This article argues that the political effects of digitalization in peripheral societies emerge from the relationship between platform properties and the social structures that receive them. It develops this claim by recovering Cardoso and Faletto’s concept of situations of dependency, which treats dependency as a configuration in which a mode of insertion into the world economy is internalized as a specific arrangement of alliances and conflicts among domestic groups and social classes. The article’s theoretical contribution lies in specifying what mediates the global tendencies of digital capitalism, namely, the political and class structures through which these tendencies are processed and which determine the form they take in a given society. To strengthen this argument, the article examines two Brazilian cases in which the same tendency, the drive to lock users into proprietary ecosystems, assumes divergent forms: the deadlock of platform regulation, where corporate interests attach themselves to the veto structure of coalition presidentialism, and the repurposing of Instagram as a labor platform in a market where informality is a structural component.