Platform seamlessness must be engineered by removing data-flow barriers

Evidence

Platforms create an interface without historical precedent: an interchange in which social life in its open-ended variety interfaces seamlessly with the forces of economic extraction. This seamlessness is not natural any more than data is naturally raw. It must be constructed through the painstaking removal of barriers to data flow within and between platforms; seamlessness is an achievement, in part, of software that enables platforms to produce “the social” for capital. This explains the deeply ambiguous status of the largest and most successful platforms, such as Facebook, which is expected to speak for and even regulate the social world because of the power that running a platform with two billion users gives it. Major platform power in China (Alibaba and Tencent) is even more ambitious, developing a triple interface across social, economic, and financial worlds to provide a new practical infrastructure for the world’s largest society. These models of economic power and social order depend on the unspoken principle of seamlessness: every barrier to data flow is a barrier to the unlimited production of social life in forms that can generate data for capital. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 130

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘seamlessness’ as a constructed achievement, not a natural state — central to the data colonialism claim.
• XREF: Parallels the surveillance school’s claim that attention capture is engineered, not incidental; adds the infrastructure-cost angle. — connects to: Seamless data flows breed opaque inequality and uncontrolled surveillance — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 607; Physical space is being redesigned as browse-able environments of sensor data — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 647
• ADDENDUM: Strong fit with ‘Grafting & Growth: On Trees as Infrastructure’ — the idea that an apparently seamless interface is itself built infrastructure requiring maintenance and barrier-removal.

Broader Connections

• Seamless data flows breed opaque inequality and uncontrolled surveillance #complicates (0.78) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 607