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?
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