Last edited: 07/10/22
Note from 31/12/24: Again, like the capitalism page. I see what I was working on a couple of years ago, and although this lacks substance or clarity, I think the ideas at least had some merit. Particularly the idea of the nomosocial that I was trying to explain at the time. I'll finish this page in the New Year and lean on some of the work I have since written which deals with these ideas in a more lucid and competent manner.
Platform Studies is important and interesting. Done properly, it is an interdisciplinary area of study that can elucidate the prevailing structure of our time. The dominance of platform business structures relies on the mass concentration of capital and population as permited by rusty anti-trust laws and Neoliberalism's rejection of "the modern infrastructural ideal" - platforms have slowly started to replace infrastructures. Technofeudalism is a heartbeat away.
What we are seeing first hand in social media platforms is the simultaneous processes through which everyday interaction, sociability and democracy are being integrated within this wider transactional architecture. Thus, the fundamental commonality between all digital platforms is their systematic formalisation of peer-to-peer exchanges within a rules-based system. Consequently, their primary characteristics are those of a marketplace, not a firm.
Adrian Athique, 'Digital Emporiums: Evolutionary Pathways to Platform capitalism' in Platform Capitalism in India, pp. 23-41.
Athique's article is interesting. It articulates the development of a Platform Economy in India - an era where "digitally mediated transactions transform economy society and culture" (Marc Steinberg, 'Toyotism as a Prehistory of Digital Platforms, 2022') - directly tied to Narendra Modi's 'Digital India' Programme. Yet I can't help but feel uncomfortable at this articulation of a platform as a marketplace. Digital Platform Companies are businesses that necessarily condense, collect, concentrate, repurpose data in such a way as to gain powerful market-shares. The idea of a marketplace of free traders with equal opportunity plays into the metaphor of the platform as a flat plane of immanence upon which transactions occur freely, without barrier, according to the law of the free market. This would be the case were platform companies not in the business of creating their own wealth. As well as influencing and limiting our social/cultural/economic engagement by way of their 'walled gardens' (high high walls made of switching costs and network effects); in the words of Steinberg once again: "the platform relies on a ‘new business model, capable of extracting and controlling immense amounts of data’ (Srnicek 2016, p. 6), resulting in a tendency towards monopolistic or oligopolistic firms, and leading some to term this ‘surveillance capitalism’. Nick Srnicek's 2016 book Platform Capitalism is essential for conceptualising the figuring of these business models.
"Here, I hope to show an emerging concept of the ‘nomosocial’. Related to the parasocial, the nomosocial is the language and communication techniques used by content creators to encourage attention and engagement from their fans; nomos; value; wealth. The nomosocial, I hope to show, is tied to the architecture that houses it as much as it is to the detached icons from which it stems. The value of this emerging concept, I believe, will be in opportunities for deepened understanding of free labour, the modern audience economy, and the interplay of platforms, content producers, consumers, and their associated algorithms; all important concepts in the analysis of the platform economy." - Quoted from a report I'm writing.
It's worth opening up with two of the most basic quotes that necessitated my initial proposal of this concept.
“What was new in Saussure is that he attempted to see language as value. In other words, he treats language as a system of the differential relations of signifiers, in which meaning is not present a priori but located within a system of the ascription of difference, that is, it emerges from the interval between words or terms.”
Kōjin Karatani, trans. Gavin Walker, Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility, p.18.
“what we are treating here as the inherent value of a commodity can itself only be posited at precisely the moment when two mutually distinct systems of value-relation come to be thought. The value of a commodity in a single system is simply a relative value determined by multiple relations, and, in this sense, the distinction between equal and unequal exchange is meaningless. Thus, exchange in the interior of this system would never give rise to surplus value.”
Kōjin Karatani, p. 44
The basic idea behind this formulation is so forth:
To view the communicative practices of influencers as parasocial - as is the standard in Platform and Media Studies - belies an exchange of commodities rather than an exchange of communicative acts. Hence the necessity of the nomosocial.
Before I deep dive into the linguistics though. It must be worth noting that at a base-level all the nomosocial is is a framework to better understand the typical behaviours and actions that content creators do online in order to properly capture an 'audience commodity' and milk them dry.
Saussure conceptualised the standard communicative act in terms of equal exchange; analagous to Marx's conception of merchant capital M-C-M' (Message-Code-Message' as analagous to Money-Commodity-Money')
However, the parasocial doesn't quite work like that; it takes a form closer to M-C C-M'; it suspiciously starts to resemble Marx's model of industrial capital; that is the exchange of the commodity of labour for wages and labour for capital. But we are still talking about sociality here: the relationship articulated by M-C C-M' is Message-Code Code-Message' (The idea is to indicate a split between subject and object).
Let's throw money into the equation; an influencer makes money from engagement, right? So the new formula works out to: Me-C C-Mo. This doesn't seem to tell the whole story; nor does it really make sense as a social act any more; this model seems quite good for something like a donation on a livestream.
There must be two systems operating here. A second one, behind the scenes, where the 'code' necessarily becomes a 'commodity'. This would look clumsily like this: Me-Cd-Me' (Co-Co'-Mo)
This still doesn't illustrate the problem very well. Especially when you try and type it out for html. A different model; one based on Saussure's model of interlocution might help.
Two years on, I think this is still fundamentally an interesting idea of grappling with the data economy - I'm not sure I was quite there with it. I would turn these ideas into a paper which was accepted to a conference that Summer. I'll pull from that and finish these old ideas this new year.