Five Theses on the Gravity of Platforms

Five Theses on the Gravity of Platforms Header image
© Anna Laqua and Veronica Thomas

In 2023 and 2024, the PLATFORM group considered how “the platform” occupies both conceptual and empirical registers. Platforms seem to assemble capabilities, users, and interests and thereby set new futures in motion. Platforms are architectures for action that enable and constrain social, cultural, economic, and political possibilities, and shape how we structure, represent, and experience the world. Platforms are socio-technical infrastructures that can coordinate, consolidate, extend, and empower the activities of individuals, communities, corporations, and other actors. Members of the PLATFORM group explored the gravity of this form across humanistic and social science perspectives, advancing five theses about how platforms simultaneously attract and repulse social action.

Authors: Marc Aidinoff, Pablo Boczkowski, Lindsey Cameron, Kriti Kapila, Ann Kelly, Shiloh Krupar, Juan Llamas-Rodriguez, Lisa Nakamura, Alondra Nelson, David Nieborg, Christian Sandvig, Julia Ticona, Moira Weigel, Hannah Wohl, Malte Ziewitz

Citation: Aidinoff, M., Boczkowski P., Cameron L., Kapila K., Kelly A., Krupar, S., et al. (2024). Five Theses on the Gravity of Platforms, School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study.

View or Download PDF

 

Five Theses: PROLOGUE

Platforms are everywhere. The Ubiquity of the word is both a sign of the digital's interpenetration into everyday life, and a metaphor that...

YOU WILL BE PULLED

Platforms exert a sometimes irresistible pull over users. Like other massive bodies, the larger they are, the more sheer mass they gather up...

REMEMBERING PLUTO

I will never get over the day I learned that Pluto was no longer considered a planet.  It was too small, exerted too little mass, and had...

PLATFORMS ARE NOT

Is social connection the same thing as buying vegetables, or hailing a ride? The self-same nature of platform architecture render these...

YOU FANTASIZE

The pull of platforms triggers a desire to escape. For with a bit of luck, we realize at some point that we have been captured. We have been...

Five Theses: CRITIQUE

The most powerful gravitational waves are created when objects move at very high speeds. At times authority and expertise are understood as...