As a business model, the platform has a single mission: to make sure that users “participate regularly and often” and eventually “stick around on their own accord” (Choudary, 2015: 43). A platform should continuously increase its trafic and interactions so that users feel compelled to return to it, so that the platform becomes a habit, or to use more clinical terms, it becomes a dependency and addiction. Yet this would require eliciting new user behaviors that “had never existed in the past”, that is, behaviors consistent with adapting a new habit; as such, the platform, should not only “invest in behavior design” but, as if in a sort of disciplinary-pedagogical mission, to “constantly reward desirable actions and discourage undesirable ones” (Choudary, 2015: 43). Here, the business literature acknowledges that the most important mission of the platform is to intervene in the behavioral matrix of users so that it creates the conditions for exploiting their time and attention.
This does not mean that all platform interactions are determined by platform design, but, in the capitalist relations of production, the platforms are first and foremost profit-making enterprises which direct user activity accordingly. Speaking of a sharing economy and collaborative production— rather than behavioral design, addiction, precarity, the gig economy and new forms of exploitation and accumulation—obscures from a critical political economic perspective the role of platforms as a fundamentally new actor in the determination of digital interaction. In this regard, the notion of platform capitalism, which I employ here is a “techno-pessimist term”, which challenges the positivism characterizing the vocabulary of business (and often media) studies, that is, the idea of the internet as inherently collaborative (Langley and Leyshon 2017). An internet taken over by platforms is nothing of the sort; it is in the vital interest of the platforms to suppress noncommodified forms of collaboration from which they cannot profit.
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Homo Curatorius