BRIE Working Paper 2021-8 Geographic Implications of Platforms for Labor and

Importantly, for this essay, and by historic analogy, the Fordist mass production paradigm had a powerful impact 4 on the geography of economic activity – not simply on the rise of the Industrial Midwest but also on the design of the US city. [...] Until very recently, the majority of research by economic geographers on the impacts of digital technologies was undertaken during or in the aftermath of the 1990s Internet Bubble (Castells 2000; Malecki 2002; Zook 2000).1 With the collapse of the Internet Bubble, interest in the geographic consequences of digital technologies waned and only has been reborn recently as geographers became intereste. [...] The prevailing view regarding the constitutive powers of the software and code was that, while important, the changes driven by the internet reinforced the existing business structures and arrangements (see Lessig 2009).2 As with many scholars, they did not see the rise to a monopoly position of the online platform firms. [...] If the sectoral concentration is remarkable, the geographic concentration of the mega platforms is even greater as the headquarters for these firms is almost entirely concentrated on the West Coast of the United States. [...] One obvious result of the movement of sales on-line, a tendency that was reinforced by the Covid-19 pandemics, is the transformation of the physical shop-based retail sales model that is leading to the “hollowing-out” of many shopping centers and main street shops (Semeuls 8 As Cutolo and Kenney (2020) point out, using FBA separates the third-party vendor from its customers and thus strengthens Am.