Is the Platform Economy the New Rentier Capitalism? Capitalising Achille Loria’s Analysis of Rent and its Elision

The economy's platformization has enacted new ways of creating value. This has happened in an unregulated context that has facilitated the spread of such tools. Nowadays, platforms mediate many services we enjoy, paying a hidden price: data. In this paper, we want to highlight platforms' role as value extractors in current market societies, which parallels the role of rent in the modern era's economic system. We employ Achille Loria's (1857–1943) philosophical and economic categories to understand whether the platform economy is a form of contemporary rent-seeking and, if so, to suggest steps to avoid its continued, yet hidden, value extraction. Our study stresses the importance of addressing such a phenomenon through the use of regulation that represents its natural elision, which is the element of novelty of our research with respect to the ones present in the literature.