While it is often claimed that the pace of digital transformation is such that its own, often glacial changes do not allow the state to catch up, we argue that technological companies, with the help of some state actors, have been slowing the state down. To capture this phenomenon, we introduce the notion of stalling strategies. We argue that stalling strategies have allowed digital platforms to create time that they have spent generating revenue and accumulating platform power, which later protected them from state actions. Drawing on a case study of Uber in Poland and a number of shadow cases, we distinguish five stalling strategies: reinventing classifications, dragging out court proceedings, stealing the time of street-level bureaucrats, delaying new regulations, and taking time to (not) comply. By analyzing stalling strategies, this article contributes to discussions about the politics of platform capitalism, the temporality of digitalization, and institutional drift.

The author argues that behind the apparent randomness of interactions between cabdrivers and their fares in Warsaw is a temporal structure. To capture this temporal structure, the author introduces the notion of a linking ecology. He argues that the Warsaw taxi market is a linking ecology, which is structured by religious time, state time, and family time. The author then focuses on waiting time, arguing that it too structures the interactions between cabdrivers and their fares. The author makes a processual argument that waiting time has been restructured by the postsocialist transformation, but only because this transformation has been continually encoded through the defensive and adaptive strategies of cabdrivers responding to the repetitive and unique events located across the social space. The author concludes with the claim that linking ecologies are a recurring structure of the social process and that they form the backbone of globalization, financialization, and mediatization.