{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","title":"Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism  The Value of Selection, Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781032023007","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","id":"d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","uuid":"d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","title":"Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism  The Value of Selection, Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures","normalized_title":"curationintheageofplatformcapitalismthevalueofselectionnarrationandexpertiseinnewmediacultures","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781032023007","isbns":["9781032023007","9781032023014","9781003182801"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":177,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Curation%20in%20the%20Age%20of%20Platform%20Capitalism%20%20The%20Value%20of%20Selection%2C%20Narration%2C%20and%20Expertise%20in%20New%20Media%20Cultures","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406/search"},"page":{"printed_page":10,"pdf_page":20,"physical_index":20,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"6984f39cc21b2fca2f8209403d7ba651c98bdd0fa2901c58677d1bc4b0121564"},"chapter":"CURATION IN THE AGE OF PLATFORM CAPITALISM","content":"Furthermore, the book rests on the assumption that technological formations are not neutral or free floating but are conditioned by the political and economic forces that invent and regulate them (Marcuse, 1941; Sadowski, 2020). Commercial platforms have one and only one motive, that is, the maximization of economic profit. When it comes to user activity, they strive to achieve this by making the user engage in productive work for them (e.g., spending time, attention, and data traces in social media) or consume the services they ofer (e.g., buying a YouTube Premium subscription or an ad-free subscription on X ), among other strategies. A result of this striving is that new areas of social life are gradually subsumed into the commodity relation.10 Platforms break down user communication into measurable units, such as comments, reactions, messages, posts, and time spent in watching, listening, or scrolling, which are then subjected to metrics, probability curves, prediction models, analytics, diagnostics, and other tools. Communication then becomes data for feeding algorithms ready for being deployed for valueproducing ends.11 Platforms reify user communications through the use of such tools, they turn them into a “thing” whose meticulous processing and integration into the productive activity promises economic returns. Thus, a like on Facebook, apart from a communicative-afective approval of a post, an opinion, an idea, or a picture, enables data for more adequately profiling the particular user; the more likes, reactions, and comments performed in the platform by this user the more accurately Facebook can understand their background, interests, and opinions, among others, and act upon them accordingly.\n\nI will also be assuming that one of the efects of platformization is the development of a “centralized, proprietary mode of cultural production” (Nieborg and Poell, 2018: 4279), which intensifies capitalism as a rationality of governance. This is of course not to deny the agency of users to organize their own spaces or the strategies for resistance these formations give rise to (e.g., Velkova and Kaun, 2021). Some of these spaces and strategies are transient, dwelling on the deterritorializing logic of the swarm, while others help building more stable organizational forms that correspond to ofline networks. These are all significant, yet the priority here is to contribute to a discussion on the links between platforms, as social-technical apparatuses, intermediaries, and capitalist businesses that dominate the internet, and the cultural forms they enable (Langley and Leyshon, 2017). The employment of the term “platform capitalism”, instead of more positivist terms, such as the “sharing economy” or “virtual community”, highlights the commodification of digital circulations (rather than ofer a totalizing account of the contemporary economic moment), that is to say a “contrary trend” in respect to the more techno-utopian moments of the 1990s (Nieborg and Poell, 2018: 4279). Using this term, I also wish to accentuate Marx’s own adage that capitalism is a dynamic system caught in a process of continuous transformation of its productive forces (Read, 2022), which also results in transformations in ideological interpellations, as well as to question the more romantic ideas of a networked economy that could lead to non-industrial forms of production or even post-capitalism (for this argument see also, Mosco, 2015; Fuchs, 2021). This cyber-pessimist perspective does not subscribe to fatalism but intends to ofer a critical questioning of the present—a present in which tremendous changes in human-technological worlds occur at a dazzling pace and bring forward an “unprecedented” anthropological mutation and a “terra incognita”, as Shoshana Zubof puts it (2019: 18–23). In this sense, the critical mapping of the terra incognita of platformization is indispensable for gauging the production of subjectivities in contemporary capitalism and thus for understanding the limits and potentials of radical collective knowledge and organizing.\n\n10\n\nHomo Curatorius","previous_page":9,"next_page":11}