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

The previous chapter examined the historical and conceptual extractions of curation and the curator; this chapter examines their actual deployment in platform economies. According to Jose Van Dijck et al., the internet experience for most users is increasingly determined by “platform ecosystems”, which refer to a nearly totalizing online arrangement of platforms regulating and exploiting online behavior (2018: 12). They make a distinction between the infrastructural platforms and the sectoral ones: The “Big Five”—Alphabet (Google), Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta (including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp)—are the infrastructural platforms at the heart of platform ecosystem (2018). These serve as online gatekeepers managing an array of fundamental online activities, including “search engines and browsers, data servers and cloud computing, email and instant messaging, social networking, advertising networks, app stores, pay systems, identification services, data analytics, video hosting, geospatial and navigation services, and a growing number of other services” (2008: 13). Services, apps, and other platforms can be built with and on these platforms. These other platforms include sectoral platforms, which depend on the services of infrastructural platforms (e.g., logins, payments systems, maps) and directed toward one (or more) niche market sectors, such as music, hospitality, education, health, and the moving image (e.g., Airbnb, Netflix, Spotify).2 Platforms, whether infrastructural or sectoral, are sites which mediate aspects of social and economic life and the organizational models incorporated within systems of contemporary production, distribution, exchange, and circulation, the most important of which are the imperatives of profit and growth; or, as Langley and Leyshon put it, platforms are a “socio-technical intermediary and business arrangement that is incorporated into the wider processes of capitalisation” (2017:11; see also Srnicek, 2017 and Nieborg, Poell and van Dijck, 2023). They accomplish this by developing sites which activate, curate, and capitalize on connectivity (Van Dijck, 2013: 12). They are not simply places where people interact online, but they harvest an environment of trust by processing payments, maintaining community guidelines, and enforcing restrictions (Woodcock and Graham, 2020: 23). Platforms appear to be reliable brokers where many stakeholders feel safe to invest their time, talents, or resources, while the mobile smartphone revolution ofering easy-to-use apps accelerates their expansion (Bloom, Jones, and Woodcock, 2021).

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The infrastructural and sectoral platforms gave rise to a new organizational and aesthetic category—what we can call platform curators—which are smaller-scale and sometimes amateur endeavors including microcelebrities, influencers, or other entities like The Dodo.3 Platform curators usually maintain their own independent website, which serves as their façade and facilitates monetary transactions, while their visibility and operationality are almost entirely dependent on infrastructural platforms and, to a lesser extent, sectoral platforms. They typically do not bring together large-scale multisided markets (as infrastructural and sectoral platforms do), but they do amass a fan base that aids in the exploitation of advertising and data revenue (and in turn creates benefits to the infrastructural and sectoral platforms). A platform curator can range from a fitness coach who shares training videos on YouTube and photos on Instagram, develops their app in Google Play and Apple Store to micro-celebrities as cross-platform mentors (Chapter 6), chefs and cooking schools (Chapter 5), or high-end creative personas (Chapter 4). I am particularly interested in two aspects of platforms as they pertain to curation: first, one of the most important functions of platforms is the creation of countless markets which mediate between supply and demand (rather than only selling services directly), allowing ordinary citizens to become curatorentrepreneurs without having to invest heavily (if at all) in their own infrastructure. This condition generates a horizontal potential for ordinary people to become entrepreneurs, by taking micro-curatorial roles which combine aesthetic and organizational decisions. Second, social media platforms are places for users to tailor versions of themselves to specific audiences. Even if users do not intend to generate specific forms of capital via this self-tailoring, these performances are in some way curated as they occur in front of an audience. These two aspects of platforms are critical in the development of a globalizing homo curatorius, both online and ofline.

In the first part of this chapter, I examine how the drive for data extraction in the platform economy generates a disordered information space, which constantly strives toward expansion. Data valorizes communication for the sake of communication, giving rise to what Jodi Dean (2010) refers to as communicative capitalism, in which, from a data extraction standpoint, the more communication, the better. While platforms have been key business models for data extraction, and thus a key source of information

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disorder, they are also claiming the exact opposite role, that is, the role of ordering information, as a means to generate capital. They thus become sites of curated communications (e.g., Netflix, Mubi, Apple News) or sites which provide users with the infrastructure to curate communications and generate value from this curation (e.g., Airbnb, Udemy, Preply, Tik-Tok, YouTube). Platform capitalism is more than a business model; it is a socio-technical apparatus which shapes, enables, and coordinates practices, ideologies, and lifestyles. In the final two sections, I examine platformized curation in relation to labor and consumption, emphasizing the aspirational angle of both, in the context of the gig and self-aestheticization economy. This helps to contextualize the productive and consumptive dynamics of platform cultures in the following part of the book.

3.2 Data, Reflexivity, and Communication Unbound

In her writings on the political economy of the internet, Jodi Dean introduces the concept of communicative capitalism to refer to a new stage in capitalist development in which exploitation is increasingly reliant on communication (2009, 2013, 2021). In the industrial phase, the subject of exploitation was primarily manual, industrial labor, while exploitation in communicative capitalism focuses on the communicative abilities of the users (2009). Communication can be defined as “the social production of meaning that constitutes a relation” (Mosco, 2009: 9), as value at this stage of capitalism is extracted in part from the ability of human beings to socialize and produce meaning. Of course, this does not mean that manual labor has vanished or is secondary; on the contrary, increased labor exploitation in mines, ports, and factories, particularly in the Global South, is required for digital infrastructures to exist in the first place, not to mention the exhausting and dehumanizing “micro-labor” of labeling and annotating data so that data becomes useful (Jones, 2022: 4).4 With generalized competition, the exploitation of communication is a new frontier and a source of profitability, which is required for global capital to continue growing. For Dean and others (Virno, 2004), this exploitation specifically targets human sociality, which is the ability of individuals to relate, communicate, and create meaning.

The growing socialization of labor has been a well-discussed trope in neo-Marxist theory at least since the Autonomist school’s immaterial labor thesis at the end of the 1990s, which argues that immaterial labor, that is, labor which produces information, afect, and knowledge, is a key driver of value production in contemporary capitalism (Hardt and Negri, 2004; Virno, 2004; Lazzarato,1996). Apart from (or in addition to) being “immaterial”, Marxist theory also describes post-Fordist labor as cognitive and afective, given the importance of IT, design, and services in contemporary capital valorization (Vercellone, 2014). I understand these concepts—immaterial, cognitive, information, afective, and communicative—as descriptive modalities emphasizing diferent aspects of contemporary capital valorization while essentially speaking about a post-industrial model of production that capitalizes on sign value. When referring to data extraction, the term communicative capitalism, which posits communication instead of, say, immateriality, afect, or cognition, as one of the key grounds for capital valorization, is more fitting. For data harvesting, for example, it is not so much the content of communication that is valorized (specific “information” or “knowledge”) but the activity of communication itself. $\mathrm { O r } ,$ for datafication, the content of actions such as liking, messaging, posting, commenting, reacting, or engaging is only relevant to the extent that these actions feed the algorithm or act as numerical indicators of clicks and other statistical figures that can be used to generate future value. This is similar to the argument advanced by McKenzie and Munster with their concept “platform seeing”, which refers to how algorithms operationalize the millions of images uploaded and circulated daily online as data for improving the algorithm’s vision (2019: 5; see also Parikka, 2023). For image datasets, for instance, the image is relevant to the extent that it aids the algorithm’s ability to “see” and recognize other similar images (2019). In this regard, even the simple act of sharing images on Facebook can be a source of value and thus a productive activity for capital (as manual labor is). Via metadata annotating and labeling, the uploaded images can be used to train the Facebook algorithm to see better or be sold as data to other platforms and advertisers as part of image ensembles.

At a time when capital searches for new forms of profitability with the decline of the manufacturing sector, with the exploitation of data the platform business model raises productivity levels (Srnicek, 2017). Apart from being used in improving advertising, for Nick Srnicek, data can

educate and give competitive advantage to algorithms; […] enable the coordination and outsourcing of workers; […] allow for the optimization of flexibility of productive process; […] make possible the transformation of low-margin goods into high-margin services; and data analysis is itself generative of data, in a vicious cycle.

(2017: 56)

Data then becomes a raw material that has to be manufactured and the activity of users is the natural source of this material (Sadowski, 2019; Powell, 2019). If the source of data is activity, that is, what a person does—which can range from chatting to browsing and from friending or unfriending to posting— then we can think of data, as Alison Powell puts it, as “traces” instead of simply numbers; traces encompassing “relationships, locations, attention, or engagements” that make up one’s life activity (2019: 121). In this regard, datafication is dependent on how efectively users are persuaded to give away their traces: where they went, who they communicate with, and what pages they search. The platform categorizes, analyzes, interprets, and uses these traces to produce better data. In this sense, the platform interface shapes, or curates, the circulations of internet culture, including discussing, posting, commenting, and messaging; circulations which are mobilized to produce as much data as possible (Langley and Leyshon, 2017). These circulations, or trafic in internet jargon, are dependent on user time and attention and thus a platform must entice users to engage with or simply spend time there (Celis Bueno, 2017). Platforms can use various methods to entice users, such as keeping access free (or partially free) or designing an architecture which encourages dialogue, connectivity, exchange, and “market encounters” (Çalişkan and Callon, 2010: 1416). Insofar as user participation becomes a source of profit, the more users participate, the more profitable a platform becomes (Celis Bueno, 2017: 117). The widely publicized saga of Twitter’s \$44 billion sale to Elon Musk demonstrates that controlling communicative exchange and participation can have enormous value for capital.

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The rise of online communication to a social mandate is also an ideological pillar which legitimizes the supposed dialogic nature of neoliberal capitalism (Dean, 2009). This refers to the idea that the “internet is inherently democratic” because online connectivity encourages the free exchange of information and ideas allowing potentially anyone to communicate whatever they want. As Andrejevic points out, in the early Web 2.0 years, the internet was positively received by democratic publics and critical scholars alike as “a scarcity-fighting machine”; a means of providing public access to information by bypassing state monopolies or private media corporations and their vested interests (2013: 28). Social media was empowering, participatory, decentralized, collaborative, activist, and potentially democratic in their ability to coordinate petitions, hashtag activism, and protests against government or corporate mistreatment (e.g., Ellison and Hardey, 2014). This idea was popular in media studies at least until 2015, when scandals involving fake news, Cambridge Analytica and later the Capitol riots erupted—events demonstrating that the ultimate goal of corporate platforms is profit; participation and connectivity are (managed) by-products of the profit imperative.

The mandate to communicate, according to Dean, is an ideological construct that perpetuates the fantasy of neoliberal capitalism, as the regulatory concept of free communication shapes liberal modes of governance (2009). Dean cites the Iraq war, in which, despite “terabytes” of anti-war protest and counter-information, George Bush proceeded with the invasion (2009: 20). Prior to the invasion, Bush acknowledged protestors’ right to “express their opinions”, that is, he acknowledged the protestors’ concerns as valid, but he still bombed Iraq (Dean, 2009: 20). The anti-war message “morphed into so much circulating content”, which became part of the never-ending circulation of culture in communicative capitalism’s shifting and constantly renewable “disintegrated spectacles” (Dean, 2009: 20–24), as the anti-war message intertwined, for instance, with cute animal videos, images from natural disasters, and sex advice. However, the concept of unrestricted communication as a means of extracting data and legitimizing capitalism has its own set of limitations. Comparing, for example, the Bush administration’s reaction of “understanding yet disagreeing” to the Russian government’s banning and even criminalizing content that challenges its war narrative in Ukraine, demonstrates that the concept of unbound communication is contingent on geopolitical limitations (and it is only conditionally applicable in liberal capitalist societies as well5). It is important to remember that the market logic of communicative capitalism, which would ideally vouch for a communication free of interruptions or political constraints, is in practice cut short due to social or larger geopolitical antagonisms.

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As a globalizing yet translocal paradigm, communicative capitalism has an anthropological slant, with one of its pillars, according to Dean, being the social production of reflexivity, or the ability to judge, question, and evaluate one’s own beliefs and practices in the absence of a grand narrative. Reflexivity theorists from the 1990s, such as Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, saw this ability as potentially democratic and empowering because Western modernity could now look inward and question its own doctrines and assumptions (Beck, 2013). Giddens famously defined Western societies as “post-traditional” where individuals see self-creation as a reflexive project, a project that can be modified, reversed, and changed by individual decisions and lifestyle choices that are independent of the authority of tradition (1994: 56). Others, most notably Zygmunt Bauman, argued that these “liquid lives” of reflexive modern individuals are precarious and uncertain, as individuals are expected to choose their own trajectories in the face of structural risks and with minimal state protection (2013: 1). On a personal level, reflexivity is the constant desire for a “better” self, which makes life “a succession of new beginnings” (Bauman, 2013: 2); common verbal injunctions for such beginnings include “do not miss this opportunity!”, “think outside the box!”, and “it is worth trying!”. However, beginnings can only happen after endings, which are frequently the source of confusion, anxiety, and disorientation (2013: 2). As we will see later, the market mandate to curate (liquid) lives, whether through food choices, information consumption, clothing styles, or self-guidance, opens up a matrix of possibilities for a better self, instilling a constant fear of missing out (FOMO) or missing a potentially better future. In any case, as a generalized anthropological paradigm in advanced capitalism, reflexivity is a by-product of the rise of consumption and do-it-yourself (DIY) self-making, rather than an emancipatory endeavor from below.

Digital platforms are encouraging reflexivity because they mediate users reflexive capacities, that is, they allow anyone who wishes to participate in the questioning of statements made by corporations, politicians, religious figures, or other users to do so through posts, comments, and reviews. The reflexivity loop in post-traditional societies—the reflection on reflection on reflection—is not limited to lifestyle choices such as the music people listen to, the clothes they wear, or the bars they frequent, but also spreads, according to Dean, in more fundamental social institutions such as the “languages we use and sciences we have” or “values that lead us one direction rather than another” (2013: 11).6 That is, communicative capitalism, with its incentive to communicate, accelerates reflexivity—refuting, questioning, and re-evaluating statements, lifestyles, news, narratives, and interpretations.

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The nuances and degrees of reflexivity vary according to the geographical and political contexts. For example, the compulsion for reflexivity in terms of lifestyle choices, opinions, and styles is much higher for the middle class in big cities like Shanghai and New York, and much less obvious in, say, a village in Yakutia. The anthropological type of communicative capitalism can then be shaped not only by political, social, and economic contexts, but also by the urban/rural divide, with reflexivity being easier to adapt in networks of greater complexity (more on this in Chapter 4). In matters pertaining to Russian politics and wars, VKontakte, the largest Russian social network, allows for less reflexivity than Facebook. Consumptive reflexivity is virtually non-existent on Mount Athos in Greece, a peninsula run by the Orthodox Church, where monks do not even get to choose the color of their clothes. We could go on and on with examples, but we must acknowledge the grounded limitations of platform-based socialities. For Dean and others (Andrejevic, 2013; 2019; Morozov, 2011; Fuchs, 2021), a key function of the technoliberal imaginary of platforms is capture: not only do platform owners capture the reflexivity loop as data, but reflexivity also becomes an ideological pilar of neoliberalism, the “endless loop of reflexivity becomes the very form of capture and absorption” (2013: 13). The reflexivity loop is thus a materialideological efect of communicative capitalism, as it is based on the profit imperative, which “pushes firms to maximize profits”, rather than being a natural process of social development (Sadowski, 2020b: 9). For instance, while the enlightened act of self-doubt is supposedly fostering a more democratic public sphere in liberal societies, à la Habermas, in communicative capitalism antagonistic actors end up frequently leveraging irrational or outright conspiratorial discourses (take for instance, Pizzagate and QAnon theories in post-2015 United States). This is because the drive to extract data results in an outpouring of communications that emotionalizes public debate and paralyzes rational decision-making by creating a chaotic environment for individuals to navigate, what Andrejevich calls “infoglut” (2013: 38).

The curation apparatus, as we shall see, promises a way out, it “comes to the rescue”, to refer again to Rosenbaum; however, as its scope expands and its entrepreneurial mandate grows, it fragments the social space into blocks of micro-expertise, at best creating new hierarchies of class and status and, at worst, deteriorating knowledge and critical thought even more dramatically.

3.3 Platform Capitalism as a Productive Model

One of the primary functions of platforms is to extract data and in efect to release an outpouring of communications; this realm of unbound communications creates a new and complex anthropological terrain for users to navigate—at work, in romantic relationships, friendships, performances of personhood, and so on. Platforms provide users with the technical means to navigate this terrain in all these diferent roles—as workers, partners, friends, and, more broadly, citizen-users. Platforms also provide the technical means for curation strategies to potentially anyone with a computer and an internet connection for accumulating, to a lesser or greater extent, symbolic or economic capital. In other words, they are more than just a means for their owners to generate capital; they broaden the terrain of neoliberal subjectification for the general population by encouraging everyone to exercise and capitalize on their curatorial-entrepreneurial abilities. In this context, I employ the neologism “platform capitalism”: an accumulation and capitalization model that hails everyone with some access to basic digital infrastructure to develop and invest in, either as producers or consumers, a plethora of curated selves for the promise of future symbolic and economic capital.

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In the literature, the term is used similarly (though with less emphasis on its efects on cultural circulation): platform capitalism refers to a platformspecific capitalization and accumulation model based on the extraction of big data for commercial purposes and new types of market encounters between consumers and producers (Langley and Leyshon 2017: 13; Çalişkan and Callon, 2010: 14). Similar to a bazaar or a stock exchange, platforms serve as intermediaries where producers and consumers meet and encounter each other (Çalişkan and Callon, 2010). One of the innovations of the platform economy is that these encounters would regularly trade on previously dormant assets or noncommodified areas of life. Airbnb, for example, provides the technical means to mediate the economization of a previously noneconomized or less economized object, that is, short-term accommodation, by bringing together two-sided markets, the sellers—owners of houses etc.— and customers—usually tourists. Educational platforms, such as Coursera or Udemy, connect instructors who create and sell online on-demand courses with people who want to engage in distance learning. These platforms, as meeting places for producers and consumers, marketize new objects or activities, and in turn encourage micro-curating practices from the former, such as house owners or instructors.

However, far from being a neutral space of encounter, the platforms are designed to capitalize on the platform-specific value ofered and generated through these interactions. What is, however, this platform-specific value, according to business literature? In their widely read manual for prospective platform entrepreneurs, titled Platform Revolution, Geofrey Parker, Marshall Alstyne, and Sangeet Choudary (2017: Ch. 6) suggest that platforms have to provide something valuable to users so that they spend time, attention, and trade on them. The most valuable services, according to the authors, include consumer access to the contents created on a platform (e.g., videos on YouTube), producer access to a community of potential buyers of services (e.g., clients on Uber), producer and consumer access to the tools that facilitate interaction (e.g., video editing tools in Tik-Tok), and producer and consumer access to the curation mechanisms which improve their interactions (e.g., recommendation algorithms in Spotify or Netflix that match the consumers’ taste with the producers’ content) (Parker, van Alstyne, and Choudary, 2017: Ch. 6). Insofar as these services manage to amass a base of interacting users, they turn the platforms to “sources of excess value” (Parker, van Alstyne, and Choudary, 2017: Ch. 6). This is the excess value the platform creates since these interactions would not exist without the platform (Parker, van Alstyne and Choudary, 2017: Ch. 6). If many users find the platform valuable and engage regularly with it, the platform’s benefits will also grow. This ideally then would become a self-generating cycle as platforms are subject to what in business literature is called positive network efects, which occur when “users derive utility from others joining the network” (Nieborg and Poell, 2018: 4278). For instance, the higher the search volume on Google the more accurate the search engine will become as the algorithm will improve, or the larger the number of Instagram followers for a user the better, as this user will expand their networks. Positive network efects occur when the users of a platform have an active interest in other users joining the platform as this increase will improve their platform activity (negative network efects, in contrast, occur when the larger the number of users of a product, the worst the product experience becomes, for example, excessive tourism in an area). In turn, the platform can monetize these efects or leverage them to appeal to advertisers or investors. This is the value that arises from user activity and has to be strategically cultivated by the business model of the platform.

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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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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.

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