This piece introduces a special section on digital platforms and agency. It unpacks the tension between, on the one hand, the imposition of digital platforms upon cultures by immensely-powerful technology companies, and on the other hand, the emergence of possibilities as people work, play, and express themselves on platforms. Cultural studies, which has always concerned itself with structure, culture, and agency, is well-positioned to work through this tension in order to orient scholars of platform studies toward radical critique and political action. The introduction situates the invited works of “Digital Platforms and Agency” in this context, elaborates upon cultural studies’ charge toward the emerging field of platform studies, and summarizes the individual and collective contributions of the special section authors.
Keyword: platform studies
The Platform-Enabled Durability of Colonial Racial Capitalism in Washington DC’s Wards 7 and 8
This article explores how platforms reinforce structures of racism and coloniality in Washington DC’s majority-Black Ward 7 and Ward 8. Drawing on ethnographic research with Black hosts who short-term rent on Airbnb, I follow how Black residents’ imaginaries of space are superseded by platform-enabled white users’ imaginaries through Airbnb’s “Location” star ratings. This rating draws down hosts’ overall ratings based on guests’ racist experiences of feeling “unsafe” in majority-Black working-class neighborhoods—resulting in lower visibility on Airbnb’s app, decreased bookings, and financial losses. Using a geopolitical conception of racism on platforms which I call the Colonial Racial Capitalist Stack (CRCStack), I show how these ratings enable platform-mediated conceptions of space and land that discursively reinforce racist depictions of Wards 7 and 8. I read Benjamin Bratton’s design concept of “the Stack” through Ruha Benjamin’s analytic of “discriminatory design” to argue that platforms are key sites for the exploitation and ongoing dispossession of land and labor under systems of racism, settler and franchise colonialisms, and capitalism across a variety of historical and geographical contexts, as described by Koshy, et. al. Through an exploration of the Stack’s layers (User/Interface/Address, City/Cloud, and Earth), I argue that the CRCStack makes racism, as a social technology, more durable by entrenching as a racialized geopolitical ordering of the world into the life worlds of Black people living in Wards 7 and 8. Durability is a key metric by which platforms are measured. Platforms that are unable to cultivate durability—whether by cultivating a loyal user community, harnessing the network effect, or technological necessity—are quickly replaced by other platforms. Reading technology as a racializing and racialized tool helps us understand how racism, as a system, is innovated and entrenched through technological means. I demonstrate how platforms act as the latest technological innovation created to extend the durability of existing systems of racialization and colonization that are required for racial capitalist economies to function. I theorize how racism on the CRCStack operates at multiple overlapping layers, focusing specifically on how discrimination on Airbnb impacts users, neighborhoods, cities, and the wider real estate market. In doing so, I not only explore how platform-enabled racism restricts Black residents’ spatial imaginaries but also trace how Black hosts push back against the CRCStack through Airbnb Support complaints, grassroots practices of negotiation with racist guests, and social movement actions in conjunction with state authorities. I conclude by thinking through what dismantling the CRCStack would require for platform corporations like Airbnb, its users, and city residents.
Digital Agents: The New Politics of Recognition in Contemporary “Post-Race” Fiction
What are the new racial politics of individual agency and collective recognition in a putatively “post-race” era defined, in large part, by platform capitalism’s increasingly pervasive technologies for identity management and securitization? This essay begins with Apple’s highly publicized 2016 counterterrorism dispute with the FBI and the company’s subsequent marketing campaign for facial recognition-based password encryption (Face ID) before turning at length to recent anglophone novels of ethnicity—by Bharati Mukherjee, Mohsin Hamid, and Teju Cole—that lend narrative expansion to the “post-racial” racializing logics that Apple’s litigation and campaign materials reveal. A cathexis for Big Tech’s identity politics as a whole, Apple’s engagement with debates over personal and national security adumbrates an intensified if deeply familiar neoliberal conception of racial individualism implicitly opposed to the coarse, impersonal racial rubrics presumed to operate across security’s bureaucratic institutions. Condensed by “the most unforgettable, magical password ever created: your face,” security, in Face ID’s schema, emerges not as the controversial task of law enforcement but as the innate (read: magical) property of a given subject’s racial-identitarian uniqueness, a property whose protections obtain not from the state’s overreaching vigilance but rather from the technical sophistication (read: magic) of Apple’s biometric sensor, able to sublimate that subject’s racial singularity into digital form. Apple thus marks out a “post-racial” racial recognition paradigm cast along two vectors: the first, a highly particularized vector of “post-racial” individualism provisioned by what Alexander Galloway describes as platform capitalism’s “new customized micropolitics of identity management,” where subjects of all races enjoy the illusion of an expansive political agency; the second, a highly reductive, re-racializing vector that, as Erica Edwards suggests, collapses Black and Brown subjects under post-9/11 rubrics of threat, fear, and terror by data-driven processes of “strategic characterization” and “pattern of life” profiling that progressively transmute individual human agents into digital racial types. Contemporaneous novels of ethnicity pursue versions of that “post-racial” vectorization scheme. Featuring Black and Brown protagonists whose racial identities disappear, mutate, and resurface as they move between shifting, differentiated zones of political inclusion and exclusion, within and across increasingly flexible national borders, and in and out of new technologies of algorithmic governance and visual securitization, novels by Mukherjee, Hamid, and Cole depict in turn race’s digital obfuscation and its hypervisibility, its subsumption within tech-intensified neoliberal market logics of individual preference, qualitative uniqueness, and customizability, and its monolithic resurgence at the militarized borders of the nation. Tracing out a literary protocol of “post-racial” race-making that belies these vectors’ opposition and foregrounds instead their mutual reinforcement of US empire and global white supremacy, these novels subsequently compel a “post-racial” reading practice in which depth reading—reading for race’s ontological invalidity—paradoxically uncovers and renews its mimetic coordinates. At bottom, they profess the digital intensification of what Madhu Dubey calls race’s “conceptual instability” in a putatively “post-race” era for which platform capitalism’s relentlessly individualizing forms of agential capacity are deployed as compensation for race’s biological retrenchment across the range of US empire’s global securitization projects.