Five Theses: 5) 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 captured linguistically, getting used to using “platforms” as a shorthand for all kinds of phenomena and problems that are, in practice, very different. Sex work, statecraft, e-commerce, neighborhoods, supply chains, biometric identification, and medical technologies all become the same because we’re getting used to seeing only video games, Uber, Amazon arbitrage, and AstraZeneca’s non-replicating viral vector vaccine. We’ve been captured politically as “platforms” are being taken up by policy-makers and designers looking for interventions into regulating “them.” We’ve been captured economically as funding bodies and foundations are announcing research programs into “platforms” for their (by now) self-reinforcing public relevance. We’ve been captured socially as our colleagues flock to “platforms” as a focal point for workshops, research themes, and special issues.
Once we’ve realized that the subject of our thinking has come to occupy the subject position in our thinking, we start to fantasize about escape. Tragically, platforms have been sticky in that they offer a solution for that problem too. Especially economists and political scientists have theorized this issue. One prominent example is Albert O. Hirschmann’s essay on Exit, Voice and Loyalty.[22] If you don’t like a platform, the story goes, consider exit (leaving the platform for another one), voice (raising your concerns to those who operate a platform), or reconsider loyalty (the reasons why you might stick to the platform in spite of everything). The problem is of course that voice ceases to be effective when the platform does not need you, that exit is difficult if there are no alternatives, and that loyalty is not a quality of customers but rather a de facto condition of our participation.
The question, then, is how to challenge, redirect, subvert, and struggle with the pull of platforms without excommunicating ourselves. How to develop and critique a phenomenon without contributing to its pull? One possibility is to foreground the many contradictions, paradoxes, and absurdities that characterize our work. Irony can be a powerful tool, allowing us to work with “contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes.”[23] In fact, the very project of studying platforms without taking them for granted requires an ironic stance. So why not learn from those who have worked with irony on conventions of genre or citation metrics[24].
Another possibility would be to learn from those who have been dealing with these challenges for at least as long as ourselves—people operating in the shadow of the platform, tackling problems that we care about as they are resisting being flattened. Sex workers, for instance, have been organizing, finding ways of contestation that mediate between refusal and submission against new forms of platform regulation.[25] Similarily, food delivery workers have banded together online to decline lower-paying orders.[26] What can the people often seen as "outcasts," "weirdos," "troublemakers" teach us for our own practices as analysts and scholars? Can we think of strategies like humor, irony, ridicule, foot-dragging, work-to-rule, etc. as forms of engaging with platform research?
Platforms have managed to convince us that escape is just another key on our laptops. Our task is to find creative strategies between refusal and submission that allow us to engage creatively with platforms—to explore them without taking them for granted.
[22] Hirschman, A. O. (1970). Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States. Harvard University Press.
[23] Haraway, D. (1991). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In: Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, (pp. 149–181).
[24] Woolgar, S. (1991). Beyond the citation debate: towards a sociology of measurement technologies and their use in science policy. Science and Public Policy, 18(5): 319–326.
[25] About. Hacking//Hustling. (2021, October 17).
[26] Mayberry, K., Cameron, L., & Rahman, H. (Forthcoming). Fighting Against the Algorithm: The Rise of Activism in the Face of Platform Inequality. In Julie MacLeavy and Frederick Harry Pitts (Eds.), Handbook of the Future of Work. Routledge.