Terraforming (literally, 'Earth-shaping') is a process of modifying a planetary surface to reconfigure its topography or ecology, affecting the entire biosphere. Forming is not (only) about shaping and configuring, but also producing and creating, or making something begin to exist. We are currently confronted with the hypothesis that Mars is the most likely candidate for terraforming. How to logistically and methodologically achieve this, the economics and politics involved, and the ethics of altering such an environment are all issues coming under scrutiny as a result of the projects being developed by the company Space X (Space Exploration Technologies Corporation).

However, while we are looking at the sky, profound mutations are occurring on Earth. We are assisting the platforming of planetary urbanscapes. The ubiquitous operations of digital platforms are radically re-shaping our lives and the planet we inhabit. Platforming is a process that redefines collective existence on this planet. Here I propose some partial notes towards the definition of some coordinates for the navigation of the emergent scenario.

Platforming as Crisis

Platforming rhymes with crisis. Even if the genealogy of platforming can be traced as far back as the 1990s, the crucial turning point for the affirmation of the process was the financial crisis of 2007/2008 – when the general low-rate environment promoted by central banks created the conditions for massive financial investment of venture capital in high-risk assets such as digital platforms. Platforming follows the rules of the 'smartness mandate'. [1]

'The new vision of smartness is inextricably tied to the language of crisis, whether a financial, ecological, or security event. (…) advocates of smartness see opportunities to decentralize agency and intelligence by distributing it among objects, networks, and life forms. They predict that environmentally extended smartness will take the place of deliberative planning, allowing resilience in a perpetually transforming world.'[2]

Platforming prompts a holistic vision with new lexicons and infrastructures with 'the political imperative that smartness be extended to all areas of life. In this sense, the smart mandate is what follows "the shock doctrine".[3] Instability, risk, continuous change are the main ingredients of platforming, a set of conditions which we see clearly during the Covid-19 pandemic, thus pushing forward the process of platforming even further. Crisis becomes the norm of our existences as platforms shape and rationalise these existences.

Platforming the Industrial Revolution 4.0

The platforming process sees planetary urbanisation as its terrain of action and its primary resource. While oil and gas platforms extract raw materials offshore and underground, digital platforms extract their raw material (data) inland and from the foreground.

Platforms are the quintessential element of the so-called 'Industrial Revolution 4.0.' They represent the iridescent assemblage of path-breaking and ground-breaking emerging forms of production, distribution, and consumption. Platforms are a complex ecology of labour-force, technologies and environments. Platforms, as well as technology in general, are not neutral, and their use is decided in social and political struggles.

Platform urbanism is the 'definitive' overlap between capitalism and urbanisation, it is not simply the support of the economy (like the old industrial cities), but a decisive part of a financially, technologically and industrially integrated production that builds an undifferentiated planetary space for its measure. As such, it takes the form of a battlefield that goes from mechanical to machinic, attempting to establish a new aesthetic and material regime. The aim is to produce regularity and organicity in an urban fabric that is instead conflictual, and within which relations are defined in a cyborg-like interweaving of human and machine.

Urban and industrial revolutions are planetary phenomena. The first industrial revolution was the interlinking of the destruction of the textile industry in India, the slave trade on the Atlantic, the plantation system in America, and the construction of a new urban figure in Western Europe: Metropolis. Focusing on this geographical quadrant, we can schematically say that: Metropolis superseded the Medieval city in conjunction with the dynamics of the Industrial Revolution 1.0; the City-Factory superseded the Metropolis in parallel with the Taylor-Fordist transformation (Industrial Revolution 2.0); the Informational/Global City superseded the City-Factory according to the logistics and ICT revolutions (Industrial Revolution 3.0); the Platforming of Urbanscapes (4.0) is superseding the Informational/Global City.

The Hyper-Urban

The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines 'industry' as a 'group of productive enterprises or organisations that produce or supply goods, services, or sources of income. In economics, industries are generally classified as primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary'. This general definition consents to moving beyond the widespread debate about 'post-industrialism' that has strongly characterised the past few decades. What has been superseded (post-) is the Fordist factory as the icon of the capitalist mode of production – at least in the 'Global North'. However, capitalist industrialisation is a process that, far from decreasing, has expanded and intensely increased in the last decades. Apart from its multiple workplaces, industrialisation is a dynamic that shapes social reproduction and societal operations at large. We are living in an increasingly hyper-industrialised way.

Platforming represents the entrance into this era of hyper-urbanism, and the platform-based ecosystem entangles private and public organisations and individuals. Hyper-urbanscapes are the algorithmic avatars of the agglomerations and logistical circuits of planetary urbanisation, making the distinction and the tension between the analogical and the digital urbanity fade.

Hyper-urbanism is not a set of technical tools. There is no such thing as an autonomy of technology. Hyper-urbanism is a political technology, defining a social relation mediated by objects and images.

The Platform as a City

Any single platform is a city in itself. The Web is the infrastructure connecting every City-Platform. Within the oceanic covering of Earth created by platforming, hyper-urbanscapes tend to cover the whole planetary surface, and each platform represents a more or less localised fluctuating archipelago of islands/cities. Platforms are architectures of digital extrastatecraft. Each platform has its own city-planning, its denizens, its languages, its governance. Platform territories are a zonal technology colonising space through the management of time.

City-Platforms are a process operating in temporal terms. Uncertainty about the future is managed through continuous recourse to the present as if it were a 'demo', a 'prototype' of the future. City-Platforms are based on a certain degree of 'self-organisation' through which previous discourses on structures and the social are replaced by a focus on infrastructure and a fetish for big data and analytics that guide development in the absence of defined goals and objectives. A development logic that mimics that of software, made up of demos, tests, updates and experiments, in which 'technicians' are always working not to 'solve problems' but to produce new versions – which can never be 'completed' – of new cities and spaces around the world. City-Platforms promote computationally and digitally managed systems that can learn and adapt, self-evolve and continuously optimise themselves by collecting data without the need for 'external' political or social intervention.

The digital skin of City-Platforms is continuously mapped. At the end, the geographical project of 'Modernity' is accomplished. The Map is the Territory. While at the dawn of 'Modernity' maps and architectures of territories and cities were realized thanks to the ocular trick of linear perspective, nowadays maps and architectures of Planetary Hyper-Urbanscapes and Platform-Cities are realized thanks to the ocular trick of the 360-degree vision of digital reality. The ways in which we traverse contemporary urbanscapes is no longer through walking. It is a navigation.

Cyborg-Subjects / A Politics for Navigation

Platforming is a process, signalling a continuous crisis, emerging within the Industrial Revolution 4.0, shaping a hyper-urban planet made of bizarre de-territorialised/re-territorialised ubiquitous Platform-Cities. Denizens of this planet are Cyborg-Subjects.

This complex meta-infrastructure is a power-design and a field of multiple tensions, conflicts, counter-logistics practices, and struggles.

Platforming marks the inability of the neo-liberal apparatus to carry out an effective and efficient governance of planet territoriality 'from above'. Platforming operates on an 'ungovernable' planetary society, and needs the continuous exploitation of the potential for social interconnection that pulsates in its labyrinths. Cyborg-Subjects are 'slaves' of platforming, like Marx's worker was for the mechanical frame, like the Fordist worker was for the assembly line, like colonised subjects for colonialism, like women for patriarchy. Collective action and organisations of Cyborg-Subjects are continuous potential threats for platforming, like Marx's worker was for the mechanical frame, like the Fordist worker was for the assembly line, like colonised subjects for colonialism, like women for patriarchy– all interlocked into an accumulating state of perpetuated hegemonies. A politics of counter-social social interconnection for the Cyborg-Subjects, new forms of subjectivation, should probably sound like new forms of navigation.

We need to explore our planet again.