{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title":"The Stack On Software and Sovereignty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780262029575","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","uuid":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title":"The Stack On Software and Sovereignty","normalized_title":"thestackonsoftwareandsovereignty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780262029575","isbns":["9780262029575"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":517,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/The%20Stack%20On%20Software%20and%20Sovereignty","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/search"},"page":{"printed_page":48,"pdf_page":66,"physical_index":66,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"94f617d0a830604f4eb06daea2638f9c4318c3cf0fefe536a4f8cd5ebf4ad901"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"4. Standardized components may also be reprogrammable within constraints by Users, allowing them to innovate new functions for machines that are composed, at least partially, of preexisting platform systems. The systematic reuse of platform systems allows for the development of complex products based on virtual components, reducing development risks, costs, and project duration. For that innovation, the ratio of what is newly introduced by the User versus what is reused from existing platform systems may be extreme in either direction, though neither ratio directly corresponds to the intrinsic novelty of any one innovation ’ s new functions.\n\n5. The design and governance of platforms often relies on formal models to organize, describe, simulate, predict, and instrumentalize the information under its management. Those models may represent a rigorously discrete view of the platform ’ s internal operations, its external environment, or, most likely, some combination of the internal and the external that measures platform performance according to metrics evaluating its outward-facing systems. <sup>10</sup>\n\n6. Platforms ’ mediation of User-input information may result in an increase in the value of that information for the User. Platform network effects absorb and train that information, making it more visible, more structured, and more extensible for the individual User or in relation to other Users who make further use of it, thereby increasing its social value. At the same time, it is likely the platform itself that derives the most significant net profit from these circulations in total. Each time a User interacts with a platform ’ s governing algorithms, it also trains those decision models, however incrementally, to better evaluate subsequent transactions. An economically sustainable platform is one for which the costs of providing systemic mediation are, in the aggregate, less than the total value of input User information for the platform. Platform economics provides then two surpluses: (1) User surplus, in which the information is made more valuable for the User once involved with the platform at little or no direct cost to that User, and (2) platform surplus, that is, the differential value of all User information for the platform is greater than the costs of providing the platform to Users. <sup>11</sup>\n\n7. Like centralizing systems, platforms consolidate heterogeneous actors and events into more orderly alliances, but they themselves are not necessarily situated in a true central position in relation to those alliances in the same way that, for example, a master planning committee or federal capitol building would be. Like some decentralized systems, platforms rationalize the self-directed maneuvers of Users without necessarily superimposing predetermined hierarchies onto their interactions. The centralizationversus-decentralization dichotomy may therefore be illusory in many cases (and not in others) in that the choke points where a platform incentivizes commitment and leverages its advantages over other options may be even more widely distributed than all of the Users that it organizes.\n\n48\n\nPlatform and Stack, Model and Machine","previous_page":47,"next_page":49}