PLATFORM: MOVEMENT, QUERY, RESOLUTION.

From wherever I enter this space, it is movement, a void permeating and restructuring all solids. Circling, the platform brims with swings that emerge, interconnect, dissolve. Swirling, it resolves denser, more massive accumulations, immediately weighing on me, too, from each of its shifting sides. The pressure I feel does not originate from an outside; it is not material (space) proper, rather it is as if time had found spatial residue to stir and shake. Its drift is visceral, crawling and banging within me, affecting my mental as well as my physical chemistry. The performativity of the volatile data harnessed and leveraged by the platform, restructures the social, the urban, the (in)dividual. As an ad proclaims: 'Our platform eats the world's dirtiest data for breakfast.' Solid qualities melt into air – we have heard the quote numerous times – but this ‘air’ is flush with the ‘data sweat aerosols I transpire’, the quantitative clouds that moisten the technocapitalist land grab. Whatever value I feed the matching engine with, the platform – an auction regime – churns out a concrete idea of me as a future option; I become price. Is there a leverage that allows me to surf (yes, more than survive!) the tumultuous waves of such volatility? To create my own performative flow of a future saturated in presence?

The unbounding release is not simply an ever more accelerated fluctuation and expansion. Rather, it lives and swings through differentiations, which unswerving collapse into contingent moves. This intensity follows a derivative logic, a manifestation of volatility that performatively collects, claims and so co-opts the states and relations of what it inundates. The derivative, we should note, is not only a financial instrument, contract or narrative. It is first and foremost the metadata of what inherently must remain unknown and uncertain. Even though it cannot be real, it is root and origin borne of futurity at instance from risk. It becomes real as it routes, connects, preempts and makes sense of all the expectations out there, as capriciously proliferating as they are, a meta-anticipation conceived by the immanent quantification of pricing. The derivative is no axiom, nor even a principle; it is motion, a flow that creates jumps without swings.

The first metadata to be quantitatively modelled and applied on a massive scale, the derivative has become the paradigmatic function of how finance operates on the very resource it aims to eviscerate: the future. Consequently, the derivative has taken hold outside the arcane world of financial speculation. The future emerges today within a normativity that follows a derivative paradigm: the exploitation of algorithmic processes that leverage the dynamic recalibration of contingent claims (another term for derivatives) is not only characteristic of finance. While the derivative is a contractual entity, it exceeds the representative dimension of law: its performative language has become the template for a technocapitalism (a term I use for data-driven financial and platform capitalism) in which the future acts on the present. The technowledge – the term designates the fusion of automation, technology and knowledge beyond human apperception – of the derivative permeates all manifestations (also those that have not yet manifested), decapsulating linear acceleration into multifarious, fleeting, non-directional movements. In its volatile intersections, capital builds its nurturing, globality-creating nests.

In the derivative condition solids are prone to drift. Power shifts from representative to performative speech, evoking the non-reign of the relative, the precarious, the contingent. Always a move implied to be entangled with other moves, the derivative dominates the logics of escalation. Speaking from within the void nested in each drive, it consolidates matter (as data) without being matter – meta-matter (meta-data) of any underlying asset – and at the same time it delivers the virtual epiphany of their very potentials, whether they relate to acts or behaviours. The incessantly recalibrated cascades of derivatives form a skewed, volatile grid of anticipations. Here, bounding and unbounding switch at moment; and as these decentred instants already belong to a nearest future, they are unattainable in the depth of their micro-time. This barren abyss only knows how to annihilate and thus liquidate the bond between past, present and future. Value, ceasing to animate life across time, is reengineered into the price of future almighty.

In the presence of volatility escalations, truth as the epiphany of the probability paradigm collapses (normal distribution is speechless in the face of extreme events). Unbounding what (seems to) matter, the derivative paradigm provokes the non-order of contingency, a potentially open, fertile array which has successfully been captured by technocapitalism to leverage its power and profits. This instance, however, might also allow those exploited to learn how to leverage the other face of the derivative and what it offers in all contingency (instead of attempting to hedge what cannot be owned and secured). Grasping and resolving volatility as a techne, the performative practice of bearing risk together, could unleash common potentials at present, as Randy Martin already argued.

The question is: what are our tokens in this stateless state, this shifting maze of inter-dis-connections that the platform and its derivative logic spawns, recalibrates, dissolves? What is the leverage that allows us, not only to survive the onslaught of data-driven sovereignty but to surf the waves of volatility ourselves to create the performative flows of a becoming saturated in our lived presence?

UNBOUNDING 1

In 1959, Edward Oakley Thorp walks into a casino for the first time in his life. In contrast to other folks flocking the gambling dens in Las Vegas, he is not a compulsive gambler. To the contrary, Thorp is a mathematics professor at the prestigious MIT with a knack for applying theory in practice. Hence, he ventures to Las Vegas to proof a scientific point (and to make a fast buck in passing). He appropriates an IBM 704 computer and Fortran coding to quantitatively calculate his winning chances on Blackjack and, in the wake, becomes a pioneer of probability theory and statistics. Additionally, he builds the first wearable computer (1961) with his colleague at the MIT, Claude Shannon, the father of information theory (1948) and Thorp, Shannon and their wives Vivian and Betty dress and wire up to improve their odds at Roulette in Las Vegas.

Computers weren’t banned from gambling venues simply because no one anticipated their use at a time when computers were room-sized, at least. And so, it took another decade or two until computers were banned, partly because a generation inspired by Ed Thorp continued his ‘experiments’: his book Beat the Dealer (1961) was an instant bestseller because Thorp proved mathematically, and for the very first time, that the house advantage of a casino can be overcome. Thorp published his research forays into gambling also in scientific journals because he considered it an academic exercise to produce knowledge on probability theory and statistics.

However, Thorp started looking for a bigger haul and he found it in a much more pervasive ecosystem. He left academia to develop and exploit science-based data-crunching methods in financial markets. In the process, he co-founded the first quantitative hedge fund in history (1969). Henceforth, Thorp kept his sophisticated knowledge undisclosed for the sole benefit of a select few investors. As a result, his contribution did not count when the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics (in fact, The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) was awarded. In vain he had laid claim on an academic model known as Black-Scholes-Merton. The sociologist Donald MacKenzie appreciated the game-changing influence of the economic model on finance with a new term: performativity. Nevertheless, Thorp won a title of honour: the father of quants. Ever since, a plethora of mathematicians and physicists have abandoned academic and state financed research for the lucrative promise of quantitative finance.

This is the neoliberal condition, and Thorp is its crystal image, a scientist-entrepreneur-philanthropist engaged in information markets who exploits probability in order to make use of risk as a productive force. Setting off from cold war cybernetics and game theory, welfare politics and the interdependence of western nations headed by the USA, the terms and conditions of the neoliberal era are about to assert themselves. And in the wake, its ’smart ideology' is to facilitate the transition 'from the post-war Fordist-Keynesian compromise to the highly entrepreneurial and financialised urbanism' (as Evgeny Morozov and Francesca Bria argue in 2018 in a study on smart cities for the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung) whose consequential geopolitics will lay the groundwork for data-driven urban platformism.

UNBOUNDING 2

In 1973, the tides change. With the abandonment of the Bretton Woods agreement and the consequential collapse of the Western currency rate system, markets entered riskier, more volatile environments. In the same year, Fisher Black and Myron Scholes published their theoretical model, expanded by Robert C. Merton, for the pricing of options. Based on volatility as a measure of risk, this approach answered to the new uncertainty. And endorsed by the Chicago School economist Milton Friedman, the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) opened and institutionalised derivative trading.

This 'switch' is not to be underestimated: While before 1973, derivatives were considered gambling and thus an immoral and corrosive activity, scientific research and technological innovation channelled into mathematical formulation turned the gamble into what was now regarded as sound science – made available via ICT, microchip switching meets Brownian stochastics meets probabilistic valuation regimes. Provoked by a shift in the modality of thought, re-engineered scientific models reorient the politics of post-war progress (and its utopia of space colonisation with all its fanciful imagery and representations in literature, art and film, amongst others) to an ‘iconoclast’ performative colonisation of time. As Elie Ayache, a financial engineer and philosopher, once remarked, 'the market is the technology of time, the technology of the future that allows us to travel in the future just like the technology of space, meaning the rockets, allowed us to go and discover space.'

What will become the data platform is still the science fiction of another future, a future we are living. But its business model is already taking shape. In a risk environment, market swings are either a threat or an opportunity. Conceptually, risk (in contrast to uncertainty) lends itself to quantitative formulation. This is a crucial difference because we do not know what the future brings (no oracle manages this epiphany, not even a mathematical one). But we can describe our volatile expectations and anticipations in conversational and narrative styles; and we can formulate what we anticipate mathematically. In derivative markets, quantitative assertions about the future are derived from historic or stochastic data, which are incessantly recalibrated in order to stay ‘in touch’ with (preempt as fully as possible) what the future will bring. An experience we all share is that expectations beget expectations. Also, derivatives are not only built on a single fundamental premise (its underlying) but on each other, too. These cascades of complex interrelations are to accommodate each contingent swing that risk anticipation reads from the margins of the unknown horizon we call uncertainty. As a consequence of quantification, price absorbs value completely (a fact obscured by the habitual misuse of term 'value' in data-driven business models).

Increasingly, this regime turns the market engine into a pricing platform – an automated global oracle whose ‘Phytia’ enunciates the brimming voices of implied volatility that claim the future at present (not accidentally, derivatives are also called contingent claims). In its historic progression – which also reflects other data-driven, infrastructural and informational developments – the profit centre shifts along technological turns: from human traders to quants (the quantitative analysts sensitive to volatility as the opportunity to exploit the future-at-present) to developers (who escalate resolution into immediacy by coding bots, innovating infrastructure, rearranging logistics and much more). Soon, it seems, coders will make themselves redundant with AI taking over. But this might not be the final bang for human involvement (as we will refer to below).

Comparably early, global finance attains the level of platform in its own right, as it becomes a combined data-driven, quantitative, informational, technological, scopic, economic and interactive set of tools and applications geared to profit-making. Here, at its peak, the neoliberal condition gives way to a new, derivative condition. The ‘neoliberal appreciation regime’ is less bound to (derivative of) the entrepreneurial ‘ethos’ and its profit regime, but rather invested in or against the volatility markets perform. Moving with and along volatility delivers the advantage for exploiting and leveraging risk options through the inter-exchange of behavioural and other anticipations. Within this new paradigm, the language of power changes radically: the derivative has no use nor time for representation. It couldn’t care less about telling us stories, defeating us with images, persuading us with branded pretence. Rather, it operates in and through us. Its speech is performative, an ever changing, volatile agency that claims the future (but merely a promise if you are on its receiving end, as capitalism has shown all along).

It is not only about controlling and governing the random swings, uncertainties and contingencies of its own making and of the world more generally. Quite to the contrary, finance is the first industry that produces and reproduces volatility (i.e., risk) in every ‘particle’ that gets caught in its maelstrom. Derivatives are metadata par excellence. They not only influence the relations between people and the market (the liberal condition), but the relations between people, market and state (the neoliberal condition). The UNBOUNDING yielded by derivative paradigm is its performativity in respect to other realms, the wider world: it spills over and makes everything act in accordance with its performative speech. Credit, distinction, appreciation are not solid forms of social relations, they turn into a liquified resource, like water whose natural flows are claimed, managed, leveraged and exploited. In his PLATFORM AUSTRIA blog entry, Douglas Spencer highlights the fact that 'connectivity is capital.' 'We' are 'producing our own immediate exchange value,' or in this text’s terminology, the precarious subject is delivered to render price. Subjected to the labour of incessant recalibration as the parasitic other of self-constitution, she reconfigures into adaptive assemblages of varied and often contradictory contingent claims that make or unmake her future-at-the-present.

UNBOUNDING 3

This is the derivative condition where volatility and leverage reign. Representation is either liquified, erased, or diminished to a mere idol of its former meaning and power. The derivative paradigm constitutes a relational power whose performativity summons everything traded in markets (across the whole gamut, from commodities to appreciation to data exhaust) to take care of their future potential as asset at all (micro)times. You either adept (by continuous recalibration) or find yourself externalised. Hidden behind the intricacies of finance technowledge, this shift is reflected in the experience worldwide of precarity and its exploitation by data platforms. A stark example is the Chinese credit score system, a massive apparatus that takes the urban platform to the level of an entire country. By outsourcing evaluation and its recalibration to the users of mandatory apps (i.e., China’s entire population), it turns implied volatility, the forecast of probable changes in the future, into an all-encompassing real-time matrix of clicks, likes, etc. Thus, data-driven state governance introduces a credit-based, automated human rights regime that ‘nudges’ citizens to leverage and hedge their risk behaviour to either thrive through norm adaptation or at least avoid exclusion defined by a highly differentiated penalty system.

On the Chinese credit platform, debt is a moral obligation of submission to a state ideology that defines who earns the status of human being and who is (gradually) dehumanised. The leverage seems clear enough, total harmonisation of population and state. The question arises as to how debt and leverage are linked in technocapitalism more generally. The critique of debt rarely takes this issue into account and therefore tends to overlook a crucial point: leverage is debt that taps into the future in order to produce opportunity. The abundance it offers, however, is seldom committed to the prosperity and well-being of those kept in debt. Rather, the hegemonic claims of technocapitalism use leverage to reproduce those in debt. This provides an insight into the UNBOUNDING of the derivative condition in social relations, replicated on technocapitalist platforms and the sovereignty they increasingly acquire. To put it briefly, in this reading society is stratified into social asset classes differentiated by access to affiliation, aspiration and distinction granted variably to its tiers. On top, the 1% of the leverage class creates fabulous wealth and power by leveraging, swapping or rolling over credit acquired with gains produced from the (instantaneous) exploitation of the debt classes whose access to leverage decreases down its tiers (not only in a financial sense like mortgages and consumer credit but also as access to education, networks, labour, technologies, etc.). At the bottom, the lowest tier is excluded even from entering into debt, and thus from participating in the order of the current times (microfinancing, from this perspective, is leverage incentivising and indebting the outcast poor to move up into the exploitable ranks of the debt classes). At the moment of default – as evidenced by the cascade of evaporating (systemic) trust from subprime to financial to sovereign debt crises – the leverage class offsets its leveraged capital-turned toxic debt to the debt classes, to states and to populations that only attract high-risk capital on extremely damaging terms. Those who have been put at risk keep being consumed by those who hedge risk.

Leverage and volatility – the engines driving the derivative paradigm – create future bonds vis-à-vis the contingent actualisations of price at present. This is not an issue of finance alone; it also describes the fundamental business model behind data platforms and hence the technocapitalist urban platform (think of the bidding engine behind Google Ads and AdSense or the way the gig economy remakes the lowers tiers of the urban debt class into a new servant class). As a core expression of the performative speech of power, leverage functions as a wealth attractor from the future. It inflates its reach by massive scalability both in the sense of optionality and infrastructure. Data platforms would not exist and would not be able to claim the future without a host of leverage applications across a gamut of networks, assemblages and applications. The more monolithic a platform, the more leverage it manifests.

UNBOUNDING 4

In the late 1970s, more and more physics and math students and graduates take their cues from Ed Thorp. Taking advantage of technological advancement and computation, they experiment with wearable computing to beat Roulette and at the same time establish hedge funds that marry prediction concepts, technologies and coding. Predication even becomes the name of an avantgarde hedge fund that pioneers black box trading. The deregulation of the 1980s – a term designating the self-regulation of private enterprises within public spheres – incentivises this generation of quants to add finance to their science and academia portfolio. And with the increased availability and computability of massive data sets, automation and algorithmisation become profitable in the boom years of the late 1990s.

Data collection has always been at the core of capitalist societies. Now, financial engineers not only work on algorithms to replace human traders. In close collaboration with data experts from other fields of science, they code massive data systems that analyse, evaluate and apply data at instance – a capacity that a decade later is going to be referred to as 'big data'. The global real-time platform of finance is on the verge of expanding to wider socio-economic realms. What is missing is a business model that exploits the prognostic ingenuity of the derivative to deal with contingent volatility, and thus offers the leverage to scale up to global implementation. The event that proves the performativity of the derivative paradigm on network society and social media and topples entire market structures, comes when Google turns from open access, to algorithmic auctioning platform in 2000.

Algorithms are not only written, automated and manipulated but owned and exploited. Hence, the question at the core of technocapitalism concerns the biopower of the leverage class. The 'derivative logic' (a term introduced by Randy Martin in his financialisation studies) infiltrate social, legal, temporal and material relations to a degree that it becomes the canon of technopolitical governance. And as derivatives are metadata par excellence, this turn has not only affected finance and the economy, but also social relations, media and politics. This case is often neglected, as debates about the contours of our technocapitalist era are often narrowed down to a 'dataism' that Evgeny Morozov exposes in his review of Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism: 'Google and Facebook were restructuring the world, not just solving its problems.' Long before Google and Facebook appeared on the world stage of proprietary digitisation, the introduction of scientifically brokered derivative models prompted waves of massive data capture and exploitation schemes. This rise not only constitutes a source of what becomes Big Data. The derivative performatively prestructures the very modes to which the capitalist system leverages the shifting risk (volatility) of what is always unknown (the future). Thus, firms like Google and Facebook are not simply Big Tech; rather, we should understand them as Hedge Funds that speculatively capture, capitalise, recalibrate, govern and make (future) individual behaviour and social patterns at any (micro)moment.

The data platform – which gives rise to the urban platform and its real-time, high-frequency governance – is a manifestation of the derivative condition with consequence for neoliberal competition. Technocapitalism is not defined by competition in the sense of a contest between market agents. Instead, it facilitates a hypercompetitive environment in which the struggle to stay in ‘business’ turns into a visceral fight for survival that can only be secured by monopolising. The systemic logic demands internalisation and absorption of what emerges as competitive threat. Rather than trying to find a niche and successfully expand it – the neoliberal competition narrative for economies of scarcity – the only ‘niche’ left in a hypercompetitive and performative economy of abundance, is the totality of the market. Hence, the criticism that platform capitalism predetermines the future via competing forecasting technologies is at an impasse, because it is not about who predicts outcome better (the successful competitor in neoliberal terms) but who owns the proprietary technologies that automate and service prediction, forecast and recognition in the first place (the venture capitalist program). The leverage implied is that the corporate black box attains total control (in political terms, sovereignty) to reimplant scarcity into an economy of abundance. The performativity of the derivative paradigm manifests in the siloed pricing consolidation of all microperformative engagements under the platform umbrella.

As mentioned above, this is not the final bang for human involvement. Evgeny Morozov and Francesca Bria, for instance, offer a remedy that does not reject the urban platform but reconceptualises, reengineers and resocialises it away from the ‘smart’ grip of technocapitalist power (which, in contrast, remains unaffected by antitrust suits that merely attempt to reinstate neoliberal competition):

'Cities cannot succeed in isolation: They must build solidarity networks and alliances between cities, movements, progressive political parties, and governments to ensure that all data produced by platforms, devices, sensors, and software does not get locked down in corporate silos, but rather is made available for public and socially-driven uses. Cities [..] should be able to run distributed common data infrastructures on their own, with systems intrinsically respectful of data protection, privacy, and sovereignty of citizens. They should then invite local companies, cooperatives, civil society organisations, and tech entrepreneurs to off er innovative services on top that function based on principles of solidarity and respect for workers’ rights, as well as labor, environmental, and gender standards.'[1]

UNBOUNDING 5

The entanglements between corporate non-transparency and regulatory capacity that define many issues at stake in technocapitalism are ambivalent and complex, to say the least. Regulatory efforts can backfire as the so-called Regulation National Market System (Reg NMS) exemplifies. Firstly, because it unwittingly sparked the rise of high-frequency trading, and secondly because it illustrates a lack of technological and/or legal expertise. The superiority of large and powerful players surfaces with a new euphemism: 'regulation arbitrage' is a term that indicates the subversion of equal playing fields by those who can leverage their stakes and strategies to new levels of non-transparency. A model case for the ambiguity of regulation in complex, messy and entangled systems, the regulation also relates to access and information asymmetry in other, only slightly less arcane fields, such as urban and social media platformism.

Regulation NMS became statutory in the USA in 2005 in an effort to warrant efficient and fair prices to all investors by introducing a consolidated price discovery across all U.S. American securities markets. To put it in a nutshell, what the authorities – in this case mostly legal experts – didn’t take into account was a fact known to every physics student: latency, i.e., the time delay in the communication from one place to another. Price consolidation takes time and even though this delay is measured at microseconds, high-frequency trading technowledge was able to undercut the operational lag. Instead of closing arbitrage windows – and thus thwart riskless profits – Reg NMS opened it wide. And instead of fairer competition, markets became more fragmented and distorted. This caused a boom in HFTs because they neutralised risk. In further consequence, competition for speed/latency advantage and order book exploitation increased rapidly and led to shrinking margins. As a result, racking up substantial profits became complicated and the pressure to cut out edge (profits) intensified. To get out of this impasse, some HFTs resorted to manipulating the framework of market centres directly (as whistleblower cases of the algo trader Haim Bodek proved). Exchange places in the USA are profit-oriented corporate platforms rather than public institutions and their leverage depends on attracting big players that increase trading volume and liquidity. With hedge funds buying shares of exchange places to press their agenda, the interests of market centres and HFTs coalesced in toxic ways, giving rise to collusion and fraud. Regulation arbitrage – and this applies to data-driven platforms as well – is the hidden production of information and access asymmetries to exploit regulatory and legal frameworks. Hypercompetition feeds on non-transparency.

In politics, arbitrage schemes are even more obscured. Mainly, because we usually look at them from the perspective of social media criticism, which is to a large degree blind to the derivative logic. By escalating volatility and leveraging information and access asymmetry, platform capitalism and Twitter politics demonstrate sophisticated but at the same time sociopathic symptoms of the derivative condition. In its wake, noise becomes the master of information. A prominent example is the arena of alt-right politics and information warfare populated by hedge fund owners (like Mercer), data consultancies (like Cambridge Analytica) media interest groups (like Breitbart), troll factories (with the most known proxies from Russia) and politicians (like Farage). Donald Trump redesigns the digital platform Twitter as a dark pool by escalating noise – that is, by producing volatility. By ‘surfing the volatility wave’ he produces unexpected microevents outside the realm of the probable; and thus, attacks and subverts truth as the paradigmatic function of probability. Black Swans events – commonly deemed rare – are manufactured in electronic speed, leveraged by fake news, repetitive assaults, lies, and other malignant information asymmetries. In the political realm, this boils down to hypercompetitive monopoly because it captures the air and data waves and conquers (social) media platforms (a political contestant would have to adopt ruthless escalation counter-tactics). When the speech of power turns performative, the production of volatility and the recalibration of leveraged (micro)claims – not necessarily correlated with truth or fact – can be exploited for automation-based domination. As a consequence (and with a play on words), gaming he(d)gemon(e)y amplifies authoritarian symptoms.

In contrast to such flagrant malpractice and abuse of power, emancipatory politics from the ground up can apply leverage and volatility, too, and to the empowerment of civil society. To name but one of many open source urban platform projects appearing around the world today, which allow for sharing risk and navigating opportunity together, the CO-LAB by the Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo at the Universidade de São Paulo in São Carlos, Brazil, is an 'open platform of science and citizen participation that develops projects with the aim of making demands visible, connecting citizens and institutions, encouraging actions of cooperation between them' (transl. from Portuguese).

EXIT

The derivative paradigm is not only a model for how data are made productive – in other words, how the future is made productive. This logic holds power over the most elusive (and arguably illusory) of human ambitions – foreknowledge of the future. In our data-driven volatile world, platform technowledge forms the framework of algorithmic governance, and thus the regimes that performatively evaluate, surveil, enforce, and thus preempt, social automation, adaptation and control.

In his critical response to Benjamin Bretton’s 18 Lessons from the Quarantine Urbanism, Godofredo Peirera demands a radical rethink against the monolithic data platform, 'such as the role that can be played by digital platforms in the support of intersectional forms of solidarity; forms of climate modelling that take into account socio-environmental impacts; to the necessary development of green new deals from the south, and even planetary coordination towards counter-hegemonic forms of globalisation based on social justice and good living. But if a repeat of the same old forms of exploitation and socio-environmental destruction are to be avoided, even such adjusted proposals would require […] care for the many worlds that make up our world, care for politics, and a critique of capitalism – which is what put the world in this mess in the first place.' Pereira’s response takes the question to the level of leverage (class) and the volatility it exerts. Thus – and no less than the Morozov/Bria quote above – it adds an example for political activism to this contribution to PLATFORM AUSTRIA: 'what if, instead of sending the military to the Amazon rainforest, they are sent to the headquarters of Amazon.com in Seattle or to financial institutions across the world, to make sure the planetary commons are not being commodified? Why [protect] the world against the people that resort to logging, instead of going against those that profit from logging?' And we would add, against those that monopolise access to the resolution of what we can know, share and act against in the first place.

There is an urgency to learn how to ‘decipher’ the performative semiotics of power and where they play out. The fantasies of platform A.I. and singularity are geared to rid us of the burden to grasp how technocapitalist violence acts and deploys its toxic cargo. But there is an 'instrument' to regain performative agency: the body as an affective, sensory and imaginative sensibility in and between other bodies. All data – and thus also urban – platforms parasite bodies for resource extraction. The question is whether we can devise a platform whose sensual technowledge swings within and between digital and non-digital bodies and supports sharing risk as embodied and collective forms of moving along the volatile spheres of contingent becoming? The platforms that allow us to sense, imagine, assemble and build such alliances have not yet been built (we present a practice-based attempt in this direction, Planetary Skins, in one of our other blogs). But the discourse around data and urban platforms, provided by PLATFORM AUSTRIA amongst others, as well as existing alternative and commons-based approaches to how data are used and to which end provide fertile ground for new ways of imagining technopolitics.

Technocapitalist biopolitics rest on a volatile cohesion in which the promise of welfare for all is replaced by the automated exploitation of individualised affects. But making sense of the political, cultural and financial potentials of the derivative, and volatility and leverage as its constitutive forces, allows us to re-valorise the extensive capacities and temporalities to perceive and reorient deep (infra)structural changes – i.e., governmental in the Foucauldian sense – against the automation of behavioural and social normalisation. New performative conceptions of the relations between architecture, art, design, data, finance within digital, urban and other spaces can contribute to a radical ‘arbitrage’ that redistributes what today is the claim (and privilege) of a tiny elite: the promise of abundance the derivative condition holds. Catherine Malabou’s notion of plasticity may serve as a lead as to how deep re-form (‘receiving’ and ‘bestowing form’) can transform not only the mind but all bodies with dignity. And while the corporate platform presses forward into a dystopian future of ubiquitous control and sovereignty, concrete pluriform utopias are increasingly developed as well, offering perspectives of a different future. Plasticity as a volatility practice is a (self-)empirical process in which bodies and minds perceive, shape, resolve and leverage each other; but where confluences of bodies (human and nonhuman) take ‘random lead’.