Platform dynamics
Ambition is metered by what we can hope from the future. Right now, predictions feel plausible to the extent that they’re grim, and plans receive sneers in proportion to their scale. At best, anything epic is an idiot laugh in the face of the facts. ‘It won’t work’, and if you try to make it, there will be blood. It’s in the ruins of the plan that the platform arrives. The concept’s gained force in industrial settings, especially those built around digital tech – Facebook, Google, Weibo, those strange and popular beasts not wholly grasped as a product, a service, or a public resource. But it has far broader remit, as this talk will describe. So what is a platform? True to the word’s roots, a stage (a ‘plot-form’, originally): a structure that can host other activities. Its interface acts as a lever, exploding possible behaviours on the outside while (and because) its interior stays relatively fixed, predictable, committed. Through the logic of generative entrenchment (Wimsatt), a platform solicits contingency in the form of appropriation, while manufacturing reliance as a type of control. For an imagination aligned with platform dynamics, politics merges with technical infrastructure, but both are transformed. Platforms yield scenarios cryptic to Western minds conditioned to subordinate means to ends. They generate their reasons to be through adoption and use. They are ways to get out of the present, not lock down the future; not plans, but something else, something that needs to be understood.
Benedict Singleton is a strategist with a background in design and philosophy. He is based in London, where he works on a mixture of commercial and self-directed or pro bono projects, and writes widely on the history and future of design technology.