Algorithmic automation is also at work in content promotion on the site— for instance, which projects are featured will vary depending on the viewer’s tastes and location. As apparatuses, these platforms make information and content visible while selecting material according to prior editorial decisions. By promoting certain projects on their homepage or personalizing what they show users depending on their actions on the site, they contribute to the hierarchization of information and reinforce competition between projects.
Like any apparatus, platforms legally establish and normalize administrative procedures (General Terms and Conditions of Use) and the relations between players who will subsequently interact according to a logic of ‘coinnovation’. The sociologist Emile Gayoso (2015) remarks that: co-innovation platforms work on both sides at once (innovation, management and marketing) and in this sense give us a privileged vantage point on the re-embedding of business within society which, as managerial injunction but also as structural necessity, has taken shape in the Western world following the crisis of the 70s, with the growth of the ‘networked business’ and of ‘management by project’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999), and finds in the Internet a powerful catalyst.
Platforms for Artists and Creation?
‘Free your creativity’, declares the participative platform KissKissBankBank. Kickstarter’s homepage is emblazoned with the words ‘Discover creative projects’. Patreon ofers to help you ‘regain your creative freedom’, while the British platform PledgeMusic has described itself as ‘a unique marketplace where fans and artists connect’. Given such slogans, it is no wonder the media, politicians, as well as many other social actors, appear to be infatuated with crowdfunding. These words, and the platforms which produce them, are symptomatic of current discourse on the digital economy, inviting ‘creatives’ to participate, to mobilize communities and to revitalize project funding and, more globally, culture itself.
Far from an Alternative: Intermediation Apparatuses
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