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# Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism  The Value of Selection, Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures

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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.

I 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.

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Recent critical literature on platforms and digital technology argues that platforms not only express an accumulation paradigm but exercise significant power over social life and transnational public spheres (Van Dijck, 2013; Van Dijck, Poell and De Wall, 2018; Sadowski, 2020). This power, theoretical and empirical studies argue, is generative, in the sense that it shapes people’s acting upon the world (e.g., Bucher, 2018; Gregory and Sadowski, 2021; Woodcock and Graham, 2020; Srnicek, 2017; Armano, Briziarelli and Risi, 2022). There are some overlapping strands of critical literature on platforms which concern us here. The first primarily focuses on platforms as enormous conglomerations of data, which, by processing and operationalizing vast amounts of the latter, herald a new model of capital accumulation (Mosco, 2015; Fuchs, 2021; Sadowski, 2019). Here, data are extracted from the activity of users (and in this sense, it is a form of labor [Miconi, 2022]), stored in massive data centers and valorized. To account for the interplay between data and value, I will be employing Jodi Dean’s concept of “communicative capitalism” (2013), as it allows me to theorize online communication as a potential reservoir of economic value. In turn, the operationalization of big data gives rise to what Shoshana Zubof has notably popularized as the age of “surveillance capitalism” (Zubof, 2019; Linder, 2019). According to this thesis, platforms and other digital corporations adopt data extraction and prediction strategies, track user behavior for optimizing their business practices and upgrading their products, and sell this profiling to third parties. Based on this information, platforms attempt to refashion user behavior so that it becomes more productive for them, in other words they engineer “behavioral modification”, which orients all online activity and operations toward value production (Zubof, 2019: 68). This insight is useful as it links

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12 Homo Curatorius

platforms with an active intention to outline subjectivities, and can thus support the idea that platforms, as profit-oriented enterprises, “curate connectivity” and by doing so enable specific cultural formations (van Dijck, 2013: 6). Karen Gregory and Jathan Sadowski, for instance, discuss how the food delivery platform Deliveroo makes its couriers assume “perverse virtues” in the domain of work, including “flexibility, vitality, and legibility” through the constant algorithmic surveillance, data processing, and profitability targets—what they call “platform biopower” (2021: 3). In this sense, platform surveillance shapes the worker and the wider user activity in an industrial fashion according to the demands of algorithmic governance while resistance to this surveillance can be fragmented and dificult to organize (Walker, Fleming and Berti, 2021; Vallas, 2019). Likewise, Tanja Bucher uses the notion of “programed sociality” to argue how, via the categorization and ordering of data inputs, platforms “link database architecture and algorithmic operations to subjectification” (2018: 5). Platforms then organize social relations for their benefit, for instance, increased user engagement by nudging, reminding, and creating obligations to everyday users (e.g., notifications about a friend’s post or Facebook birthday reminders) that would not otherwise exist in the same form in ofline friendships (Bucher, 2018). As ofline and online activity are not strictly separated spheres but intertwined continuities, these insights are important as they allow us to turn attention to the cultural, subjective, and even larger anthropological shifts that platform capitalism enacts upon the world. There is a third strand of literature which focuses on the link between content creation and the specificities of platformized cultural production, especially as it regards bloggers, micro-celebrities, and influencers (e.g., Tiggemann and Zaccardo, 2018; Pitcan, Marwick, and boyd, 2018; Marwick and boyd, 2011; Marwick, 2015; Dufy, 2022; Dumont, 2017; Poell, Nieborg and Dufy, 2022: 5). I employ this strand of literature (especially in Chapter 6) to explore the micro-entrepreneurial aspirational possibilities which platforms aford in the domains of production and consumption.

Drawing on these critical platform theory perspectives, I would like in this study to explicitly connect platforms and the production of systematic forms of cultural activity—in terms of style, aesthetics, posture, performance—and highlight how the structural imperative of profit in the regime of platform capitalism is not simply a political economic matter but coordinates adjacent practices, subjectivities, and lifestyles. The curatorial imperative is a central notion I want to underscore in this process. As my main case studies refer to phenomena that are global, diverse, contextual, and prone to adaptability, this book aims to be a step toward initiating a broader scholarly discussion around the cultures of platform capitalism.

In Chapters 4, 5, and 6, I speak about “cultures” that are coalescing in and around the curatorial imperative, namely the cultures of fashion, food, and coaching. The notion of platform cultures then denotes the concretization of forms of cultural interaction which are accentuated or evolve as an efect of the usage of platforms. The plural “cultures” instead of the singular “culture” acknowledges the irreducibility of cultural formations to a single logic, leaving space for heterogeneity, agency, and change. In this sense, while I argue that platform capitalism accelerates the subjective investments in curating and being curated, subjects have agency to negotiate this shaping or evade it in other spheres of life where the mandate of self-presentation is not as strong.

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There are two forms of cultures that I am interchangeably concerned with, the everyday and the industrial. The first comes from an understanding of culture in anthropological and cultural studies traditions, ranging from the Chicago school of sociology and the Birmingham cultural studies school to social and cultural anthropology, as composed by the meanings, values, rituals, and symbols embedded in vernacular forms of social interaction (Williams, 1981; Hall, 1997; Hebdige, 1979). These everyday forms through which users, communities, and individuals communicate and make meaning on and of platforms intersect with more organized forms of cultural production, that is, the industrial production of symbols and texts aiming at generating forms of capital (Hesmondhalgh, 2018; Banks, 2007). The industrial production of culture regards the intentionally commodified “production of ‘aesthetic’ or ‘symbolic’ goods and services” that is to say the “commodities whose core value is derived from their function as carriers of meaning in the form of images, symbols, signs, and sounds” (Banks, 2007: 2). On platforms, the industrial cultural production is visible in the performances of brands, micro-celebrities, restaurants, hotels, tour guides, and content creators, among others. In this book, I explore it in luxury fashion brands and designers in Chapter 4, the organizers of Airbnb Experiences and restaurant social media accounts in Chapter 5, and the life coaches in Chapter 6. Yet, in platform-based cultural production the distinction between the everyday and the industrial is complicated as everyday users can amass symbolic capital that can be later translated to forms of economic capital by monetizing audience or customer desire. In this sense, platform-based afordances drive everyday cultural production to assume practices of industrial cultural production, in which “the production of meaning is seen to be deliberate and selfconscious, designed to appeal to aesthetic preferences, or related to existing or emergent economies of taste, style and distinction” (Banks, 2007: 2). This is a key point here as platforms imbue everyday activity, which can often take unintentional forms, with entrepreneurial reasoning by turning the self into a constantly performing social, economic, and cultural actor. A complementary concept to think through this indefiniteness between industrial and nonindustrial platform production is the term “platform practices” that Dufy, Poell, and Nieborg ofer (2019: 2), which regards “the strategies, routines, experiences, and expressions of creativity, labor, and citizenship that shape cultural production through platforms” (Dufy, Poell and Nieborg, 2019: 2). Here, the emphasis is on the action, the “doing” that crisscrosses everyday and industrial platform cultures.12

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I also use theoretical perspectives for analyzing the case studies and curation as a larger phenomenon (see below on theory as “medium”). In this respect, I employ the art sociological perspective of “artification”, which is suggested by Shapiro and Heinich (2012), to describe an ongoing process of expanding art-related tropes to an increasing array of social fields. This expansion develops by partially extracting objects from previous contexts and subsequently re-classifying, individualizing, and intellectualizing them in contexts traditionally associated with art (Shapiro and Heinich, 2012). To give some examples of artification, museums artify archaeological or heritage objects, which once had a functional usage, by putting them on pedestals accompanied by conceptual-historical reasoning, or Instagram users can artify food by posting unique and individualized photos of dishes. The idea of artification does not entail assuming that “now everything is art” or “now everyone is an artist” but points to a value enhancing process in capitalism according to which the association with art-related tropes promises symbolic uplifting.

A key reference in this book is the work of the sociologist Eva Illouz on the commodification of emotions in capitalist public spheres (2013). Illouz argues that, rather than abolishing emotions, as is commonly believed, capitalism in fact does the opposite; it constructs public spheres which allow the self to be performed in overwhelmingly afective ways, with anger, happiness, sadness, and frustration being some of the emotions that are regularly shared across internet-mediated publics (2013). This, as we shall see in Chapter 6 in more detail, compels people to discover and perform their emotional selves in front of audiences as a vehicle for self-validation. However, while contemporary capitalism releases an “unprecedented intensification of emotional life, with actors self-consciously pursuing and shaping emotional experiences for their own sake”, at the same time it makes “rationality into a pervasive feature of human action” (2017: 5). “Emotions”, Illouz continues, “have become smoothly imbricated in rational modes of conduct promoted by everdeepening grip of economistic forms of thinking in various realms of life” (2017: 6). As emotions become public, emotional reactions become data used by corporations, while, as we shall see in the chapters that follow, various online entities perform specific emotional tinges to curate atmospheres around them (we will elaborate on the concept of “atmospheres” in Chapter 4), including the atmospheres of coolness, authenticity, and inspiration. Furthermore, Illouz’s idea highlights the market rationalization that is a constitutive element of contemporary public spheres, an idea that helps to look at how art-related tropes in the curatorial imperative are undergoing similar rationalized routes in order to achieve particular results instead of being free-floating (similarly to Illouz’s argument about emotions). The artified restaurant dishes shared on the social media accounts of everyday users and especially restaurants, for instance, as we shall see in Chapter 5, are not spontaneous reactions but calculated forms of self-presentation.

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Another phenomenon I highlight is that of the difusion of expertise (or in more optimistic scenarios “the democratization of expertise”, e.g., Fulbright, 2020), a phenomenon which is augmented by the internet economy where individuals are given a stage. Expertise, and the forms of authority it gives access to, can be claimed by anyone on any possible topic, from wines to perfumes and from pranks to magic tricks. The critical literature on bloggers and micro-celebrities discusses this expansive claiming of expertise as a platform afordance (see for instance, Presswood, 2019; Patel, 2020), as platforms turn everyone into a potential expert, therefore magnifying the curatorial imperative. In this sense, we can speak of a public sphere undergoing a process of curatorialization instead of artification, as a more appropriate term to address platform practices and cultures.

The work of Michel Foucault on social technologies as part of neoliberal governmentality aiming to create positive desiring investments to subjects is also helpful for the study at hand. Foucault uses the term dispositif, or “apparatus” in English, to describe an ensemble of institutional, administrative, regulatory, discursive, and epistemological structures through which social power operates. As a form of a distributed imperative, curating is part of a creative dispositif, as Angela McRobbie calls the neoliberal injunction to fabricating positive, free, and self-fulfilling subjects (McRobbie, 2018). I refer to the work of Foucault mostly in Chapter 6, but the tradition of Foucauldian cultural studies runs through the pages of the book in general (e.g., McRobbie, 2018; Gill and Organ, 2022; Wilson, 2017; Littler, 2017). Finally, I employ the idea that social perceptions of class are inscribed in cultural exchange (Skeggs, 2013) to account for the aspirational class identities and the middle-classifying drive surrounding the curatorial imperative. In this context, I will be often referring to concepts from the work of Pierre Bourdieu on symbolic and economic capital, distinction, and habitus. The curatorial imperative in its performative and aspirational dimensions relies on objective positionalities which are predisposed on class but also on gender, ethnicity, and ability. For instance, the performance of a “respectable” instead of “cool” self as part of upward mobile aspirations is conditioned by respective class afordances (Skeggs, 2013; Pitcan, Marwick, and boyd, 2018). In their research around upwardly mobile younger people from low socio-economic status in New York, Mikaela Pitcan, Alice Marwick, and danah boyd (2018) argue that these people have to edit an online “vanilla self” that abides to social norms and is less socially risky in order to achieve their aims. The idea here is that insofar as lower-class populations want to become respectable members of the community and compensate for their socially stigmatized class, they are in principle obliged to perform more normative online identities. Beverley Skeggs similarly shows how the inscription of notions of self-worth in aspirational femininity involves a repudiation of working-class lifestyles (Skeggs, 1997; 2013; McRobbie, 2018). The politics of self-curating, whether they pivot around respectability, coolness, authenticity, or inspiration, are in this sense always inscribed within particular notions of class and broader or narrower milieus of cultural exchange.

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1.3 Methods and Perspectives

The concept of curation, as stated above, is used to codify the behaviors, values, practices, and meanings around platform cultures as well as to draw attention and initiate a larger discussion around adjacent postures and rituals. Therefore, I set out to investigate a difused and necessarily open-ended phenomenon, one that can be adapted and modified by diverse agents in equally diverse contexts. Since difused curation is neither given in advance nor territorialized in a specific location, I had to reflexively construct the field of research, including the sites I would set out study. The methodological perspective I follow is multi-sited ethnography, a perspective which recognizes the decentralizing role of modern technologies in organizing social reality as well as the task of the researcher to trace the adaptation of these technologies across contexts of interaction (Marcus, 1995; Pink et al., 2015). Pertinently, George Marcus speaks about how cultural logics (such as curation),

are always multiply produced, and any ethnographic account of these logics finds that they are at least partly constituted within sites of the socalled system (i.e., modern interlocking institutions of media, markets, states, industries, universities-the worlds of elites, experts, and middle classes).

(1995: 97)

To understand these logics, in turn, the researcher develops strategies of “quite literally following connections, associations, and putative relationships” (1995: 97). I thus followed the logic of curation in its multiple manifestations by constructing the manifold and heterogeneous sites where it appeared as my research went along.

I also employ what Karen O’ Reilly calls an “iterative-inductive” approach, which implies beginning the research process with as few presumptions as possible, allowing theoretical considerations to emerge in the course of research and employing a spiral research design where theory and the material inform each other in a mutually constitutive loop (2021). In this context, the diferent stages of research are not independent from each other, namely “data collection, analysis, and writing are not discrete phases but inextricably linked” (2021: 5). Theory in turn is at the same time a “precursor, medium and outcome” (2021: 29), that is, it helps initiating the study process, mediating between data and analysis and eventually being the end product of the inquiry. In this regard, I did not determine the problem-space in advance but inductively iteratively constructed it during the research process. While O’ Reilly and Marcus position themselves within an ethnographic context, Celia Lury proposes her similar “compositional methodology” as larger cultural theory method, where the phenomenon that is being studied “becomes a problem as it is investigated” rather than being predetermined (2021: 2). For Lury, this research design is pertinent for investigating phenomena that take shape in and across platforms (such as, in our case, platform curation), as platforms bring about changes in our “epistemic infrastructure”, including the ways that knowledge is produced and distributed (2021: 113–115). The constant remixability and recursivity of knowledge claims which are accentuated by platforms, according to Lury, exposes sites of knowledge to uncertainty: platforms “mutate the topologies of knowledge of problem spaces”; they tend to modify the phenomena they convey and in turn transform the problem-space associated with these phenomena (2021: 13). Compositional methodology then takes into consideration this changeable condition vis-à-vis the main components of research design, what she calls the “givens” (a priori assumptions), the “goals” (research aims) and the “operators” (theory and method), regarding them as open to transformation (2021: 3). In my case, the given was that curation, as a concept and a logic, has sprawled in the last decade as a form of value-adding from the artworld to the online economies. The goal was to explore what this sprawling does—in the anthropological sense—in wider cultural landscapes. The operators of critical cultural and media theory and multi-sited digital ethnography led me to focus on platforms as principal sites where this sprawling takes place. Thus, the operators were in constant dialogue with the givens and goals. This relatively elastic relationship between the givens and goals and the operators helped to maintain an open-ended problem-space that could be re-examined as theory and the research material shaped each other.

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I initiated the research process by exploring sites where the very term curation and its ofshoots were mobilized as an explicitly business endeavor in online economies, such as Steve Rosenbaum’s Curation Nation (2011), Curate This: The Hands-On, How-To Guide to Content Curation (2014), and Michael Bhaskar’s Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Excess (2016). This material, which I look mostly in Chapter 2, ofered insights into the business construction of curation as a monetizable remedy against information overload. The insights helped me to draw links between art curating and the market usage of the term and thus to look at the phenomenon as a larger cultural economic logic that creates value via the figures of selection, narration, and expertise. Following this logic in its diverse manifestations, I constantly encountered the role of platforms, as massive techno-social apparatuses of self-presentation, which dramatically intensify the imperative to curate and be curated, as I discuss in Chapter 3. After identifying the connection between platforms and curation, I had to choose the focus of the case studies. I decided not to look at case studies highlighting the daily or industrial self-curation strategies of specific users or the audience responses to specific curated content as this would narrow the exploratory character of this research. Instead, I opted for a wider approach that grapples with the ways curating is performed in diverse cultural-economic fields in terms of production and consumption. While this strategy risks generalizing certain aspects of the phenomenon, it is also, as a result of its enlarged scope, suitable to account for the aim of the book, which is to explore the curatorial imperative and stir debate around the cultures of platform capitalism. There are several sites of cultural production where the curatorial imperative operates, online and ofline, such as, indicatively, music, design, fitness, eating, and architecture. I chose to focus on fashion, food, and coaching, which are fields gathering some of its most typical aspects, including the overlapping cultures of coolness, authenticity, and inspiration.

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I gathered and examined material from these settings, which I chose on the basis of first purposeful and then theoretical sampling, selecting therefore cases that “can best contribute to the developing theory” and can be explored “along with the emerging theoretical concepts” (Moser and Korstjens, 2018: 11). Thus, the selection of settings was “based on the emerging findings to ensure adequate representation of theoretical concepts” (Moser and Korstjens, 2018: 10), that is to say, most principally the curatorial imperative in platform capitalism. In this sense, the selection of cases, settings, and material constitute what Sean Cubitt calls “anecdotal evidence”, according to which “the importance of the uniqueness and of working from the particular to gain understanding of broader phenomena is stressed” (Skjulstad, 2020: 185; Cubitt, 2020). In Chapter 4, I followed the Instagram accounts and online performances of agents whose activity brings into the fashion system avant-garde provocation, underground tropes, and social media driven imagery. Particularly, I followed the online activity of the brands Vetements and Balenciaga, principally in Instagram, and the online presentations of Demna Gvasalia, the co-founder of the former and the creative director of the latter. In Chapter 5, I followed several Airbnb Experiences and food sharing accounts in social media, particularly on Instagram and Facebook, to delve into the imagery and practices of these cultures; I also participated in an Airbnb Experience of online cooking by an Italian grandmother and observed the Facebook interactions of a restaurant in Thessaloniki, Greece that exemplifies the food curatorial ethos. In Chapter 6, I followed the online activity of life coaches and coaching schools, including their various Facebook and Instagram accounts, podcasts, online certificates in the educational platform Udemy, and YouTube videos; I participated in two online courses and got two certificates for becoming life coach myself. I manually coded these materials according to the theoretical considerations described above and the constellation of themes I wished to underline.

Lastly, while the book discusses cases from a limited amount of countries, including Greece, the United States, Russia, Italy, the UK, and France, it does not claim a regional focus, assuming that internet technologies spread and territorialize discourses and practices across disparate localities. Curation is what Ong and Collier call a “global form”, that is, a worldwide circulating logic coding “heterogeneous contexts and objects” yet whose movements are always limited “by specific technical infrastructures, administrative apparatuses, or value regimes” (2008: 11). Curation in platform economy is thus a phenomenon which develops in tandem with the techno-socialities of capitalism yet whose movement and adaptability by certain locales is contingent upon the availability of internet technologies (e.g., the digital divide), the access to metropolitan and urban imaginaries and familiarity with middleclass codes, among others. While I assume that there is no single center coordinating how these practices and discourses shape subjectivities or are adapted by users, I also wish to highlight the structural imperative of value production (economic, symbolic, social) organizing this process. Instead of a non-hierarchical ontology of networks and actants co-shaping each other in the information space, however, which is most often used in internet decentralization approaches, the book claims the tradition of critical theory which pays attention to hierarchies, power relations, and the structural efects of socio-economic organization (Malm, 2020). Speaking about the cultures of coolness, authenticity, and inspiration that platformized fashion, food, and coaching amplify, I will thus be prioritizing the structural imperatives of commodification, value, and the profit-motive in regulating online circulation.

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1.4 Chapter Breakdown

Although I have touched on the chapters above, here I give a more methodical breakdown of the content of this book. Chapter 2 explores the figure of the curator from its early appearance in ancient Rome to its genealogies in art, museum, and biennial contexts and its subsequent widespread circulation in contemporary mediascapes. The purpose of this chapter is to outline the cultural and aesthetic registers via which curation enters platform cultural economies. I argue that the rise of curators to an expanded valueadding figure relates to the popularization of the term itself as well as their practice of presenting items as experts. The market employment of the curator is thus capitalizing on its rise in the discourse of the creative and art industries as an independent, nomadic, and refined cultural intermediary. Drawing on material culture approaches, I look at how expertise constructs social and economic value around objects by grouping them under historical, epistemological, and scientific narratives. Platform curating draws from and expands the process of valorizing and capitalizing on expert narratives which is specific to the histories of the Duchampian readymade, the institutionalization of conceptual art, and the rise of the curator as an authoritative intermediary in the art field.

Chapter 3 turns to curating in and through digital platforms. Platforms, and especially social media, curate landscapes of incessant communication which results in information overload as they strive to acquire data, generate network efects, and grow. In turn, they ofer co-coordinated possibilities for self-curation both to ordinary users and micro-entrepreneurs who want to monetize their online activity. I look at curatorial labor and curated consumption as practices that harvest aspirational lifestyles of flexibility and individuation respectively. Platform capitalism is thus not simply a regime for accumulation but a structure mediating the formation of larger social practices and identities.

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