App Imperialism: The Political Economy of the Canadian App Store

© The Author(s) 2020. To critically engage with the political economy of platformization, this article builds on the concepts of platform capitalism and platform imperialism to situate platforms within wider historical, economic, and spatial trajectories. To investigate if platformization leads to the geographical redistribution of capital and power, we draw on the Canadian instance of Apple’s iOS App Store as a case study. App stores are situated in a complex ecosystem of markets, infrastructures, and governance models that the disparate fields of business studies, critical political economy of communications, and platform studies have begun to catalog. Through a combination of financial and institutional analysis, we ask if Canadian game app developers are effective in generating revenue within their own national App Store. Given Canada’s vibrant game industry one would expect Canadian developers to have a sizable economic footprint in the burgeoning app economy. Our results, however, point toward the US digital dominance and, therefore, we suggest the notion of app imperialism to signal the continuation, if not reinforcement of existing instances of economic inequalities and imperialism

'This is our Call of Duty': hegemony, history and resistant videogames in the Middle East

In recent years, non-state actors in the Middle East have engaged a new generation of activists through a variety of media strategies. Notable among these is a series of videogame interventions, which have appropriated Western game products to convey political and religious messages through the inversion or complication of the roles of hero and enemy. This article explores a selection of such media, produced by or in support of two non-state groups, Hezbollah and Islamic State (IS). The article takes a discourse theoretical approach to examine the ideologies presented in these media and reflects on the ways in which these game artefacts engage with, and reject, Western narratives of history and of US pre-eminence. It concludes that while these game interventions challenge existing hegemonic (re)presentations of the Middle East and the ‘War on Terror’, they remove or reduce agency to the extent that those who engage with them can only witness these challenges, rather than instigate their own. While we acknowledge that hegemony can always be challenged, we view this lack of agency as support for Mouffe’s proposition that the result of counter-hegemonic resistance is often to maintain and reproduce the hegemonic order

The platformization of cultural production: Theorizing the contingent cultural commodity

This article explores how the political economy of the cultural industries changes through platformization: the penetration of economic and infrastructural extensions of online platforms into the web, affecting the production, distribution, and circulation of cultural content. It pursues this investigation in critical dialogue with current research in business studies, political economy, and software studies. Focusing on the production of news and games, the analysis shows that in economic terms platformization entails the replacement of two-sided market structures with complex multisided platform configurations, dominated by big platform corporations. Cultural content producers have to continuously grapple with seemingly serendipitous changes in platform governance, ranging from content curation to pricing strategies. Simultaneously, these producers are enticed by new platform services and infrastructural changes. In the process, cultural commodities become fundamentally “contingent,” that is increasingly modular in design and continuously reworked and repackaged, informed by datafied user feedback