platforms <> gravity

The platform isn’t about its extension, but rather its gravity: degree to which it can pull in and provoke actors to engender social, political, economic, and ethical transformations
- ⇒ physical theory of the platform as a gravitational force because we can then imagine the platform as a boundary object where a new social theory can be brought to bear
→ Questions
- What is the feeling of being pulled in by the platform?
- Of being included in predatory ways that often feel good but aren’t good?
- When we realize that we must engage with an apparatus that is invisible, whose rules change frequently, and whose ownership is both arbitrary and despotic, without accountability or real agency?
  - My qn: Is agency within constraints still validly agency? Isn’t there a difference between having agency and doing agentic things / agency vs agentic behavior?
- How to challenge, redirect, subvert and struggle with the pull of platforms without excommunicating ourselves?
- How do we galvanize and sustain the energy needed to limn the planetary scale — beyond the tunnel visions of innovation and black holes of data accumulation — and, instead, to bear the moral weight of future generations and conviviality with the geographically distant?

platforms <> public sphere

platforms have increasingly become the primary instrument for the articulation of such ‘matters of concern’ — an arena for political contestation and provocation. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter promised dialogic space for issue-formation, the kind of problems that exceed institutional capacity, and generate demand for democratic debate and animate action
“Recursive publics”: Imagined not through some shared identity, but rather from the technical and legal work through which collective commitments can be articulated

To read further on: The Algorithmic Sublime