James Muldoon starts from a fairly brutal premise: the digital platforms that organise so much contemporary life are not merely businesses we happen to use, but increasingly function as privately owned infrastructure.

Facebook mediates sociality, Airbnb reshapes housing and cities, Uber reorganises labour, while the communities these companies claim to cultivate become sources of data, behavioural control and profit. Platform Socialism asks what democratic ownership of digital infrastructure might actually look like.

Muldoon draws on guild socialism, cooperative organisation and public utilities to imagine platforms governed by workers and users rather than shareholders. Chapters move from the monetisation of community and the strange rhetoric of Big Tech “community-building” through questions of public infrastructure, civic platforms and global digital services.

The useful thing here is its insistence that the internet does not have to be either corporate or state-controlled. Digital systems are political institutions already; the real argument is over who gets to design them, own them and decide what they are for. A concise bridge between platform studies, socialist political theory and practical institutional imagination.

Pluto Press, 2022. First edition, paperback. Very good condition; light shelf wear and minor rubbing to covers and edges, clean internally.