- How Platforms Work
Platforms centralize and decentralize at once, drawing many actors into a common infrastructure. They distribute some forms of autonomy to the edges of its networks while also standardizing conditions of communications between them. Many of the defining cultural, political, and economic machines of our time operate as platforms (from Google to transnational political theologies). Platforms are formally neutral but remain, each and every one, uniquely “ ideological ” in how they realize particular strategies for organizing their publics. They are identified with neoliberalism (not without reason), but their origins lie as much within the utopian megastructures of 1960s experimental architecture, counterculture cybernetics, Soviet planning schemes, and many other systems of sociotechnical governance, both realized and imagined. Platforms are infrastructural but rely heavily on aesthetic expression and calibration. A platform ’ s systems are composed of interfaces, protocols, visualizable data, and strategic renderings of geography, time, landscapes, and object fields. For stack platforms, they also include a predominant architecture of interoperable layers. Even as the majority of the information they mediate may be machine-to-machine communication (as, for example, today ’ s Internet), the specific evolution of any one platform, in the ecological niche between the human and inhuman, depends on how it frames the world for those who use it. It draws some things in and draws other things out, but foremost a platform is a drawing and framing machine. Our interest, however, is not to critique platforms as aesthetic works but to identify the work that aesthetics does in their development, and through this to clarify how some existing (and potential) platforms are worthy of our critiques.
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Platform and Stack, Model and Machine