The infrastructural and sectoral platforms gave rise to a new organizational and aesthetic category—what we can call platform curators—which are smaller-scale and sometimes amateur endeavors including microcelebrities, influencers, or other entities like The Dodo.3 Platform curators usually maintain their own independent website, which serves as their façade and facilitates monetary transactions, while their visibility and operationality are almost entirely dependent on infrastructural platforms and, to a lesser extent, sectoral platforms. They typically do not bring together large-scale multisided markets (as infrastructural and sectoral platforms do), but they do amass a fan base that aids in the exploitation of advertising and data revenue (and in turn creates benefits to the infrastructural and sectoral platforms). A platform curator can range from a fitness coach who shares training videos on YouTube and photos on Instagram, develops their app in Google Play and Apple Store to micro-celebrities as cross-platform mentors (Chapter 6), chefs and cooking schools (Chapter 5), or high-end creative personas (Chapter 4). I am particularly interested in two aspects of platforms as they pertain to curation: first, one of the most important functions of platforms is the creation of countless markets which mediate between supply and demand (rather than only selling services directly), allowing ordinary citizens to become curatorentrepreneurs without having to invest heavily (if at all) in their own infrastructure. This condition generates a horizontal potential for ordinary people to become entrepreneurs, by taking micro-curatorial roles which combine aesthetic and organizational decisions. Second, social media platforms are places for users to tailor versions of themselves to specific audiences. Even if users do not intend to generate specific forms of capital via this self-tailoring, these performances are in some way curated as they occur in front of an audience. These two aspects of platforms are critical in the development of a globalizing homo curatorius, both online and ofline.
In the first part of this chapter, I examine how the drive for data extraction in the platform economy generates a disordered information space, which constantly strives toward expansion. Data valorizes communication for the sake of communication, giving rise to what Jodi Dean (2010) refers to as communicative capitalism, in which, from a data extraction standpoint, the more communication, the better. While platforms have been key business models for data extraction, and thus a key source of information
Curating and Platforms
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