- The generic universality of platforms makes them formally open to all Users, human and nonhuman alike. If the User ’ s actions are interoperable with the protocols of the platform, then in principle, it can communicate with its systems and its economies. For this, platforms generate User identities whether they are desired or not. Platforms can provide identities to Users who would otherwise not have access to systems, economies, territories, and infrastructures, such as a person who is not recognized as a political “ citizen ” by a location, but who is nevertheless included in communication by platforms that are agnostic to the legal status of its Users. At the same time, platforms can also name, enumerate, track, and capitalize the identity of Users who would rather remain anonymous. For the former, the required provision of User identity may be seen as an advantage of platforms and for the latter as a disadvantage.
- Even as platforms guarantee identities to the Users of its systems, for better or worse, they do not provide these evenly or equally. A platform governs one User differently than it does another. An Interface that may open a space for one User also closes it off to another. An interface that may be open for one User at one moment may be closed at another. This differential is a core technique of how platform sovereignties normalize the exceptional reversibility of the partition. What may be an interiorizing partition ( “ enclave ” ) for one User at one moment may be an exteriorizing partition ( “ camp ” ) for another at another moment.
- An ideal platform architecture is one that produces a strategic minimum of new content into its own communication economy. An ideal platform is like an empty diagram through which Users mediate new and archived information. A search engine, for example, does not produce new Internet content for its Users, but rather structures the value of content that other Users produce. (If medicine were reconceived as a platform, it would obviously provide new critical information to Users, that is, patients and doctors, as well as organize medical knowledge to date, but it would, in principle, focus the point at which new diagnostic or therapeutic expertise is most crucially required and support it with, for example, highly structured patient data and precedents from the literature). <sup>12</sup> 11. Any structuring component of an ideal platform architecture is replaceable by a new component, and so the platform could, piece by replaced piece, evolve into something entirely different while retaining its essential shape. As in Theseus ’ s paradox, every plank of wood in a mariner ’ s ship is replaced over time by new wood, and yet the new ship occupies the same virtual place as the old ship and so it still is “ Theseus ’ s ship. ” The same operation holds for platform architecture. Any given component (e.g., layer, protocol, interface) could be replaced, inclusive eventually of all components of the platform in its totality.
- Platforms may respond to User inputs immediately and may draw on archived rules to recursively govern those interactions in real time, or it may act back on those interactions only once some qualitative or cumulative threshold requirement has been met, perhaps by many Users at once. Platforms govern both instantaneously and cumulatively.
Platform and Stack, Model and Machine
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