Today, November 7, 2020, is the final day of the week that, if in person in Venice, I would be blogging about Platform Urbanism in the Austrian Pavilion. It is also the day that we, US and world citizens alike, heard that Donald Trump has been voted out of office. So many competing thoughts: hard to write on a complex subject when we are experiencing, ever so briefly, pure affect (read: elation); hard to separate the tragedy of the last four years from neoliberalism, the gig economy, the discourse of genius and competition, and winner-take-all ethics.

The issues of state-as-controller-of-data that made Corbyn’s proposal interesting has sent me down a rabbit hole. Meant as an escape from the US wild west approach to a digital economy and fueled by the simple anarchist thought that the state, while better than the market, might also not be trusted with the welfare of platform workers, the focus on 'digital democracy' has proved confusing. Does 'digital' refer to social media, online voting, or service platforms? Does 'democracy' guarantee citizen privacy and preventions of worker abuse? Or access to government participation? And, in the end, do either affect what I am really interested in: the conditions affecting the production of architecture and the urban environment? Still, the faith that state governance is materially relevant to platform work led me on.