Nick Srnicek – författare

What unites Google and Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, Siemens and GE, Uber and Airbnb? Across a wide range of sectors, these firms are transforming themselves into platforms: businesses that provide the hardware and software foundation for others to operate on. This transformation signals a major shift in how capitalist firms operate and how they interact with the rest of the economy: the emergence of ‘platform capitalism’.

This book critically examines these new business forms, tracing their genesis from the long downturn of the 1970s to the boom and bust of the 1990s and the aftershocks of the 2008 crisis. It shows how the fundamental foundations of the economy are rapidly being carved up among a small number of monopolistic platforms, and how the platform introduces new tendencies within capitalism that pose significant challenges to any vision of a post-capitalist future. This book will be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the most powerful tech companies of our time are transforming the global economy."Also available as an audiobook.

A vital and timely proposal for a feminist post-work politics

Would you let a robot clean your house?

When we think about work, we still tend to think about workplaces—if we think about reducing work, we think about reducing working hours and spending more time at home. But the home has never been free from work, and with the continued gendered division of labor, women still do the bulk of domestic activities.

As two-income families find themselves ever more time-poor, many look to outsource to cleaners, nannies, and care workers. More and more, it would seem, people are finding themselves without either the emotional or the financial resources to take care of themselves and each other. The home, rather than an escape from the work and its pressures, is in fact an extension of it.

After Work is a crucial corrective to this trend, extending its attention beyond paid jobs to the impact of domestic work upon familial relationships, social bonds, and our very conceptions of domestic space. What if we automated housework?

In this groundbreaking work, Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek argue that there is a crisis that can and should be tackled. Only by rethinking the way we organize our living arrangements, redefining our domestic standards, and remaining open to the automation of work done in the home, they argue, can we imagine a world that is truly post-work.