Five Theses: PROLOGUE
Platforms are everywhere. The ubiquity of the word is both a sign of the digital’s interpenetration into everyday life, and a metaphor that can provoke weary acceptance and eye-rolls (what are those damn platform companies up to now?!) Thus, the platform occupies both empirical and conceptual registers. It seems to assemble capabilities, users, and interests and thereby set new futures in motion. Though both the network and the platform are metaphors for forms of electronic commerce and connectivity, they are valued differently. If the value of the network is calculated by its size and reach, the strength of the platform is calculated differently. The platform isn’t about its extension, but rather its gravity: the degree to which it can pull in and provoke actors to engender social, political, economic, and ethical transformations.
Over the past decade, platforms have garnered centrality in fields as disparate as economics, management, media and communication studies, anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, to name but a few.[1] At the same time, disciplines like computer science have also been influential in this field without depending on the term.
What kinds of habits of mind or intellectual dispositions are needed to say something useful about platforms today? This is a ripe and urgent moment for precisely this kind of critique, for as A.I., the platform whose weight sucks so many things into its orbit, scales so tremendously it exceeds our capacity to address it using older methods and metaphors. The digital network gave rise to its own periodization–the Age of Networks (Sampson)–its own political economy–The Wealth of Networks (Benkler)–its own science and methodology–Network Science (Barabási)–and even its own theory of society (Castells).[2] While networks imply a certain kind of equality or at least topography, they didn’t seem to have the agency and the symbolic and economic mass of the platform. As we have shifted from the “network society” to a social situation, historical moment, and subjective experience conditioned in such large part by platforms, what kind of “science” needs to come into being? What theory of the social does the platform engender and require?
We are an eclectic set of scholars who came together at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Spring of 2024 to consider this question and playfully experiment with what a Platform School might look like.[3] The IAS was a place built for experiments, for the contemplation of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, with both Seriousness Of Purpose, and a call (as it says on the marked bench as though Einstein and assorted Great Men sat there) to follow the will-o'-the-wisps from within, those most gentle ideas that flutter away when pursued too closely. If the atomic bomb, or rather, the effort to redeem knowledge after its creation, animated this place when Oppenheimer was appointed its longest serving Director, is a benchmark that lingers in the air and the bones of this place, how might we use this platform to sit with the intellectual challenge of the Platform?
Platforms are physical, ideational, and political objects that exert force, uphold arrangements, and behave as bodies determining time and space. We propose a physical theory of the platform as a gravitational force because we can then imagine the platform as a boundary object where a new social theory can be brought to bear, based on the willingness to experiment with new logics and forms of language. This is not the only way to think with the platform as a socio-technical formation, but at least it is a different way. Platforms have been studied as economic systems, as care delivery apparatuses, as spaces for temporary labor that has become permanent, and as political message delivery vehicles for some time. They are all of these things, indeed, that is why they are so weighty.
What is it about platforms that make them “the thing”? And why is it so hard to talk about? What’s gravely needed in our scholarship and research that is lacking now? How can we exploit the affinities and frictions between our areas of local expertise to understand the platform’s gravity and gravitas today?
Platforms traffic in metaphors shared with the language of flows, i.e. capital, users, innovation.[4] Keeping this multiplicity and proliferation in mind, the force that platforms exert has less to do with the traffic of flows, and more with the opposite, the solidity and weight of the cathedral of the 21st century. (In 1999 digital media theorist Lev Manovich asserted that the Hollywood Film, think Jurassic Park, was the medieval cathedral of the 20th century because of the vast and heterogenous forms of human and computational labor and creativity that were needed to produce it.) Even smaller platforms like Rover, the dog walking service, dwarf films like Jurassic Park. Fold in the bigger public and private platforms, like India’s citizen database Aadhaar, along with Amazon and Google, the gravity of the platform becomes clear. The term “platform” has become a term of art among scientists and virologists as well, who refer to vaccines as platforms to be revised, shared, bought, and sold.
In awe and anger at the gravity of platforms we propose five theses. In a separate opinion piece co-authored by our Platform School group entitled “The Platform Polycrisis,” we argue that the gravity of our situation requires major capital investments in research and theorizing, at the scale of the International Space Station and the Frankfurt school. Respecting gravity, we make forceful propositions. Respecting gravity, we also expect to fall. These theses build from a generation of platform scholarship, much of which we cite here. We synthesize these to ground our five calls to pay attention to platforms’ laws of attraction and repulsion.
[1] For a smattering of review pieces see: Kellogg, Valentine, and Christin, 2020; Matassi & Boczkowski, 2021, 2023; Rahman, Karunakaran and Cameron, 2024.
[2] Sampson, T. D. (2012). Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks. University of Minnesota Press. Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale University Press. Barabási, A. L. (2016). Network Science. Cambridge University Press.
[3] See the Laboria Cuboniks collective’s Xenofeminist Manifesto for an inspiring example. Cuboniks, L. (n.d.). Xenofeminism: a Politics for Alienation | Laboria Cuboniks.
[4] Llamas-Rodriguez, J. (2022). The Tunneling Metaphor in Networked Technologies. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 8(2).