Platform executives speak as social theorists to legitimize their data extraction models

Evidence

Executives in the social quantification sector, whether or not they planned to, are becoming social theorists, or at least trying to sound like them. “Thank you for believing in this community,” wrote Mark Zuckerberg in his full-page apology in British Sunday newspapers on March 25, 2018, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But behind the bland term community lay a lot of background theorizing. Certainly executives’ habit of speaking like social theorists did not start in the past decade. Just before the 2012 Facebook international public-share offering, Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook is “a fabric that can make any experience online social.” In 2010, he had already dubbed the 2007 invention of the social graph (Facebook’s way of mapping the network connections between users) “our way of explaining the phenomenon we thought was happening in the world.” — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 426

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘social graph’ and ‘open graph’ as Facebook’s engineering constructs dressed up as descriptions of the social world.
• XREF: Connects to the surveillance/attention school’s account of platform self-legitimation, and to how Zuboff frames surveillance capitalists as redefining the social. — connects to: Corporate rationality masks everyday data extraction as routine business rather than appropriation — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 101; Corporations treat streamed social data as a management surface — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 419; Framing technology as autonomous disguises who profits from data extraction — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 511 (+4 more)
• SEED: Angle: ‘The CEO as amateur social theorist’ — how platform executives’ self-descriptions function as a rival, competing ontology of the social that social science must engage or answer.

Broader Connections

• Platforms are the first business model with data extraction built into their core DNA #qualifies (0.80) — Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 76
• Framing technology as autonomous disguises who profits from data extraction #expands (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 511
• Falling manufacturing profits drove capitalism toward data extraction via platform monopolies #complicates (0.72) — Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 17