Programs and Platforms
| Date: | 2014 |
| Index: | quasi-institution writing |
Programs and Platforms
Today, the platform is infrastructure. It doesn’t do anything in particular, but rather it makes things possible by providing tools, resources, or connections to be used for constrained, though indeterminate future activities. Platforms are pre-production. They are not bought and sold like products in the market, nor are they exclusively available for hire like a service worker. A platform is an artificial ground that anticipates and invents, through its very operation, its own economic, legal, and ethical practices. And it is in this way that the platform produces reality: as these practices are absorbed into moments of everyday life, the world is remade in the image of the platform.
Platforms are functional schematics. Consider, for example, a publishing platform. As readable code, or an API, or a diagram it describes some possible forms of publishing, and it suggests new practices, relations, and material configurations. But while the platform performs as a representation (of itself and its anticipated use), it is more importantly a simulation. It establishes a 1:1 scale model within the world that oscillates between the fictional and the real, the possible and the present.
Such an oscillation can be productive: glimmers of the possible, not-yet-present can stimulate users of the platform, drawing in their attention and leading them to experiment with new behaviors. But ultimately the platform aspires to recede into the real, to become naturalized, or at least habitual. In this sense, competing platforms are in a race for the bottom. They want to become as essential as the ground, to become the essential ground for people, institutions, and other platforms. For them, it’s less a matter of being too big to fail - scale is not the primary issue here - but too fundamental. Platforms are radical according to both the traditional and contemporary notions of the word: they get to “the root” of the matter, while breaking conventions.
Coming long after periods of primitive accumulation, the rise of the sovereign nation-state, and the carving up of the Earth into territories, platforms treat all of this accumulated modernity as the raw material for new rounds of accumulation, producing new sovereign entities, and recomposing territorial boundaries. Just when there appears to be no undifferentiated space left for any new actors, these new actors emerge through the redefinition of space itself. Amazon, Apple, Bitcoin, Facebook, Google spring forward at the scale of the state. Unsurprisingly, a techno-libertarian ethos drives these platforms, provoking and ridiculing the state for being too inefficient and simultaneously too authoritarian. Buoyed by the comfort of capital and preaching a gospel of “disruptive innovation,” this ethos doggedly applies the platform logic to everything.
Techno-libertarianism advances the platform as a space of withdrawal into the future, a tabula rasa with no traces of history, class struggle, racism, war crimes, polluted air, or depression. It is where citizens start again, now as users. This exit looks like Paul Romer’s charter cities, Peter Theil’s seasteads, Balaji Srinivasan’s Special Innovation Zones, or simply celebrating the shutdown of the U.S. Federal Government, like Chamath Palihapitiya. Looking beyond hypercapitalist fantasies, we also find it in the Occupy encampments’ ideology of prefiguration, which might be most succinctly summarized in David Graeber’s definition of direct action: acting as if you were already free. “This is what democracy looks like” and even “be the change you want to see” are slogans that express the theory that ends can be productively appropriated as means (with a little bit of acting). Each example, for different reasons, seeks a space buffered from existing regulation (and other historical baggage) in order to impose a new set of rules. Each follows the narrative arc of the platform, a narrative inherited from the mythology of the American West.
Until recently, cyberspace was regularly compared to the Wild West: it was an untamed, uncharted territory beyond regulation, history, and the market. A Gold Rush mentality during the late 1990s reinforced the metaphor, which was only furthered by domain-name squatting, and easily accessible gambling, pornography, and bootlegged goods. This new frontier was seemingly an opportunity for self-invention, economic opportunity, and social mobility not easily available in the Old World. The platform seduces by renewing the appearance of wilderness where there is none. Likewise, the sheer abundance of mobile gadgets today obscures that they are no contemporary to Reyner Banham’s Great Gizmo - our gadgets are not portable, self-contained tools so much as the surface expressions of infrastructure.
But even if contemporary computational devices - tablets, smartphones, and the like - are practically paralyzed in the absence of signals, networks, and content-providers, they are mutated offspring of, arguably, the greatest gizmo: the personal computer. Originally marketed as liberating people from a dependence on mainframe timesharing, the personal computer seemed both extraordinarily useful and totally purposeless. An early Apple II advertisement featured polymath revolutionary, Benjamin Franklin, as if to suggest that it would be suitable for any type of person (“diplomat, printer, scientist, inventor”). Just beyond this finite list of professions, however, was the radical openness of a machine that could be programmed by its users to do things that were theretofore unimagined.
Programmability is an essential feature of the platform. That’s not to say that every platform will necessarily be programmable by its users, but rather that every platform will have been programmed anew. Both limitations and possibilities are inscribed into the use of the platform through various programmatic means, such as the manipulation of symbolic code, legal licenses, interface design, and expository writing forms. Further programming is possible only if that possibility has been programmed into the platform. To give an example: the early Apple operating system was advertised to come with three programming languages (“including Pascal”) whereas the newer iOS is intended for consumption and social interaction, not further programming by the user.
Platforming is simultaneously a process of deskilling. In this sense, Benjamin Franklin, a transitional figure at the cusp of the industrial revolution, is an especially fitting user of the Apple II, which occupies a pivotal moment in the information revolution. Paralleling the absorption of skilled, handmade, domestic manufacturing into centralized factories with machines operated by unskilled labor, “desktop” computation similarly migrates out of the home and is consolidated into data centers, which in many cases occupy the very same infrastructure as the industrial factories. Automatization, in either period, restructures time and generates new social forms.
Deskilling suggests that rather than restate the old moralistic opposition between active producers and passive consumers, it’s more useful to think about platforms in terms of autonomy and dependency. The platform is not creato ex nihilo, it depends on a ground, a support in order to stage its autonomous fiction. A person on the platform develops from self-determined use within certain parameters into a reliance on the platform for the activity it enables. In other words, both coding and use express the dual character of platforms, suggesting that we look at the relationship between them.
If platforms are developing into quasi-states and citizenship is increasingly paralleled by usership, then to think about the rights of users is an entry point into a conception of the politics of platforms. Internet social networks have entered the formal political process in quite visible ways, whether as a tool for protest or fundraising, and usually in the service of already existing constituencies. But platform politics is about the politics of platforms themselves: their specific connections between programming and use; their relationship to external political and economic institutions; the particular ways that general concepts like privacy, property, or power are expressed; and the ongoing process by which all of these issues are made visible, subject to public engagement, and integrated back into the platform.
In many, if not most, platforms, the politics are totally ignored, suppressed, or redirected into innocuous “feedback” processes. Epitomized by seamless iOS-style platforms, they promise no cracks or crashes, and there is certainly no space for politics. But even in these cases, there is potentially an opening within the iterative design process: this feedback loop can instead be a readymade site for politics, for debate about the purpose of the platform, to identify where power and property are accruing and how they might be redistributed, to ask what rights the users of the platform might expect to have, and to provide opportunities for the users to be programmers.
At the horizon of an ever-diminishing distance between programming and use is a continuous reconstruction process in which political debate is simultaneous with programmatic experimentation. Surpassing the radical openness of the Apple II, which merely allowed the user to write programs, this platform would open itself up to reprogramming. Here, Banham might quote the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, “wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking.”