Platform All stacks are platforms, but not all platforms are stacks. Ultimately platforms can be seen as not only a technical model but also an institutional form along with states and markets. Platforms are generative mechanisms, engines that set the terms of participation according to fixed protocols (e.g., technical, discursive, formal protocols) but gain size and strength by mediating unplanned and perhaps even unplannable interactions. A platform may be defined as a standards-based technical-economic system that may simultaneously distribute interfaces into that system through their remote coordination and centralizes their integrated control through that same coordination. Platform logic refers first to the abstracted systems logic of platforms and the tendency on the part of some systems and social processes to transform themselves according to the needs of the platforms that may serve and support them, both in advance of their participation with that platform and as a result of that participation. For a more complete list of general characteristics of platforms see section 10.
Platform Sovereignty Refers to the still immature combination of legally articulated political subjectivities and an infrastructurally determined sovereignty produced in relation to the platform infrastructures, regardless of whether these are privately or publicly owned. Platform sovereignty operates within territories that are composed of intersecting lines, some physical and some virtual, and for this, deciding exceptions is no less critical. The exceptions to be decided, however, are over what geographies those lines describe and what conditions they inscribe. These forms of sovereignty may be produced by an automated normalized exception, programmed at the level of the Interface, and may coincide with formal legal norms, may transgress them, or may operate outside their supervision altogether. Exit/entrance dynamics are a key site of contestation wher different degrees of platform sovereignty cohere or filter Users in their image.
Platform Surplus Value Platforms often provide core service at no direct transaction cost to the User. Platform economics is based on absorbing value from the provision of each transaction that is ultimately greater than the cost of providing it. Platform surplus value is this differential. For example, the ultimate value for Google that Users provide in training its algorithms to anticipate future User interactions has proved much greater than Google ’ s net costs to provide its search algorithms to Users for free.
Stacks Generally stacks are platforms, but not all platforms are stacks. Stacks, like most other platforms, are generic, plastic, and extensible. They may provide for modular recombinancy of system components, but only within the bounded set of its synthetic planes. Its generative capabilities grow through an initial subdivision of technologies into planar layers and then through an autocratic consolidation and rationalization of these through internal interfaces and protocols. Key to the success of this modular model is its flexibility in absorbing future technological innovations that can be introduced at any given layer (e.g., fiber optics instead of copper wire at the physical layer, a faster router, an application with better features and security) without disrupting the existing components (so long as the new technology adheres to the protocols established by the platform model that allow it to communicate with its vertically adjacent layers, above and below; in principle, any machine could be inserted in a layer of the network if it can adhere to the necessary grammar that would allow to communicate with its most proximate neighbors). For computation, there are many different kinds of stacks with very different functions (e.g., application stacks, data structure stacks, protocol stacks). It is likely that every contemporary academic discipline relies on some form stack model as part of its ontology, epistemology, or methodology.
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Glossary