Five Theses: 1) 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 in the form of our and others’ data, global participation, and ubiquity across devices, (what doesn’t have voice recognition, search, and GPS onboard anymore?) the more effectively they incorporate you and me into their orbit. Their ‘micro-physics’ penetrate across all the tiny, mundane everyday forms of life and intimate spaces, playing upon and intensifying our most basic desires.
Platforms are socially symptomatic, and we propose that they be read that way: OnlyFans, the pornography delivery video platform, pulled in millions of users during the isolation of COVID-19. This sheds as much light upon the pandemic and its impact upon intimacy and touch as it does upon digital commerce and innovation. Why would we study disease and vaccines without studying the ways that platforms pull people in to address what they engender?
Our scholarship on platforms begins with that feeling. What is the feeling of being pulled in by the platform? As Tressie McMillan Cottom writes, of being included in predatory ways that often feel good but aren’t good?[5] When we realize that we must engage with an apparatus that is invisible, whose rules change frequently, and whose ownership is both arbitrary and despotic, without accountability or real agency? What is the sensation that comes along with being pushed out by it? When we don’t have the device or the system that lets us do what everyone else is doing–find work, laugh at content, or have a political voice.
What positions of relation are available for us and others that both acknowledge the platform's force and use it as an occasion for discerning who has the most and least degrees of freedom in its orbit? Again, this is a way in which the social theory of platform gravity is really the study of physical and symbolic relations, and the ways that their force fields illuminate the social through its symptoms. It is not possible to exist outside platform relations; as theorist Achille Mbembe writes, theirs is a planetary logic.[6] All politics have to be planetary politics now as worlds heat up, partly as a result of data platforms, and our futures have become entwined around them.[7] And platform politics are terrifyingly local–the platform is here, in my home, taken with you to bed, turned off (perhaps) for sleeping.
Even the term to “push back” assumes a more solid body than ours that can always resist the force we exert against it. The act of platform resistance or rejection must necessarily orient itself around the platform, which behaves like a solid mass that supports our reactions. Being engulfed by the infinite scroll-feed that platforms produce can feel like falling into a hole meant for a rabbit, not for a person. The sensation of security, of being held, by the platform that never goes down, hits differently for its creators of scale. Women of color enable scale to take place. They make it feel solid by providing the brute labor that means that if it goes down, we never feel it, and they are the precondition for the platform’s gravity. To forget this is to forget how planets are made.
The Kenyan and Nigerian and Phillipine women whose hands and eyes clean the mass of textual and visual data that provide the volume that platforms like A.I. need to run and achieve critical mass are part of the platform’s smallest and least free orbit.[8] They have the least degree of freedom in relation to it just as they are themselves part of what gives a platform weight, that is to say, to heft that enables greater degrees of freedom for minority world users like us. Again, seeing this about A.I.’s platforms like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Dall-E and others is part of a theory of the platform as social symptom. Rather than assuming that new technologies will produce different and more equal forms of social hierarchy and relation as many of the network theorists did, our theory of platform concedes that platforms are gravitic fields whose shifting constellations and dynamic forms as objects enter and exit, grow weightier and closer or smaller and more distant, and that to look at them this way is to see specific systems of social relations like racial capitalism writ both large and small.
[5] Cottom, T. M. (2020). Where Platform Capitalism and Racial Capitalism Meet: The Sociology of Race and Racism in the Digital Society: Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 6(4), 441–449.
[6] Mbembe, A. (2021). Futures of Life and Futures of Reason. Public Culture 33 (1 (93)): 11–33.
[7] Wainwright, J., & Mann, G. (2018). Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future. Verso. See also Planetarypraxis.org for a critical social science take on smart forests, political ecology, A.I. and environmental risk, etc.
[8] The instances of PTSD and disabling trauma acknowledged by the firms that broker their labor to Meta, OpenAI, and others are the price of scale and of platform. Abuya, K. (2023, September 7). Sama Hires 2,100 Kenyans for AI Work. TechCabal (blog).