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Platform pragmatics
Edoardo Biscossi
The production and circulation of content, its mediated forms, and the interface processes through which it emerges, constitute one of the core entanglements of contemporary attention economies, but also — as the ubiquitous presence of platform mediation within the social intensifies — of contemporary economies more in general. In platform-mediated economies, making a living — not unlike maintaining a social life or participating in consumption — requires at least my reputation, my connections, if not my direct earnings, to take form through loops of algorithmic mediation. My own inner enterprise thus works as a culture industry production unit, engineering narrative fragments and representations from the aimlessness of everyday experience. Within this private activity-machine, a certain process of transduction is in action, transforming life into content, somehow turning formlessness into form(s).
Getting by in algorithmic-mediated economies depends not so much on the direct commodification of labour time — perhaps increasingly a residue of more thermodynamic times — but more and more on what some have called «assetisation»: the opening of one’s productive capacities to valuation and appreciation through digital marketplaces — a metaphor for the incorporation of subjectivity in platform-mediated labour (Birch & Muniesa 2020; Jarrett 2022). But my assets do not constitute a concrete portfolio, they exist as virtuality until I find ways to valorise them in specific enactments of exchange — it’s all up to me, it’s my human capital.
Significantly, the actualisation of this undetermined capacity doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but through platform mediation — in the fragmented machinic totality of language, affects, behavioural vectors and algorithmic learners. And the interface that mediates this actualisation/transduction is not just a user interface, an individualised device, but an ambient interface, a trans-individual meta-media (Andersen & Pold 2018). Perhaps an instance of «dark media» or «xeno-communication» (Galloway et al 2013) — this mode of mediation doesn’t just connect humans between them, but also with an alien rationality leaking at the thresholds of everyday mediation, revealing the technical world as not entirely made for us. From this perspective, content appears more as the surface of the cultural plane field, whose technical organisation increasingly takes place at the more fundamental level of algorithmic mediation.
How do we navigate this opaque mediated reality? Within the common sense of our cultural imaginary, it often seems that we stand determined, distracted and disempowered, subjected to a centralised platform complex, a transcendental black-boxed structure acting “from above”, that we can either succumb to or escape — or maybe dream of re-appropriating. But looking at the ways in which content and forms circulate — across bedrooms-offices-studios-stages, ambient interfaces and proprietary computational infrastructures — we can understand this as a process of imitation and repetition that re-interprets and contaminates the logic of platform control and accumulation; as a networked complex of «vitalist pragmatics» (Gago 2017).
Perhaps, aesthetic and political possibilities within platform economies are not entirely pre-determined, but contingently produced through the pragmatics of both oligopolistic infrastructures (from above) and users, workers, carers, tinkerers (from below) — not autonomous from but immanent to algorithmic-mediated realities. In order to sidestep the impasse of “irrational” or “unusable” politics, it’s important to understand the cultural organisation of content and form through the organisation of labour and pragmatics, patterns and protocols, as a space of social and technical individuation.