capitalism, “PF capitalism”; and 2° a method that allows participatory financing and, therefore, sharing: as is the case with crowdfunding. This modality, far from being the first, has certainly contributed to improving the image of PF, an image that is also greatly compromised by the deliberately anti-wage practices of PF home delivery, such as Deliveroo. It should be noted that PF today covers very diverse modalities, which do not allow a simple or even single definition to be given. From the point of view of the digital techniques that are in some way at the base of PF, we can consider that what is constitutive of these same PFs is in some way a variable set of a plurality of techniques (today moving towards what is referred to as artificial intelligence, i.e., the 2nd generation digital). Due to this variability and this plurality of techniques implemented, PFs cannot be considered radical innovations, they are linked to type 2 innovations, or product innovations, and more precisely to incremental innovations to which a multiplicity of changes usually contribute. But these characteristics are not enough to characterize the platforms. It therefore seems to me necessary to insist on the fol- lowing three essential observations: 3 BATX stands for Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Xiomi, the acronym for the four largest technology companies in China (retrieved from: https://pt.wikipedia. org/wiki/BATX)
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