By promising exclusiveness and experience, among other things, curation is an apparatus spearheading the increasing commodification of internet practices. For instance, as mentioned above, one of the main functions of platforms is to commodify previously non-commodified areas of life by incorporating more social activities into monetary relations. Commodification has particular social and class efects, as monetary exchange becomes a prerequisite for accessing specific services, goods, and relations. In the cultural industries sector, for example, the rise of platforms has coincided with a shift from the gift economy of peer-to-peer to the curated economy of monetary exchange, in tandem with the legal and techno-economic interventions which support this shift, such as the formulation of online copyright laws alongside relatively low subscription models. To use an example, consider the transition from peer-to-peer sharing, such as torrent sites (labeled as “piracy” because they circumvent copyright laws), to subscription-based streaming platforms like Netflix, Mubi, or Spotify. This transition from peer-to-peer to platformized cultural production is facilitated by the commodification and investment in curation services which serve as value adders. Mubi, a sectoral platform relying on infrastructure platforms (e.g., email services for log in, Instagram and Facebook visibility), hosts files in the cloud rather than the user’s hard drive and organizes films in an arthouse and festival atmosphere, where handpicked curation by micro-experts overlaps with a new production/distribution model (“What is Mubi”, Mubi itself asks, “A streaming service? A curator? A publisher? A distributor? A cinema lover? Yes”).7 This is a very diferent experience than peer-to-peer torrent sites, where chaos is constantly piling up, usually resulting in many files that the user must categorize on their own. Another example is the shift away from gift economy hospitality services like Couchsurfing and Hospitality Club and toward platforms like Airbnb. In the early days of Couchsurfing, hospitality was not mediated by monetary exchange, and the rewards for the host were mostly symbolic or intangible, such as cultural exchange, new friendships, positive reviews, and so on. The notion of hospitality is totally commodified on Airbnb, with hosts competing for economic capital and curating their advertised spaces accordingly. In this sense, the term platform capitalism indicates a form of enclosure of the commons and the practice of curation is key in this enclosure.
Sectoral (or content) platforms condition what Nieborg and Poell call the “contingent” character of cultural commodities, including music and news (2018: 4274). Contingency here has to do with the fact that cultural commodities are contingent on digital platforms, and especially on GAFAM, that is, they depend on them for their production, circulation, and monetization, and that they are contingent as malleable, modular, and feedback-driven objects open to “revision and recirculation” (2018: 4276). In this latter sense, contingent commodities inhabit a logic of continuous updating and modification by users caught in the stream of communications, feedback, and data (e.g., cropping, screenshotting, recording, replacing, cutting/pasting and so on). This is similar to the culture of what Manovich called in the early internet days “remixability and modularity” (2005), yet with the rise of platforms as the dominant socio-technical assemblages this culture is channeled to feed the commodity relation. In turn, platforms take it upon themselves to curate contingent commodities, like music and news, via specific services so as generate new forms of power and profit.
Curating and Platforms
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