Are We All Fungible?

In considering this week’s readings on platforms, I was the most struck by Nick Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism. Srnicek situates the platform as a particular kind of business model that develops in the consolidation of various tech industry survivors after the dot come bust, but that really takes form in the after math of the global financial crisis of 2008. I appreciate the ways in which he consistently reads both the platform as a typology for various business ventures centered on the ownership of data and infrastructure, along side the shifting political economy of precarity as it seeks to absorb both surplus labor and surplus capital. For Srnicek the platform becomes "an efficient way to monopolise, extract, analyse, and use the increasingly large amounts of data that were being recorded.” (Srnicek 25). One of their key features is that they work as intermediaries for brining together various types of stakeholders, while simultaneously diminishing their need to maintain certain overhead startup costs. In this respect I think Srnicek does a good job of showing the ways that platforms working in both material and immaterial ways create new markets and services through their ability to extract and monetize data from the sources that they intercede between. He covers this nicely stating, " Platforms, in sum, are a new type of firm; they are characterised by providing the infrastructure to intermediate between different user groups, by displaying monopoly tendencies driven by network effects, by employing cross-subsidisation to draw in different user groups, and by having a designed core architecture that governs the interaction possibilities. Platform ownership, in turn, is essentially ownership of software (the 2 billion lines of code for Google, or the 20 million lines of code for Facebook) 18 and hardware (servers, data centres, smartphones, etc.), built upon open-source material (e.g. Hadoop’s data management system is used by Facebook).” (Srnicek 27). While Srnicek details various types of platforms (advertising, cloud, industrial, product) he seems to spend the most time discussing lean platforms. Contrasting with the previous models he discusses, lean platforms own the platform of software and data analytics but outsource the other material and labor costs to those that they precariously employ. Srnicek sums this up well stating, "Why are they ‘lean’ platforms? The answer lies in an oft-quoted observation: ‘Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles […] and Airbnb, the largest accommodation provider, owns no property.” (Srnicek 39). Srnicek shows the ways that this model builds from previous capitalist endeavors in outsourcing labor and migrant seasonal employment. However, the scale of lean employment is notable, as “alternative arrangement jobs” has become the net increase of U.S. since 2005. These numbers have grown steadily since 2008. Taking these figures out of the narrative that equates growth with economic health Srnicek points to this shift as endemic of a much larger troubled global economy. Given the control over interest rates by global central banks, surplus capital is seeking investments with higher rates of return. Srnicek argues that the tech industry and lean startups in particular are propped up by venture capital investments over actual revenue returns. He argues that "Yet the profitability of these lean platforms remains largely unproven. Just like the earlier dot-com boom, growth in the lean platform sector is premised on expectations of future profits rather than on actual profits. The hope is that the low margin business of taxis will eventually pay off once Uber has gained a monopoly position. Until these firms reach monopoly status (and possibly even then), their profitability appears to be generated solely by the removal of costs and the lowering of wages and not by anything substantial.” (Srnicek 44-45). This can be seen most recently in the ways that We Work has become significantly devalued. Because these businesses themselves become holdings for surplus capital they are speculatively valued by their potential to grow and hopefully monopolize. Yet, because actual revenue retention is an afterthought their success is extremely risky, especially now that there is such saturation for on-demand services. Though if these companies are just speculative investments for a few highly concentrated capital holders I wonder to what degree their success is premised on their ability to continue operating? If the logic (and I use that terms loosely) that gave rise to turning one of the most stable investments, federally backed mortgage securities, into a game of speculative returns is now doing that same just with another asset, what is the time frame for the next coming crisis? As we know that the limits to growth within capitalism create a paradox that ensures crisis, then we know that crisis is closely related to surplus that doesn’t move. As the material attachments for platforms simultaneously diminish from traditional business models and concentrate in fewer hands, our data becomes a form of capital in of itself, in that it can be valued and sold, but also used as a material basis for the means of production. This is where I was hoping for more thinking from Srnicek regarding data and free labor. Srnicek seems to be arguing under traditional Marxist analysis that the social generating of data that is then captured by platforms and built into their business models is not free labor. Instead he argues that work needs to be done to the data to make it valuable to then be sold as commodity. While this is true, I think this points more to the limitations of Marxist analysis as it regards labor. This is in no way a new argument as there are countless critiques of Marx’s limited view of labor. In this argument users of platforms are natural resources equated to raw goods which then need to be finished and turned for a profit. This shows some of the limitations of Marxist labor in that it cannot account for how to value this form of exchange other than in Lockean notions of work. What Srnicek describes is much more closely related to the ways that Saidiya Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson talk about fungibility as the primary way that black people are subsumed under capitalism rather than labor. Fungibility in this sense means the removal of the subjectivity of individual black people and rather the making of blackness into a raw material to be constantly mined of value, both in the free labor that is extracted as well as the psychoanalytic value by which white people become human. Thinking about fungibility over labor as the ways that we are consumed as data bodies then begs us to ask what forms of abolition are needed as we orient ourselves to platforms?

Dark Dark Dark

Simone Browne is doing a lot of work in the opening to her text “Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness”. Browne is clear that she is offering us two key terms through which to think through surveillance studies with a committed rigor to blackness. She offers racialized surveillance and dark sousveillance. For Brown racialized surveillance is "a technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and exercise a “power to define what is in or out of place.” (Browne 16). This means that surveillance becomes not only a disciplining act as Foucault would argue but is also an ontologically defining practice by which blackness, or rather the category of blackness, as da Silva would say, is made. Racializing surveillance for Browne is about the reifying of race itself and the use of race as a normative practice of maintaining boundaries, borders, and bodies. The aspect of this that is really interesting to me are the ways that Browne is working with time through this concept. Because Browne situates her investments in surveillance through the act and aftermath of chattel slavery, she is looking at an entirely different set of surveillant and sousveillant practices and tactics found in the everyday lives of black people. Most importantly this focus allows for what she terms dark sousveillance to be born from the intimate engagement that black people had with surveillance practices on and off the plantation. Dark sousviellance can be understood as "the tactics employed to render one’s self out of sight, and strategies used in the flight to freedom from slavery as necessarily ones of undersight.” (Browne 21). This allows Browne to find the ways that black epistemologies make sense of various forms of surveillance and then “co-opt, repurpose, and challenge” the authority from which the surveilling eye sees. By returning to the ways that black people circumvent the surveillant practices of the plantation, we are able to consider surveillance as something partial and vulnerable rather than complete and totalizing as Foucault’s approach to the panopticon would suggest. By returning to slave narratives that tell of bondage and escape Browne begins to locate "how black performative practices and creative acts (fiddling, songs, and dancing) also functioned as sousveillance acts and were employed by people as a way to escape and resist enslavement, and in so being were freedom acts. As a way of knowing, dark sousveillance speaks not only to observing those in authority (the slave patroller or the plantation overseer, for instance) but also to the use of a keen and experiential insight of plantation surveillance in order to resist it. Forging slave passes and freedom papers or passing as free are examples of this.” (Browne 22). I’m really struck by this passage as it beings to outline a dark sousveillance beyond the act of becoming unseen but as a form of knowledge and meaning making in itself, forged through black performance and cultural encoding. I found this really provocative and pertinent to some of my own work thinking through black computational thought and cultural encoding as computational practice.

Platforms, Web Series, and Queer OS

The platform readings and their citing of Kara Keeling's Queer OS reminded me of my presentation on web series platforms by Black queer content creators and their use of VHX (either in addition or as opposed to YouTube) to create online communities to bridge the gap between spectators and content crerators. It makes me wonder if this is used as a means to escape both advertisements and algorithms in addition to creating these communities . . . obviously there's a financial reason as well...

WT:Social, might be this an alternative?

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales launched a rival to Facebook and Twitter that he hopes will combat clickbait and misleading headlines.  WT:Social, allows users to share links to articles and discuss them in a Facebook-style news feed in a wide range of topics.

Here a screen shot form my landing page:

Curious to hear more from you.
Without claiming that I could spend a reasonable time on this platform, my first impression is that it gives the feeling for an authentic platform without adds and commercialism. The design of the interface is not very appealing but there are different modes to cross- search posts and by doing so bypassing the bubble of the own sub-wiki. For now, it seems participants are interested to contribute to a "fake news free" platform but I am wondering how long it takes for trolls and bots to enter this space. Also, it would be interesting to see the differences of a google search and wt.social on a certain topic.

See here for alt-right
on WT:social

and google

Glitch Art

I was interested to explore the connection between trash, waste and glitch. Here are some interesting quotes from the book  High-Tech Trash: Glitch, Noise, and Aesthetic Failure by Carolyn L. Kane

How can be waste, as something unwanted and expelled from the system, inserted back into the system as the error message, a minor gesture destabilizing power. In this sense, artistic processes attempting to confuse hegemonic systems can be generally seen as glitches, or their action potential as glitching. (Most prominent example are all different ideas that attempt to obscure human faces as identifiable data by surveillance technologies).

Two artistic example:

Clement Valla
Postcards from Google Earth
http://www.postcards-from-google-earth.com/

Takeshi Murata, Monster Movie, 2005https://vimeo.com/147761897

Core Post - Platforms

Sorry to miss what I’m sure is a *lively* discussion on platforms today!

Since I’m not there I imagined the exercise we might do—What IS a platform?—and began writing down all the words that came up as I read that described this thing: infrastructure / intermediary / interstitial / a politics / an empty space / a control structure / access / extractive apparatus / porous / recorder / hub / cloud. According to Nick Srnieck, a platform is interjection “as a service”: “a platform positions itself (1) between users, and (2) as the ground upon which their activities occur, which thus gives it privileged access to record them” (25). 

He goes against prior weeks’ readings about cognitive capitalism, and I think Srnicek is quick to gloss over the ways in which social activities are labor (think the “domestic” labor of maintaining the social connections of a household, sending birthday and holiday cards, maintaining the calendar) and lacks the scope of how these generate surplus value. He seems to do this in order to set up an alternative position—“[Platforms] are an extractive apparatus for data” (27), he says. This is useful, and not new, and connects to our material discussion of Anatomy of AI discussion too, but I don’t think it needs to be set at odds with an expanded definition of labor. Nor do extractive platforms need to be their own “new and only” “thing.”

Anable’s summary connecting many of the critiques across feminist media scholarship on platform “studies” hits the “thing” on the head here. Whether OOO or platform studies, many of these approaches of research are about isolating the thing in order to stake a methodological claim and a case for oneself rather than seeing connections across bodies, things, other researchers, influences, scales. While its champions claim it points to material substrates, platform studies’ “narrowly bounded object creates an artificial partition between the chips, wires, and code and the bodies and identities that interact with them” (Anable 139). The article connects its insistence on obscuring technology’s black boxes “that can only be exposed by a certain kind of penetrating scholarly gaze” and “the networked exposure of [women’s] bodies and sexuality”(138). As an alternative, Anable points to the ways “feminist media scholars use and creatively abuse the platform metaphor” (137). I particularly appreciate the suggestion of platforms porousness and penetrability, after Wendy Chun’s “leaky” networks (137), and platforms true material underpinnings, built on WOC labor, after Sarah Sharma’s and Lisa Nakamura’s work on electronics assembly (138). Anable points to scholars (like Tara McPherson!) who “call for the creation of new platforms [...] guided by attention to difference” (139).

If I’m willing to go for a bit with the platform studies metaphor, a couple of questions for imagining new modes: Is a platform then the conditions by which data may be extracted? Is the body the original platform, a queer, promiscuous, porous, feminist platform? 

The Xenofeminist Manifesto take a political approach to platforms:

https://www.laboriacuboniks.net/