[Ray Kyooyung Ra, Core #2/5, Blog #4/15] Platforms and abstractions

For another course I am taking this semester, the class discussed a book titled The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value by Seb Franklin that I highly recommend (the first chapter might be a bit much, but once you get through the introductions, the rest is a breeze). Franklin’s project elucidated the level of abstraction in which digitality functions at, much like racial capitalism that found itself on exploitations of gendered and racialized surplus labor, where the “digitally disposed” are pushed to the margins by de-valuation but at the same time, become vital part of the very system that produces their oppressed status. 

Franklin’s mission to make legible what is abstracted, what is obscured in digitality with its promise of the digitally-liberal subject resonated with the readings this week, particularly for me in bringing together works by Anable, Gilllespie, van Dijck, and Srnicek. As human labor is coagulated to capitalist value in objective product form to be exchanged, and this process of production and exchange is further fetishized as social relationships, (Marx) the abstraction of materiality into fluid data form and mere “surface effects” (Anable) obscures the users from seeing platforms beyond its self-serving representation and their supposed neutral role in facilitating communication. 

Something else that intrigued me with this week’s discussion of ‘platforms’ was that the object of analysis itself had such far-reaching scope of definition. The ‘platform’ that this week’s writers were discussing wasn’t just social media, it wasn’t just located at the level of codes, but rather presented as a complex entanglement of software, hardware, capital, culture, legal structures, and more. Different writers found different points of entry to interrogate the trope of the platform: Anable in the “the thing-ness” behind the bachelor apparatus as well as the reservoir of data beneath interface; Gillespie in etymology; van Djick in the complexly engineered sociality, user agency, and cultural contents of Web 2.0; and Srnicek in the material consequences of exploitative capitalism and its employment of data as resource. 

How far-reaching, then, is the workings of abstraction which obscures the nature of the digital to us users? When we “open the black box” (Apperly, Parikka) and are able to see platforms as not stable, closed entities but as its multiple manifestations, how do we deal with the worms inside? As Hyejoo’s presentation from last week illustrated, what is hidden beneath the surface that promises minimalistic modernity, universal communications, or liberal subject-hood? Platforms studies seem to direct us to look beyond screen-deep representation.