The past ten years have seen an outpouring of research on the rise (or return) of politics varyingly described as authoritarian, illiberal, right-wing populist, post-neoliberal, extremist or even fascist around the world. Many commentators assign technology a key causal role. Echoing the origins of media and communications studies in crowd psychology and propaganda analysis, they argue that the affordances of search and social media platforms undermine both individual rationality and democratic deliberation. This talk takes up the subject of platforms and contemporary politics from a different angle. Spurred by a sense that tech critique has been 'running out of steam,' Moira Weigel turns to a new analytic site and approach. Specifically, she shares findings from four years of research on e-commerce entrepreneurs, conducted in both the United States and China. Adapting methods from science and technology studies, she shows that these platforms bring a variety of actors into new “configurations,” which analyses based on received demographic categories fail to explain. Situating platform entrepreneurship in centuries of petty capitalism, as well as more recent organizational forms like franchising and direct marketing, she argues that platforms both reflect and reinforce processes of disintermediation that go beyond “content.” This disintermediation creates opportunities for individuals excluded from prior institutions and arrangements insofar as they are willing to accept certain, centralizing protocols–fostering political forms that seem both atavistic and futuristic, regressive and disruptive, at once.
Speaker
Moira Weigel writes and teaches about the history, theory, and social life of media and communication technologies, from the early nineteenth century to the present. She originally trained in comparative literature and film studies, working in German, French, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese. More recently, she has focused on data-driven technologies, particularly social media and marketplace platforms, as well as on new developments in artificial intelligence and machine translation. Her articles on these subjects have appeared or are forthcoming in boundary 2, The International Journal of Communication, New Media and Society, Polity, and Social Media + Society. Her first two books are Labor of Love: the Invention of Dating (2016) and, with Ben Tarnoff, Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do and How They Do It (2020).
Moderated by SOF Fellow Irina Kalina
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