Digital Battlegrounds

Overview

Published in the Academy of Management Annals, this paper reframes digital platforms as contested battlegrounds where stakeholder power struggles reflect and influence broader societal turbulence. While the ubiquity of digital platforms is undeniable — as is their transactional efficiency and world-flattening possibilities — the emerging era brings looming specters of rentier capitalism, digi-serfdom, misinformation, data exploitation, digital addiction, and near-ungovernable algorithmic agents. The paper argues that scholarly focus on transactional features and old-economy governance conceptions largely ignores the extent to which power dynamics determine who benefits and who is exploited.

Contribution to the Research Program

Digital platforms are the infrastructure upon which much of contemporary entrepreneurship occurs, making platform governance a foundational concern for the Cyborg Entrepreneurship program. This paper establishes the structural context for understanding how AI-mediated platforms shape entrepreneurial opportunity — who gets access, whose innovations get surfaced, and whose value gets captured. It connects to the Methods & Infrastructure stream by mapping the institutional architecture of the digital economy, and to the AI & Deep Tech Entrepreneurship stream by revealing how platform governance decisions increasingly rely on algorithmic systems whose power dynamics are opaque to the entrepreneurs who depend on them.

Key Insights

• Platforms are best understood as contested governance structures, not neutral market intermediaries
• Power asymmetries are encoded in platform architecture, algorithms, and terms of service
• The relationship between platform owners and complementors (including entrepreneurs) is fundamentally one of asymmetric governance
• Understanding platform power dynamics is essential for any theory of entrepreneurship in the digital economy