The morphology of the current transformation of the 21st century can be examined with the tools of Polanyi's analysis of the great transformation (TGT). The previous profound socio-economic transformation was connected to the Industrial Revolution that created industrial-urban societies. The first Industrial Revolution was localized as the most eloquent example in England 1750-1850, overarching only a century and followed by further waves of industrial revolutions stretching the new socio-economic system toward a globalized order. There is no doubt that the changes of the 21st century are unprecedented and far-reaching. The considerations about which changes exactly are transforming our global realities are manifold but can be grouped at least into two main strands: those concerned about the transformation of socio-economic systems to preserve and to redefine ecological systems and those that focus on the impact of the digital or platform economy reformulating fundamental institutions, such as markets, governance, and ownership.
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Earlier profound socioeconomic transformation was connected to the Industrial Revolution which created industrial-urban societies (Polanyi 1944) and culminated in the ‘conservatism’ of the 1920s that ended in the Great Depression. The first Industrial Revolution was localized in its clearest example in England from 1750-1850, spanning only a century, but being followed by further waves of industrial revolution that expanded the new socioeconomic system into a globalized order. There is no doubt that the changes of the twenty-first century are also unprecedented and far-reaching. Debates about which changes exactly are transforming our global realities are manifold, but they can be classified into two main strands – those related to the transformation of socioeconomic systems and the preservation and redefinition of ecological systems, and those which focus on the how the impact of automation and the digital economy is reformulating fundamentally important institutions such as markets, governance, and ownership in a context of platform capitalism and hyper-globalization.
The so-called digital revolution has turned out to be a trigger for evolutionary processes in the context of global capitalism. The digital revolution, an abrupt technological paradigm shift, was connected first to the spread of the internet, which implied a shift in social interaction, news, and information consumption patterns – the first visible and much-discussed change. The technology-assisted metamorphosis of the political, economic, and social spheres has resulted in the emergence of platform capitalism. These profound transformations involve new institutional arrangements of markets and political agency, and the (re)distribution of power, democracy and autonomy, as information technologies are tightly linked to political systems. Just as the industrial revolution was the long-term context for short-term political conflict (Novy 2020), the process of the digital revolution is creating the underlying structure for a series of politically and economically framed events.
Following the method of connecting short-term events to underlying structures, in methodological terms the COVID-19 pandemic is taken as a political-economic rupture – with specific reference to the harsh governmental responses in the form of lockdowns, especially during the first waves of the pandemic, which came as a shock. This rupture on the one hand caused immediate damage to social and economic systems, and on the other accelerated digitalization and platformization processes. It involved a game of temporality – obtaining time on the inter-governmental level to freeze the devastation to the social system, while accelerating the profound digital transformation in the economy and further commodification of labor. Automation and the disruptive innovations in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are impacting all spheres of work, from factories to online services and beyond, questioning the fundamental frames of work such as knowledge, skills, working conditions, and forms and approaches to organizing work. The enhanced commodification of labor is tightly connected to the redrawing of boundaries of public and private spheres (Faludi and Crosby 2021) and abrupt changes in the labor market.