THE PLATFORMS ARE TAKING OVER the world. Hide the children. Take only what you can carry with you. Their dominance is inevitable. Resistance is futile. Those who do not capitulate will be relegated to the bottom rung of our increasingly stratified economy. The rulers of this new global order are the early platform investors and the visionary entrepreneurs they back. Those who join them have a chance of survival. All the rest are collateral damage. There is much to commend this narrative. In industry after industry, this new breed of so-called platform companies are sucking all the value, returns, and growth out of the companies that actually do things.