Max Berwald - Core Post #2

In Platform Capitalism, Srnicek argues that, in the context of the growing affordability of recording, managing and processing enormous amounts of data, the platform is the key capitalist innovation of the 21st century (22–25). He describes their tendency towards monopolization (the product of network effects) as well as their tendency to offer systematized architectures for developers to produce software within. This too has the process of generating ever greater quantities of legible data. It’s very American and appropriate that false optimism of Web 2.0 rhetoric all got crushed by Google and Facebook deciding to just become new spaces for advertising. Like from the perspective of the 1980s, this extremely powerful new communications technology has been invented and people are sure it’s going to somehow generate peace and democracy, but it turns out the biggest internet companies will have reinvented themselves as data-optimized billboards by 2000. 

To Srnicek’s point on 30, it’s perfectly true that not all of our social interactions are captured and monetized by platforms, but the scale of the capture that does go on changes how we behave both on and off platforms. In this sense, platforms are socializing us. This is different from the way the factory floor, the subway train, or even the movie theater socialized people in the past, because those were all places for certain kinds of social interaction, whereas email, SMS, Twitter, Slack, and the full gamut of digital communications platforms subsume increasingly broad swathes of human “social” activity. You leave the factory floor, the subway train and the movie theater, but you always have your phone ready to hand. You have to use it to work, and also to get ahold of your mom.

I thought the Gillespie was much more incisive in terms of what is really new about platforms (relative to legacy structures for disseminating large volumes of media). Gillespie centers his analysis with the etymology and history of the word “platform,” and then quickly moves into a discussion of how the largest internet companies cannily use different definitions of the word to appeal to different stakeholders, from users to investors to politicians. For prospective users and content creators, YouTube is a platform in the sense of being radically open and level playing field where anyone can share video content with the world. For would be regulators, it is a platform in the sense of being only a platform: what media appear on any given user’s screen is not something YouTube can be held accountable for. Of course, as Gillespie notes, platforms have to be built, and what content appears on any given user’s screen is the result of decisions made by developers at YouTube (even if a mountain of algorithms mediates those decisions), as well as a result of their content policies (359–60). 

The Apperley and Parikka article on “Platform Studies’ Epistemic Threshold” gets into possibilities for shared concern, methodology and research between platform studies and media archaeology. While Gillespie and, to an extent, Srnicek are concerned with tracking the positions of various platform types with regard to culture and the state in the contemporary moment, Apperley and Parikka are, in media archaeological fashion, arguing for more concerted study of what’s “inside the black box of the platform.” (362) That is to say, moving beyond what is on the screen, even if what is on the screen is recognized as important and included alongside study of the platform itself. They also make a call for a greater attention to user practices and developer practices, creativity outside of the model of a single, agential genius, etc. Writing from 2018, Anable notes that platform studies (1) is already devoted to looking inside the box (probing the materiality of platforms) but that (2) this aligns platform studies with the longer STS trajectory. This doesn’t seem contradictory to me, since I think Parikka would agree that media archaeology is already broadly aligned with and drawing from STS, but Anable also points out that the very metaphor of hardware ensconced in a black box, a deep “layer” of hidden meaning, has been destabilized by feminist scholarship. Using the example of Facebook’s construction of gender, Anable points out that there is no layer of the platform that does not exist in extension of, tension with, negotiation of larger cultural forces.