Miasmas of Silicon Valley doom hang around Twitter’s cyberspace since ownership of the famously unprofitable platform has been forcibly passed onto a foundering Elon Musk (Huang 2022). Twitter has seen weeks of unmitigated chaos with mass firings, tendentious (and sometimes quickly repealed) changes to application architecture, and rampant misinformation prior to American midterm elections (Conger et al. 2022). These events expose the connotational complications of the term ‘platform’ that Tarleton Gillespie has outlined: in the popular imagination it is a neutral raised surface, innovative technology, and a democratic stage upon which discussion may take place (2010).

Gillespie argues that this lexical sleight-of-hand allows businesses and owners to evade confronting the inherent tensions of what we understand as a platform: it is an intervention in discourse, and a space for it; it is a marketplace of products, yet also of people and ideas. Those who laud platforms’ – social media platforms, more specifically – democratizing potential, tend to position them as the antithesis of conventional news agencies who sought to monopolise and dominate particular localities (Spinner 2012). Instead of curating content for the geographical conquest of a city or a country, platforms are responses to an increasingly fragmented, apportioned society whose varied interests would never find representation in antecedent traditional media. Contrarily, the results have been polarisation, and rampant biases from individual’s tiny “filter bubbles” within platforms; as Törnberg submits: “the public splinters while corporations consolidate” (Pariser 2011; 578: 2022). Other theorists, however, have theorised platforms more generally, in an effort to situate them in a wider context of late capitalism. For Nick Srniceck, platforms are simply “digital infrastructures that enable two or more groups to interact” (57: 2017). In this essay, I consider Srniceck’s characterisation of advertising platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, with an emphasis on their cultural dimensions, briefly examining their consequences for selfhood under capitalism.

Srnicek’s account conceptualises capitalism as a system of “generalised market dependence…a systematic imperative to reduce production costs in relation to prices” (19: 2017). New theories of capitalism centred around developing technology and data have been elsewhere explored as ‘cognitive capitalism,’ (Boutang 2011); ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff 2015); and ‘informational capitalism’ (Fuchs 2010). Platform capitalism adds to the literature by transcribing the contemporary economy’s relationship with data, and the new type of marketplace enabled by its architecture. Under Srnicek’s typology, there are five types of platforms: advertising (relevant to this discussion); cloud; industrial; product; and lean. Advertising platforms generate revenue through the collection, sale, and exploitation of data gleaned from the usually free usage of the platform itself – most commonly social networking sites like Facebook, or Instagram. Since platforms are mediators “between users” and also “the ground upon which their activities occur,” ownership of a platform confers privileges of constructing a new type of interaction under capitalism, without the production of a physical commodity (58: 2017).

Crucial to platform capitalism is the idea of ‘network effects,’ where the more people on a platform, the more valuable it is to the people on it, and to the owners, inculcating in capitalists a “natural tendency towards monopolisation” (59-60; 2017). For instance, LinkedIn only offers value as a site to build professional connections if there are considerable professionals and employers who use the platform. Srnicek acknowledges that these are far from apolitical, free spaces of interaction, and that whoever engineers “the rules of the game” determines the nature of behaviours possible on the platform (60: 2017). Yet here, Srnicek’s prioritisation of providing an economic ‘survey’ hedges his analysis’ scope – especially in the case of advertising platforms. It is not just that they enable and disable forms of digital interaction, but also that their epistemologies have reconfigured non-digital sociologies as well. For instance, Tumblr’s ‘tagging’ system was one of the first platform moves that pushed users to self-identify and brand as members of aesthetic interest groups (Fung et al. 2020). In the same vein, Facebook’s concept of a ‘like,’ and Snapchat’s of a ‘story’ have altered social realities of emotion and culture for the platform’s users.

Srnicek explicates that data is the heart of advanced capitalism’s exploitative model (2017). Platform capitalism’s ‘raw material’ is data, and the instruments of platforms seek to mine this resource from the interactions and activities of users online. Tremendous human labour goes into collating, cleaning, and analysing this data in order to turn it into a valuable form of capital. It is valorised in the economy for its ability to “give competitive advantage to algorithms …allow for the optimisation and flexibility of productive processes…data analysis is itself generative of data, in a virtuous cycle” (Srnicek 2017: 56). However, Srnicek’s economical nomenclature of ‘users’ and ‘data’ underplays the extent of the cultural upheaval created by advertising platforms. This nomenclature belies what is at stake in part because of how comfortable the general public (‘users’) is with trading off euphemised ‘data’ to gain access to convenient and connective platforms. Van Dijik argues that “dataism” has been naturalised as a facet of modern life, at great personal cost, since under its doctrine, social interactions have submitted themselves to platforms for quantification, exploitation, and manipulation (2014). It is worth spelling out what ‘data’ entails for advertising platforms: who is part of a person’s social network; emotional responses evoked by particular bits of media; conditions where consumption is likely; levels and fabric of political and intellectual awareness, and so on. These are sometimes intimate, unknown or unspoken desires, patterns, and tendencies that are part of a person’s subjectivity. Algorithms have gotten more sophisticated and frighteningly accurate in their prediction of the contents of particular subjectivities only because of how much data has already been fed to the ritournelle; the virtual cycle of datafication continues (Allard 2021).

Thus, when Srnicek suggests that there is no value-neutral data-extraction, then this invasion into the interior of a person’s life implies more than an economic logic of capitalist accumulation. Or rather, that this capitalist logic of accumulation structures technology in manners that encourage engagement, identification, and activity in new, reified terms that benefit the platform’s owners’ pursuit of greater data extraction (see also Harvey 1991; 1989). Capitalists embed systems that encourage ever-increasing encroachment into the private life of the individual, in order to create more robust algorithms, thus through specific features and digital tools, users are conditioned to plug more and more of themselves in every time they get online. While Srnicek is right in emphasising an economic analysis of the mechanisms at play, there are dimensions of politics and personhood implicated in the same mechanisms. Theorists of postmodernism (Baudrillad 2016; Jameson 1991) have long discussed the fragmented subject’s bastardised, accreted relationship with cultural artefacts under late capitalism, while mediatic theorists of new technologies have detailed the impact of the infrastructure of media on psychosociological identities and well-being (Postman 1985; McLuhan 1966; 1967). Where post-Fordism produced the postmodern consumer of television and Hollywood, platform capitalism in the 21^st Century has produced the postmodern creator and consumer – sharing themselves and stylising selfhood using cultural artefacts as signs on platforms (Törnberg 2022). Taken together with theories of platform capitalism, cultural critics have suggested that it is not data, but “selfhood” that is “capitalism’s last natural resource” (Tolentino 2019: 76; see also Nieborg and Poell 2018). 

However, the premise of personhood being a resource and raw material does not imply that social media users are platform capitalism’s labourers. Apart from professionals on these platforms (influencers, moderators and so on), it is not labour that is generative of any surplus value for the capitalists. Instead, it is that presence on these platforms inheres subjectivities that are primed for being quantified, datafied, and in turn, moulded by platform infrastructures. The distinction between labour and simply existing as exploitable raw material on the internet is an important one. The concern is not that users are engaging in alienated labour without their knowledge, it is that users in an alienated world develop and spill their selfhood to platforms, in accordance with technical infrastructures designed to get as much out of them as possible. By this formulation, we may begin to comprehend the totality of the cultural changes instituted by platform capitalism. In much the same way as Elon Musk’s public politics have infected Twitter’s ideological position, or how simple concepts like which accounts are verified or not impact how relevance and cultural capital are distributed in our cyber society, selfhood and platform capitalism are imbricated in convoluted games of algorithms, cybernetics, and ideology. Only an active interrogation of these infrastructures will begin to dismantle technology’s tendencies of naturalisation and exploitation.

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