Rapid technological development means that the ground on which recent academic studies and public debates about the future of work organisation are based is shifting too rapidly for predictions to be credible. Organisational studies scholars have provided a counterpoint to this futuristic, speculative debate about the world of tomorrow with studies that contextualise seemingly new trends within a longer history of industrial capitalism. In this article, using Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory (2022) as a starting point, I further explore the historical contextualisation of two aspects of platform capitalism: its de-spatialisation and its use of “autonomy”.

技术的快速发展意味着，最近关于工作组织未来的学术研究和公开辩论的基础正在迅速变化，以至于预测不可信。组织研究学者为这种关于未来世界的未来主义、思辨性辩论提供了一个对比，他们的研究将工业资本主义的悠久历史中看似新的趋势置于背景中。在本文中，我以莫里茨·阿尔滕里德 （Moritz Altenried） 的《数字工厂》（2022 年）为起点，进一步探讨了平台资本主义两个方面的历史语境化：它的去空间化和它对“自主性”的使用。