Five Theses: 4) PLATFORMS ARE NOT
Is social connection the same thing as buying vegetables, or hailing a ride? The self-same nature of platform architecture renders these actions, now called “micro-behaviours” to look as if they are the same, performing similar things, and making the same kind of intervention in our world. It is our proposition that the inescapable gravitational pull of a social networking platform does not capture the same vital aspect as a medical platform, less still a pornography based one. A research platform that makes possible a techno-scientific breakthrough and a pornography platform that provides access to myriad forms of erotic content may share a similar technological scaffolding. Furthermore, they may render collaborative intellectual labour in pursuit of a new drug and the leisure(ly) pursuit of erotica as phenomenologically equivalent acts (clicks of tabs, screens, informational flows, cloud architecture, etc.). But good social science warns that we pay heed not only to the technological similarities of platforms but more importantly, to the divergent and diverse social forms they bring together and in turn give rise to.
The power of the platform lies in rendering these effects as if they are similar entrapments, incarcerations, transformations. Screens are everywhere and are the universal face and form of platforms. The screens used for accessing healthcare in rural Kenya, for receiving welfare payment in peri-urban India, shopping online in Djakarta, receiving psychotherapeutic counseling in Buenos Aires, and for working via OnlyFans in urban United States may formally look the same, but each of these screens interfaces with different registers of statecraft, market logics, supply chains, labour arrangements, and social inequities.
The ease and the lure of a click mutually constitute each other, though their transformational powers are not the same, or at least they do not flatten subjectivity into a self-same in every instance. Some clicks leach away your money (Amazon), some your inner dispositions (Facebook and Instagram), while others your freedom (Aadhaar).The gravitational force may be experienced similarly in each of these, but the source of the gravity is not at all shared across platforms. These are, to continue the metaphor, gravitational pulls of different planets.
The ability to conceal or flatten these underlying processes and inequities is sometimes called the algorithmic sublime (Ames 2018, Marx 2000, Nye 1994) to capture this power of unknowability and irrationality at work. Their blackboxed power is beyond calculation and certainly cannot be reverse engineered. Because of this irrational basis to their power, they appear charismatic. The gravitational pull does not appear terrifying, but rather alluring, if inescapable[21]. More and more work is corralled into the gig economy. They draw by force as much as they allure by the charisma they exude, and together these two different forces result in creating a new kind of collective (a “blind following”). This new collective is neither the engaged, dialogic “public” of the public sphere, nor the purified “population” of biopolitics.
[21] Cameron, L. D. (2022). “Making out” while driving: Relational and efficiency games in the gig economy. Organization Science, 33(1), 231–252.