‘Capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things.’ The capitalist relation is built upon ‘things’,[1] which are either natural or artificial. From this assertion, it seems crucial to delve into the politics of ‘things’. Do they have politics? In the proceeding paragraphs, I will try to show that they do.

Infrastructures are indubitably particular forms of artificial things: ‘matter that enables the movement of other matter’ according to Brian Larkin.[2] In general, society moves on infrastructures as matter, and it is for this reason that infrastructures, and the matter they are comprised of, are intrinsically political. Upon a closer look, the movement of the global present is enabled not only by solid matter but by digital matter. Platforms are this digital matter, enabling the iterative functioning of other digital matter.

Things that Talk

Things that Talk, is the title of an essay by the Harvard Historian of Science Lorraine Daston,[3] who aims to demonstrate how objects are ‘simultaneously material and meaningful’. According to Daston, the meaning of objects ‘derives from certain properties of the things themselves, which suit the cultural purposes for which they are enlisted.’[4] Things ‘talk’ through their function, use, and the material of which they are made. They say different things depending on who ‘listens’ to them, they are producers of meaning, and they induce behaviours in both individuals and communities. Human behaviour itself can only be fully analysed in relation to this world of ‘things’, which precedes and exceeds them in a seamless process. Artefacts and other non-human elements are thus an irreducible part of humans, both in their individual and collective sense. They represent what Bruno Latour calls the ‘missing masses’, making up for the absence of ‘social links sturdy enough to tie all of us together or for moral laws that would be inflexible enough to make us behave properly.’[5]

In a further step brought by Bruce Braun and Sarah J. Whatmore, ‘things’ assume another crucial character, that of being ‘eventful’.[6] Things lead us into a future that cannot be predicted. They can instigate unforeseen surprises the very moment they are combined with other elements, institutions, practices or gestures – combinations, and results of such combinations, which we may have not assumed or considered. A spatial indeterminacy accompanies a temporal one, as ‘things […] bring about new assemblages and generate new spatial relations.’[7] In other words, technology is not neutral, but rather forms our lives into a political shape. Decades ago, even Martin Heidegger warned us about the ‘illusion’ of feeling ourselves free from technology: ‘Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it.’ Given that ‘things’ curate how our lives are formed, temporally and spatially, we can definitely claim that they have a political character. And we can search for it.[8]

Infrastructures Have Politics

‘Do arteficts have politics?’ asked Langdon Winner four decades ago. His answer was yes. Artefacts (including infrastructures) incorporate politics and poetics, shaping the material and virtual phenomena of our shared subject-space.[9] Consider Robert Moses, architect of modern New York. He designed bridges leading to Long Island beach with underpasses so low that buses were unable to traverse them. He thus restricted access to a wealthy area through infrastructural shaping that intentionally alienated working-class populations and their modes of transport. In light of such examples, it is difficult to argue that artefacts or infrastructures do not have politics. Take Baron Haussmann, who implemented a drastic renovation of Paris under Napoleon III: enormous new avenues were placed in the ancient medieval neighbourhoods in order to dismantle the terrain where riots and revolts took place in 1848. Infrastructures certainly have politics.

One of the main features of infrastructures is the fact that they are often passively and erroneously assumed to be neutral, ‘taken for granted’ as non-aspects of a lived space. Infrastructures are a kind of skeleton, ‘the nervous system’ of economy and society. On the one hand they are indistinguishable from everyday life: they shape the material and virtual social-subject space. But on the other hand, we can distinguish them from the material they shape, labelling them as infrastructural power, as Michael Mann has done, describing them as ‘the capacity of the State actually to penetrate civil society’.[10]

Moses and Haussmann are historical cases linked to urban planning and the built metropolis. However, we have multiple contemporary examples: if we assume the politics of infrastructures, we could see how recent struggles and conflicts around infrastructural projects have brought to light how such projects act as vectors of capitalist and State power. From the Dakota Access Pipeline in the US to the Canadian Coastal GasLink pipeline, and from some of the planned infrastructures within the IIRSA project in Latin America to the high-speed train in northern Italy: these are all instances (just to mention a few) where the politics of infrastructures act vividly. Anthropologist Brian Larkin illuminates:

‘As several scholars have pointed out, liberalism is a form of government that disavows itself, seeking to organize populations and territories through technological domains that seem far removed from formal political institutions […]. Even the free flow of goods that constitutes a laissez-faire economy rests on an infrastructural base that organizes both market and society […]. Infrastructures are interesting because they reveal forms of political rationality that underlie technological projects and which give rise to an ‘apparatus of governmentality.’[11]

Platform as Infrastructures

Digital platforms today are increasingly considered as infrastructures. At least some of them are. Just think of Google. We use it constantly: email, data management, video streaming, maps, drive etc. It represents the terrain onto which a multiplicity of other ‘things’ move. This is precisely the definition of ‘infrastructure’ offered by Larkin: infrastructures ‘are objects that create the grounds on which other objects operate.’[12] Does it matter if such objects are real or virtual? Not at all. At least, not anymore.

Google, together with Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple (GAFAM), or Alibaba, Tencent or ByteDance are the heart of contemporary global society. They are the infrastructures on which the digital side of society rests: ‘the most profound technologies are those that disappear’.[13] These infrastructures providing the foundation for a world of ‘predatory platforms’ such as Uber, Airbnb, Deliveroo, Taskrabbit, Helpling, etc., sectorial platforms that have been gaining more and more centrality since ‘the crash’, the economic crisis of 2007/08.

Platforms have occupied and ‘infrastructurised’ digital space. Like material infrastructures, digital infrastructures connect and restrict. We can compare platforms with railways, for example. Conceptually rooted in the Enlightenment and liberal positivist ideas, throughout the nineteenth century railways represented the quintessential form of a moving, opened world. Upon closer inspection, the same railways both delimited and determined movements, connecting, of course, but also excluding and conditioning motion. They were the tools for controlling the seemingly limitless western prairie in the US: an instrument for the Western conqueror. Now, just think of Facebook. It is difficult to deny its role in the creation of a seamless community of people spread throughout the world. At the same time, it tends to capture all alternatives, monopolising online social interaction and shaping it into a highly conditioned, curated structure of limitless, free choice.

The Politics of Platforms

Capital ‘structurally needs to find or open up new spaces (literal and metaphorical) to expand what we call the frontiers of its valorisation’.[14] Platforms operate to find new space within two fields: first, the field of social relations from which they can extract value and create profits, second, the field of the online world, where platforms are blooming day by day. Platforms are the section of the online world usually adopted as a tool to extract value from social relations.

Like the sectors of logistics, finance and extraction, platforms increasingly absorb economic and political power. Far from being just what ‘pertain to the polis’, politics become less pure as new forms of power are glimpsed on the horizon of the real and the digital worlds.

In the digital space – an artificial space shaped through code, physical cables placed in oceans, under the ground etc. – platforms are becoming hegemonic. The Covid-19 pandemic sharply shows this. Platform’s hegemony is represented by the fact that they both absorb digital behaviours and subsume analogical ones, inducing their translation into a digital format. How many sectors of life have passed from analogical to digital during the pandemic? How many are going back? There is no written answer to this question. Surely, there are forms of digital and analogical resistances that can act against and interfere with the platform monopolisation of life.