A Quick Note on Platforms
Every attempt to define digital architectures must account for an excess or ambiguity that clues us into something fundamental, or operative about their structure. The ambiguity of platforms is this: they are the architecture of the digital public sphere. The way platforms work obscures the need to question their rules and structure. As Martin Kenny puts it, the “proliferation of labels” associated to digital platforms, signifies that “we are unclear about their dynamics and directions” (3). Instead of discerning a satisfying and final what they are, our inquiry into platforms begins with how they are. Notions of how platforms operate lurk in the speculative definitions offered by our readings, which in summary, describe platforms as an n-sided, digital framework that establishes the parameters and conditions of possibility for specific actions, within a given network of exchange. As the readings suggest, just how and why a platform elicits specific actions within a network, has become a question of great social, economic, and political importance.
Each author explains that platforms play a central role in the governing and privatization of the digital public sphere. As Professor DeNardis outlines, digital platforms today are the “central points of control on the Internet,” mediating and incentivizing access to the digital commons (1). For DeNardis, the regulatory tendency is to focus on the “governance of,” and not on the “governance by social media.” As recent history suggests, governance “from the outside” is only marginally successful in addressing what is, or appears to be, the monopolistic position of control enjoyed by a few representatives in today’s platform economy. Taken together, the authors critique the platform economy, and advocate for a shift in Internet governance, based on their analysis of the “structural conditions at play in the rise of platforms” themselves (Srnicek, 70).
Whether on- or offline, the rules and protocols of the public sphere are upheld by its participants. Often these rules stem from government, the law, and from custom. Despite being formally the same, the governance of the digital public sphere suffers from a “lack of regulatory harmonization” on an international and domestic level (DeNardis, 7). The disharmony has led to a splintering of internet governance and the internet itself, and this clearly “demonstrates the complicated values tensions that arise in cyberspace.” Like rules and protocols, value-systems originate in, and are informed by culture. But what makes the digital public sphere distinct from its referent, are the questions it poses of our social and regulatory values: does the unprecedented, digital culture of the platform economy introduce a disruptive value-system? Or, does the platform economy expose the incompatibility of traditional governance and value-systems when dealing with the contingencies of digitalization?
Questions of value in the era of the platform economy revive the dialectical tension between the view that there are inherently political technologies, and the view that technologies reflect the systems in which they emerge.[1] From the two others, a third view emerges that considers the mutually constitutive relationship between society and technological artifacts. Our readings show, that this view applies to the relationship between the economy and the emerging dominance of platform technologies. Kenny supports this third view, when he says that the battles over economic rearrangement in the platform era, will "interweave to reshape our communities and social life...as well as the character of markets and market competition" (14). From this third perspective, it is clear that increasing the regulation of dominant platforms, based in historical anti-trust and broadcasting precedence, will partially address their monopolistic control, but will not guarantee effective competition in a market that relies on their infrastructure. As Prof. Kenny perspicuously notes, when "balancing the need to sustain initiative while cushioning the consequences of significant socioeconomic transformation," the challenge for policymakers and so the fight for equality of access in the platform economy, is the concern of "social policy, not just market policy" (13).
1. [1] Winner, Langdon. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus 109, no. 1 (1980): 121-136.
The further entrenching and acceleration of capitalist dynamics in the platform economy should not surprise us. Rather, it should underscore the urgent need for social policy to directly engage with the antagonisms central to capitalism. As we read, the reigning critique of the platform economy as part and parcel of a certain “Capitalist Realism,” fails to fully account for the contradiction that was present in the beginnings of the idealized, emancipatory potentials of the internet. The emergent character of the internet and its hyper-democratizing protocols, obscured from its creators the truth of its dialectical opposite: the potential for aggressive privatization of the global commons it helped create.
The above narrative is too much a mythology like that of Shelley, or Pandora's Box. One form of platform dynamics has taken-hold of the market and much of our way-of-life. But another dynamic might emerge, that could from the start assume the failures of its predecessor, and so better risk – or lose again – what has already been lost: our data, our notions of privacy, even our naive prizing of democracy as inherently good, or worth closing the regulatory gap for. Perhaps there is a potential for digital agency in this alternative platform dynamic, beyond one that is the affirmed by-product of various state-to-state-based protections and regulation, often relegated to the status of retroactive correcting.
Srnicek thinks the collectivization of platforms into public platforms is such an alternative (70). The question remains whether public platforms adequately scale competition and incentivize innovation. Yet another perspective thinks “data” is the first myth to dispel. If we change the way we see data and data ownership, we might recuperate a sense of control over it, while becoming more active agents of participation in the digital society.
Works Cited:
DeNardis, L., and A.M. Hackl. “Internet Governance by Social Media Platforms.” Telecommunications Policy 39, no. 9 (2015): 761–70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.telpol.2015.04.003.
Kenney, Martin, and John Zysman. “The rise of the platform economy.” Issues in science and technology 32, no. 3 (2016): 61-69. https://issues.org/rise-platform-economy-big-data-work/
Srnicek, Nick. “Platform capitalism.” Platform capitalism. John Wiley & Sons (2017), 36-92.
Winner, Langdon. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus 109, no. 1 (1980): 121-136. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652