Five Theses: 2) 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 thus been demoted to the status of something much smaller: a dwarf planet. Who and what are less perceptible, but are still part of the platform’s orbit, are constitutive of it, or at least our idea of it, and must be disavowed? Who benefits from this reorganization?
For example, did you know that the social network “friend,” or profile that can build a persistent and public link to another profile on a social network, was prototyped by a collective of young Asian Americans? In 1997 Merrill Lynch investment banker Ben Sun launched a new social networking service for Asian Americans with his friends out of his Wall Street apartment. He realized having worked to finance early dot.com companies that there was a great opportunity to bring together users who were not being served by internet service provider platforms like AOL. By 2000, AsianAvenue had over 2 million users, and was the model for Omar Wasow’s social network for black users, BlackPlanet, which by April of 2002 had 5.3 million users. Sun created a parent network aggregator company for these new platforms, Community Connect, which expanded to include MiGente, a social network for Latinx users.
By 2008, Sun’s Community Connect was one of the top three social networking sites based on advertising sales. Importantly, Sun launched the company with $300,000 in seed funding that he and his partners raised from their friends and family. Thus, the world’s first large social network platform was both non-white and was funded by a “kye,” a Korean term that describes a form of investing where members contribute to a group fund, knowing that they will each get their turn at an interest-free loan. Asian entrepreneurs in the U.S. and elsewhere have long relied on each other to fund businesses, knowing that as racialized and sometimes not-legally-documented immigrants they were not attractive borrowers to American banks, and that they could not afford its interest rates. “Bootstrapping” Asian Avenue through financing that emerged as a result of institutional racism allowed Sun to be independent and nimble, making the sometimes risky decisions that benefited the company while keeping him accountable to his community.
This is a very different story of platform innovation, eclipsed by the trajectories of big white personalities like Mark Zuckerberg, Tom Anderson, Sergei Brin and Larry Page, and others. As Charlton McIlwain has written, black entrepreneurs and early tech workers were deeply involved in developing computer culture in the 70’s and beyond.[9] Like Pluto, AsianAvenue and its sister Latinx and Black social networks were once undoubtedly part of the constellation of platforms–the social network– that would come to signify what a platform is. It has since become obscure(d) despite its role in creating the ruling logics of social media networks.[10] In answer to our earlier question--who must be disavowed from platform history’s reorganization, and who benefits?
Just as Pluto is no longer defined as a planet because it orbits around a different star than Earth, so too are some platforms viewed as “dwarves,” or as minor, because of their differing orbits.[11] Asia, specifically India and China, constitutes by far the biggest mass in platform culture, yet does not appear in much scholarly writing about platforms, even though they are always inside platforms (the majority of semiconductors are made in Taiwan by TSMC, a company founded by Chinese Taiwanese engineers trained after the war at National Taiwan University, and later sent to American universities like our neighbor down the road, Princeton, on a charter flight[12].) Platform studies and our fields suffer from this exclusion, while U.S. empire benefits from this arrangement that centers venture capital (with the emphasis on capital), versus the state or other national projects like TSMC.[13]
[9] McIlwain, C. D. (2019). Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter. Oxford University Press.
[10] This is also the case with e-commerce platforms; the Latin American platform Mercado Libre was launched in 1999 and though its market capitalization is $76 billion it often goes unmentioned as a key progenitor in the history of digital retail.
[11] Pluto’s “historical downgrade” is observed every August 24th by the international scientific community as “Pluto Demoted Day.” Bittel, J. (2022). Ever Wondered Why Pluto Is No Longer a Planet? Washington Post.
[12] As physicist and chief TSCM engineer Shang-Yi Chiang remembers it, there were so few flights to the U.S. from Taiwan in 1969 that he and his18 classmates had to fly together on a small plane.
[13] See work by Kapila, Weigel, etc.