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 the speed at which commentary can be brought to bear on an issue of seeming salience, creating heat through the force of engagement.
As for us, we sat together at a table in order to generate energy around the study of platforms and to create a collective research agenda: How we might best study how platforms’s force, the ever changing ways that they create and transform markets, concentrate power, scale near instantaneously, and consolidate socialities with distinct geographies and histories? We take the “form” of platform studies both seriously and playfully, just as we do our individual research platform research. Gravity’s effect on heat is to push candle flames up, buoyantly, and similarly our shared effort paradoxically seeks to defy the gravity of all the attention placed on platforms and the pressure-cooker of constant innovation, scholarly production, and critique.
At the same time, mounting crises marshal a sense of “too lateness” and spiraling futures down the technocratic drain, from the blackboxing of labor to the Silicon Valley “prepper” mentality and the drumroll of extinction panics. How do we galvanize and sustain the energy needed to limn the planetary scale—beyond the tunnel visions of innovation and black holes of data accumulation—and, instead, to bear the moral weight of future generations and conviviality with the geographically distant?
We finish where we started: with the physical features and high aspirations of the Institute for Advanced Study where we work. The wall plaques and benchmarks of Great Men demarcate epistemic authority all over its campus grounds. How might we reimagine IAS Director Robert Oppenheimer’s failure to integrate the sciences and humanities as a platform for queer arts of humanistic inquiry?[27] How places and spaces like this platform new styles of social theory that takes account of its biggest formations?
In the summer of 1947, in the few months preceding the start of Oppenheimer’s long tenure as Director of IAS, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists debuted the Doomsday Clock on its cover, to signal how “scientific and technological breakthroughs pose great risk” and demand creativity and commitment to build a safer world.[28] A “platform for dialogue and debate among scientists, policymakers and the public” more than 70 years later, the internationally recognized symbol honors vulnerability while rejecting militarism and the atomic fetish, recalibrating the urgency of disruptive technologies and worlding-in-common concerns (climate change, global pathogens, ethical obligations) with every allegorical reset of the minute hand closer toward midnight.
Twenty years later Theodor Adorno mobilized a positive nuclear metaphor to describe Walter Benjamin’s intellectual commitments—one that offers an evocative dis/orienting device for platform studies: “Everything which fell under the scrutiny of his words was transformed, as though it had become radioactive. His capacity for continually bringing out new aspects, not by exploding conventions through criticism, but rather by organizing himself so as to be able to relate to his subject-matter in a way that seemed beyond all convention.”[29]
The platform needs a Doomsday Clock, and we hope that our five theses can get us part of the way there. We need a scholarship that tells us where we are in space, with an eye towards action. As more and more aspects of life, human and otherwise, are pulled toward platforms, a greater diversity of scholars and stakeholders must turn our attention towards a social theory purpose built to address them. We bring new skills, methods, and techniques to theorize and analyze platforms. In this article we played with gravity as a trope for visualizing and feeling how platforms come together and apart, but also to reflect a felt sense in our bodies that something is bigger than can be borne, and we feel its weight in a visceral way. We can learn to account for these new normative orientations and affective engagements by returning to our five theses.
One, that envisioning platforms as socially symptomatic gets us out of the trap of determinism and offers a new way of intellectually engaging with massively multi-actor systems that selectively pull us in and push us out. Two, that the most attractive and most influential platforms are the most invisible to scholars and are excluded when we talk about platforms, wasting an opportunity to limn how their platforms are socially symptomatic. These are symptoms that are disregarded, and therefore the most ripe for analysis, as they invite us to explain how and why they are pushed to the side. Three, that platforms are now themselves both publics and politics that operate both independently and interdependently with other public and political formations, and we must theorize them that way despite our lack of access to some of their workings if we want to get anywhere close to politics. Four, we must resist the charismatic pull of the platform’s sublime qualities, its arbitrariness and unaccountability coupled with convenience and seeming flatness. And lastly, five, how can we resist the pull of platforms to interpellate us into their logics and terminologies, and what can we learn from specific people, like sex workers, who have very different investments in them from us?
[27] Halberstam, J. (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press.
[28] How the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Got Its Start. (2024). The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
[29] Adorno, T. W. (1981) Prisms. (S. Weber and S. Weber, Trans.). MIT Press. (Original work published 1967) see p. 229.