Platforms’ convening power forces all content into platform-ready extractive form.

Evidence

As part of their basic business model, platforms operate as multiway data auctions, linking users, data buyers and users, and of course the platform itself. As Julie Cohen explains, the basic structure of platforms gives their operators a remarkable power to organize parallel series of economic relations through adaptable arrangements, with each series arranged through the platform’s interface software. This convening power of platforms creates a recentralizing force that requires all actors to make their content “platform ready.” That force is based on platforms’ power to control the degree and type of data extraction that is the “price” ordinary platform users must pay. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 129

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘platform-ready’ recentralizing force parallels how standardization coerces compliance, recalling code-law and modular normativity debates. — connects to: Platform power required political commons-plunder before any invention — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 281; Platforms are universal media governed by uniform policies over heterogeneous communities. — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms,…, 427

Broader Connections

• Platforms are universal media governed by uniform policies over heterogeneous communities. #expands (0.78) — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet, 427