I argue that anxieties, aspirations, emotional tonalities, and subjective investments are taking a mass character with the help of platforms. The idea that choice is meaningful and evocative of one’s social identity was previously limited to more exclusive class formations or niche therapeutic cultures that had time and resources to devote to matters pertaining to the self. I departed from the premise that the overarching organizational core of platform capitalism is the profit motive (Sadowski, 2020b), and that according to this motive platforms, which are vast apparatuses of enjoyment and control, attempt to curate connectivity (van Dijck, 2013) and program sociality (Bucher, 2018) according to value-producing ends. The evaluative, ideological, and afective registers of this motive undermine the potential role of platforms as public institutions, or at least generate a tension between the public sphere, which à la Habermas is meant to be a space of rational deliberation, and commodification, and which involves the extraction of value from this public deliberation, spinning it to value-producing ends. Fake news, for instance, on a platform like X (formerly known as Twitter), is not always purposeful misinformation but an in-built efect of the X architecture. The latter is designed to capture the time, attention, and engagement of users and, as such, it renews the user feed continuously. This drives news channels in X to want to report faster than their competitors in order to be seen, followed, and grow; in other words, the platform architecture itself undermines fact-checking, which, in the context of a hyper-competitive environment where even seconds matter, is a time-consuming process.
Thus, on the one hand, platforms are actively pouring out an informational, communicational, and relational overload, which results in a perplexing social landscape fragmented in terms of discourses, lifestyles, fads, news items, and values. On the other hand, they are also major sites for nurturing the curatorial imperative, enabling ordered narratives. Apart from algorithmically curating the interactions between users by building a coding architecture to increase user engagement, as we saw, they often take on the role of content curator (e.g., Apple News) or ofer curatorial possibilities to the users, either as potentially monetized (micro-celebrities, influencers, bloggers, and so on) or daily practice (e.g., organizing and displaying one’s feed in a social media platform irrespective of the number of followers). Via the latter afordances, platforms blur the distinction between the industrial and the every-day as they give the opportunity to users to monetize hobbies, or subcultural and niche practices. In this way, countercultural traits are constantly exposed to the possibility of commodification. What could once have counted as a counter-public sphere is exposed to instant capturing as information and data—the raw material for value production. A niche blogger or simply the latest Vice article captures and recycles countercultural tropes as algorithmic spectacles which aim to attract user engagement and time. These algorithmic spectacles, which are suggestive of the overall fragmentation of spectacle in neoliberal capitalism (Wark, 2014), are in turn valuable for the platform itself. In this neo-feudal arrangement, the platform resembles a landlord who lends its space to the users and subsequently collects rent in the form of data, premium subscriptions, and attention, among other things (Sadowski, 2020a; Dean, 2020).
Concluding Thoughts
159