Platform urbanism is the latest expression of the Internet industry’s relentless drive to capture the digital culture of participation for the purposes of capital accumulation. Already in the early 2000s, after the dot.com stock market crash of 2001, the organic intellectuals of Silicon Valley were spreading the message that harnessing users’ participation was an essential component of any successful business strategy in a new economic environment shaped by an abundance of information and a scarcity of attention.[1] The movement from virtual communities to the social web, and then from the web 2.0 to social media and platform capitalism, has thus been a process of progressively consolidating a model that combines an extractive approach to monetisation based on data mining with a governmental approach based on algorithmic regulation to managing the behaviour of networked populations.[2]

On the one hand, then, platform capitalism has renewed and extended the power of what Romano Alquati called ‘valorising information’ – a concept that Matteo Pasquinelli has recently suggested can be considered as forming a link between the cybernetic notion of information and the Marxist theory of value.[3] In his militant co-research on the Italian I.T. corporation Olivetti in the early 1960s, Alquati defined valorising information as the information that moved through the circuits of the industrial factory, produced by and around workers themselves, which was subsequently channelled vertically by management and turned into ‘control information’. Thus, following Pasquinelli, one can see such valorising/control information today (such as metadata) as having been systematically harvested by networked Turing machines in ways that bring together the powers of dead capital (machines) and living capital (both waged and free labour) in new infrastructural assemblages of value extraction. If industrial capital’s discovery of valorising information acknowledged that the living labour involved in the assembly line also produced a surplus of information that could be channelled upwards towards management and fed back downwards onto the production floor, then platform urbanism extends this extractive process to what Italian autonomists called ‘the city as social factory’ by turning it into a series of speculative assets.

This has not caused the disappearance of industrial labour. On the contrary, the latter has now become yoked to what, with Gabriel Tarde and Maurizio Lazzarato, we might call the economic psychology of the techno-social brain – that is, the quantifiable collective flows of beliefs and desires algorithmically coded through social plugins such as like, share, or rate and re-worked by A.I. programs and systems.[4] This is apparent in the case of Amazon, which yokes the harshest forms of industrial – that is, mechanical and de-humanising – labour in its warehouses and supply networks to an economic psychology of evaluations, ratings, preferences and purchases all organised by machine-learning algorithms and parametric software architectures[5].

As in the Fordist factory, such economic organisation also implies a governmental mode of power. This may be based on what one could call the post-digital concept of the social, which grasps the social as an informational medium of transmission while recording it as a dynamic computational model. Digital social networks are the medium through which information propagates – modulated by social topologies formed either by conscious or nonconscious connections, depending on whether they are generated by the act of ‘adding a friend’ or following on social media, or through automated nonconscious patterning: the clustering of profiles around a specific product, place visited, flat rented out, film seen and so on.[6] In as much as they need to support the daily interactions of large numbers of heterogeneous users such as clients and workers, platform capitalism, and especially platform urbanism, also need to develop specific kinds of governmental technologies. These technologies aim to affect conducts or behaviours by means of behaviourist-inspired techniques of incentivising and disincentivising, rewarding and punishing behaviour, which make possible the ultra-stability of very large systems supporting enormous quantities of communication and interaction.[7] Such techniques redesign what Caribbean theorist Sylvia Winters, taking up Franz Fanon, describes as the sociogenic principle or the process of sociogenesis as a specific level of individuation distinguished from the phenotypical genesis (affecting the species) and ontogenesis (affecting the individual).[8] If sociogenesis depends on, without being reducible to, the mobilisation of the physiology of the brain and its chemical mechanisms specifically for the constant reproduction of social identities and hierarchies, then the post-digital social provides the new conditions for the genesis of the social by means of something that might be called algorithmic hyper-socialisation.[9]

Platform urbanism as represented by companies such as Airbnb, Uber and WeWork (but no less so by companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and others) also techno-colonises urban space – a process whereby private corporations subtly and stealthily appropriate governmental functions to redesign the social life of the cities for the purposes of capital accumulation. This involves a range of processes and approaches that are justified in the name of the principle of utility value (that is, the satisfaction of customers). Platform urbanism includes: Airbnb's commercial enclosure of residential properties in the historical centres of tourist-ified cities in ways that make such properties unaffordable for local inhabitants[10]; the replacement of public transport with fleets of private cars for hire; the possible movement towards a world of purely online shopping culture and rider-delivered commodities, which would spell the final end for local businesses; and the relocation of erotic and sentimental encounters away from physical spaces and towards dating apps. Redeploying the calculation techniques invented by Swiss mathematician Leonard Euler in his solution to the puzzle of Königsberg’s bridges in 1736, platform capitalism models the city (and the social) as a tangle of possible computable routes to find the best deal for anything.

And yet, such processes of techno-colonisation also produce its shadows. For example, in the post-postcolonial city, as Ravi Sundaram has observed, digital sociality has definitely contributed to breaking down the post-colonial model of the modern city and its rigid control of urban flows, which presupposed the separation between the social (as a space inhabited by political actors and ruled by the state) and the medial (as a space of regulated leisure formed by distinct type of institutions such as cinema, the press etc).[11] For Sundaram, this has turned populations into media proliferators acting through shadow networks (such as Whatsapp groups and suchlike) which are causing a crisis of governmentality agitated by hidden currents of news which occasionally erupt in episodes of violence or organised revolt.

It is important then to hold on to the description of the predatory, neo-colonial character of platform urbanism, while at the same time continuing to perceive the forces that move beneath and beyond the power of utility or customer satisfaction and the promise of a smooth hyper-governability of urban spaces. This means, for example, discerning what it is that exceeds utility value or sheer economic survival in the willing subscription of subjects and the mass adoption of platform urbanism. The ambivalent nature of platform urbanism, as a mode of the capitalist capture of value, lies in the ways in which it mobilises desires and beliefs that could demand new kinds of institutions. These are desires for traveling, visiting, and knowing new places, for independent forms of labour, for access to commodities that enact specific passions and desires, for the freedom to choose where and how to work, for social contact and sexual/erotic experiences beyond the limits of specific places, for social contact beyond one's limited circles, for knowledge and art, and even for knowing the world through data in ways which support existential rather than extractive modes of relation.[12]

Such techno-social desires, while perhaps emancipatory, are nonetheless desires born out of the condition of planetary entanglement in hyper-connectivity and shaped by platform capitalism, and cannot be trusted to produce automatically the kinds of institutional forms that would not just satisfy these desires and bring them back into equilibrium, ready to re-start a new act of consumption. Like networked movements, they have at the moment an ephemeral and subordinate existence, failing to find an enduring focus of subjectivation and organisation that could break the hold that platform capital has over them. However, a recognition of the actual presence of such emancipatory desire should be part of any effort to turn around the tide of platform urbanism's techno-colonisation of cities and their extension of private accumulation, intensification of inequalities, and decomposition of urban forms of life. This is a necessary task in as much as, as the ongoing Covid-19 pandemics show, the looming planetary crises and challenges of the coming decades risk opening new venues, providing new opportunities for platform capital to take hold of our ways of living, working and socialising.[13]