Platforms demand an active conversion between economic and technical systems and their respective limitations. Their initial program may be born of economics, but their execution can push sideways through other models of value, confounding and compressing the political spectrum along with them. Their history bears this out. A working technical definition of platform, in general, may include references to a standards-based technical-economic system that simultaneously distributes interfaces through their remote coordination and centralizes their integrated control through that same coordination.<sup>4</sup> I will unpack this definition below. What I call platform logics refers first to the abstracted systems logic of platforms (their diagrammatics, economics, geography, and epistemology of transaction) and second to the tendency on the part of some systems and social processes to transform themselves according to the needs of the platforms that might serve and support them, both in advance of their participation with that platform and as a result of that participation. Platforms provide an armature and induce processes to conform to it. The Stack is a platform, or, more accurately, a combination of platforms. Its own governing logics are derived from platform logics, but its geography and geometry are also peculiar, and so while stacks are platforms, not all platforms are stacks, and in fact most platforms are not stacks.
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Platform and Stack, Model and Machine