This special issue of Social Text critically thinks through how models of contemporary platforms such as Amazon or Google are reproductions of colonial capitalist enterprises such as The East India Company. Authors are invited to engage the field of digital platform studies through the analytical lens of the colonial.
Please send 800 to 1000-word abstracts and brief bio to eclim [at] yorku.ca with the subject line “Social Text Colonial Studies of the Platform Special Issue.”
Special issue editors:
Elisha Lim
Assistant Professor of Technological Humanities
York University, Toronto
Ezekiel Dixon-Román
Professor of Critical Race, Media, & Educational Studies
Teachers College, Columbia University
Call:
This special issue argues that colonial theorists are digital theorists, because modern platforms like Meta, Amazon, Uber, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Pinduoduo are recursive embodiments of The British East India Company, the Dutch East Indies Company, the Hudson’s Bay Company. This special issue urges critical and cultural theorists of the colonial to engage the ways in which our scholarship is foundational for tackling the problems of this digital era. Platform crises, from polarizing culture wars to the brutal exploitation of the gig economy, are illuminated when digital platforms are understood as late capitalist iterations of the expropriated-appropriated racial logics of both the subject and capital, and their intimate relation with the extractive and racializing technologies of governance.
While calculation has long been part and parcel to the speculation of capital, modern computation has become the operative logic and engine of racial capitalism, or what Luciana Parisi and Ezekiel Dixon-Román call “recursive colonialism.” For example algorithms are not biased because of faulty, fixable data, they are biased because they are haunted by the statistical mathematics of centuries of materially and discursively produced sociopolitical relations of power and “difference.” Similarly, culture wars are not exacerbated by a group of white supremacist Facebook trolls; trolling is born out of Ads Manager’s necropolitical calculus of identity as lucrative niche markets. These two arguments are examples of colonial studies of the platform, a field that this special issue seeks to build with critical and cultural insight into digital platforms.
Our current dystopian digital mood is a liminal moment of violent new innovation that Jonathan Beller poignantly elaborates as The World Computer “plied by slavery, anti-blackness and other forms of racism during the past centuries.” However students are not taught to recognize the history of contemporary digital invention. In an atmosphere of AI market amplification and geopolitical tensions, federal and private funding incentivizes digital scholars to research and train digital entrepreneurship with empirical data science and cybersecurity skills divorced from historical critique.
Digital curriculum needs colonial theory. This special issue asserts that digital theory must not be abstract but directly interrogate questions of colonial and racial capitalism. Just as colonial formation stems from specific land treaties and calculative logics, technology becomes violent when it is weaponized by specific corporate platform agendas. For example Meta unwittingly supercharged culture war and populism because its apps, Instagram and Facebook, rank and promote users as market-ready identity brands. Uber eviscerates labor conditions to diffuse freelance contracts below minimum wage. Amazon Turk outsources AI data annotation to a vulnerable global precariat with no form of recourse in the face of wage theft and job termination. Platforms are corporations that facilitate trade within their digital ecosystems in a catastrophic chain reaction of specific commercial motives. Each platform becomes automaton operations of racial capitalism in a carefully balanced manner culminating in a specific crisis according to particular business models, work and territorial contracts, technology patents, proprietary software protocols and user terms and conditions drawn up by a specific C-suite of executives and designed based on the cosmogonies of the overrepresentation of Man. Platform scholar José Van Dijck created a canonical formula for studying platforms in six parts: business models (e.g., labor outsourcing or ad targeting), governance (e.g., Terms and Conditions, ad policies, public statements, annual reports), ownership (e.g., Jack Dorsey’s style vs. Elon Musk), technology (e.g., algorithms, software, affordances), content and users. In order to speak to modern capitalist digital instruments–AI, algorithms, coding, Big Data, etc.–these six elements are consequential. Yet, what continues to be overlooked in platform studies is the focus on the racial, dispossession, uprootedness, subjugation, and subjection of the colonial.
Colonial scholars already do this precision work by describing how The British East India Company and its competitors established territorial standards and norms through specific treaties, corporate documents, critical readings of liberal philosophy, and the formation of the racial via physiognomic signifiers and the later invention of ethnicity in relation to the temporal-spatial difference of the nation state project. These norms are the progenitor algorithms, spreading indifferent, agnostic, inflexible corporate rules that shaped the constitution of the human. Colonial theorists are crucial to modern platform scrutiny because of their historic insight into the original colonial platforms that coded modern imperialism.
Critical theoretical insights of the colonial must be incorporated to sharply examine the dominant digital framing of platform infrastructures as a new, unprecedented neoliberal conflation of technology and business strategy ominously invoked by Benjamin Bratton as the machine as the state. This special issue argues colonial capitalist platforms such as the East India Company (EIC) were the original machine as the state, indeed a corporate machine that came before the state since it pre-dated the absolutist state. Current studies of the platform wrongly posit that these companies are bad apples in otherwise smoothly running Western democracies. Digital studies teaches students to interpret platform strategies and develop regulations and protect civil liberties like privacy and digital property. In the process this framework overlooks and naturalizes what Sylvia Wynter calls the Master Code, cloaking the work of the racial in the operations and logics of the platform enabling its recursive reproduction.
This special issue seeks to explain what platforms do and contextualize them within colonial history. Looking at the long history of platforms sheds light on why algorithmic grammars always segment populations into exploitable and condemnable differences parsed by granular gradations of marketability. This special issue argues that the very notion of a “platform” is a product of colonial history and an abstraction that accomplishes the erasure of the history that produced it. The papers in this special issue argue that coloniality must be included in the definition of a platform so that platform power can be fully understood through its colonial ontologies of race, gender, disability, and more. This collection intervenes in platform scholarship to demand 400 years of platform studies, not just 50.
Expected theoretical contributions:
- Genealogies of the “Data Industries” including data annotation, cloud infrastructures, and data analytics
- Eighteenth-century corporate technologies, interfaces, and data practices
- Intellectual histories of the idea of digital colonialism
- Modern technological legacies of slavery and indenture systems in biometrics, tracking software, and visa portals
- New materialist histories of analogue-digital governance
- Connections between machine learning and scientific racism and ableism
- Colonial treaties as software
- Posthumanist theories of eighteenth-century technology; how its intra-acting agencies enact, produce, and come to matter
- Platforms and territorialization / re-territorialization
