Platforms locate the signal processing of pricing intelligence in both central mechanisms and in the indeterminate activities of Users, whose behavior may be modeled in advance but is not legally fixed to the dictates of that model (we hope). Furthermore, the functional difference between goods provided without profit by public utilities versus goods provided at or near zero-marginal cost by quasi-private platforms suggests a paradoxical alignment between the absolutization of monetary signification and its practical obsolescence (more on this below). A centralized system may be based on input-output models that are agnostic as to exchange value of goods and are therefore able to include the entire life cycle of resources in their models of economic activity, in principle if not in practice, but historically have been crippled by the slow feedback of demand signals back into those models. For expenditures with a long duration and widely shared return on investment, such as building a bridge, this slow relay is not such a problem, and most likely an advantage. Market governance works by building aggregate systems out of the emergent intelligence of zillions of individual transitions, including the distributed planning and forecasting of commodities and futures, and in doing so, they can have difficulty modeling totalities with long durations, especially ones composed of resources with tremendous value but no explicit price, such as a rainforest (or perhaps a bridge), and which therefore can be excluded as “ externalities. ” <sup>51</sup> (Again to preempt criticism from economists and ideologues alike, I grant that my treatment of these is artificially reductionist. They are meant to diagram a dynamic of convergence between what are conventionally understood as polar opposing tendencies into platforms , shown as technical-institutional systems that combine aspects of both and perhaps the ascendant infrastructural typology for contemporary planetaryscale computation.) Of particular interest is when very large-scale market actors also take on the governing role of central planning of the vast numbers of transactions that they engage in and enable. Problems of asymmetries of information between market actors engaged in a transactions are well known and in many respects presumed as part of a regularized cycle of buyers and sellers turning into winners and losers. However, when the sheer scale of one actor also allows it extraordinary omniscience and influence over the very possibility of a transaction, perhaps even by controlling the determining signals of prices already in advance of any impact they may have on any “ open ” transaction, then a form of governance is discerned. For example, the platform scale of Walmart and Amazon allows them line-of-sight into the supply chains that is so comprehensive, from the raw materials on which their suppliers depend through to the tastes of individual Users, that they can set wholesale prices (and wages) at skinthin margins because they know more about their suppliers ’ bottom-line costs than their suppliers do. This is one aspect of how platforms can manage a kind of synthetic catallaxy.
The Stack to Come
329