Governing platforms and societies

When we (my co-authors Thomas Poell and Martijn de Waal) published The Platform Society. Public Values in a Connective World in 2018, the field of “platform studies” had just started to emerge. In our book, we tried to explain how platformization had started to affect entire sectors, exemplified by the news industry, urban transport, health care, and education. In the epilogue, we argued that “governing platform societies” requires not just a cross-sectoral approach but calls more profoundly for a transnational discourse of governance issues. Since 2018, we have seen a distinct rise in challenges concerning platforms and societies: the growing impact of Big Tech platforms on digital ecosystems around the globe; the rise of two “superpower” ecosystems which are in many ways interwoven with geopolitical forces; the mounting dependence of state and civil society actors on large digital infrastructures owned and operated by Big Tech; and the lasting impact of platformization not just on labor and business management, but on democratic processes and institutions.

Over the past 6 years, the study of platforms and how they function has become a critical part of academic research. Therefore, I welcome the launch of a new journal that aims to “provide a space for scholars charting how platforms transform and integrate into economies, societies, cultures, and institutions around the world” (Editorial introduction). Platformization is the prism through which we should critically examine how technological shifts that are simultaneously social, economic, cultural, and political transformations affect the global power (im)balance while deeply infiltrating private lives and public spaces. The governance of these new public–private, global–local spaces presents challenges to conventional state-based governance approaches. Academic researchers should be concerned with how platforms govern societies as well as the other way around: how societies govern platforms. In the epilogue to our book, we argued that governance questions should revolve around public values—values which contested nature are part and parcel of a democratic process involving various stakeholders.

While studying platforms and societies is an urgent goal, I applaud the editorial board's endeavor to focus not just on big, global platforms as hegemonic powers of change, but also on “other types of platforms and platformization that exist at the margins of scholarly and policy concerns (Editorial introduction).” After years of investigating how Big Tech corporations dominate the platform ecosystem, I concluded that, while such analysis has been urgent and necessary, it is equally important to highlight alternatives: smaller platforms that try to survive independent of dominant ecosystems, or governance forms that highlight the autonomy of institutions. For instance, in our recent work on educational platforms, Niels Kerssens and I have considered alternative ways to organize digital environments in schools to make them less dependent on global platform providers (Kerssens and Van Dijck, 2022). And considering the recent demise of global social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter), we studied how public organizations in The Netherlands explore decentralized alternatives by building national and local coalitions of interested civil society actors (Bogaerts et al., 2023).

Highlighting alternative initiatives platform societies is even more important because of the recent tectonic shift in technological advancement: the emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). Indeed, as the editors of this new journal argue, this development is rapidly changing the platform industry, consolidating the power of BigTech firms “that own the capital, compute, cloud infrastructure, and proprietary training data necessary for developing large language models and the AI services built on them” (Editorial introduction). Platforms and built-in AI-powered software are deeply rooted in the material infrastructures of data centers and continuous data input. Current GenAI developments, frontloaded by Microsoft and Google, are leading towards centralized, closed, proprietary systems. Legal disputes such as Getty Images vs. Stability AI and The New York Times vs. OpenAI are fought out in courts, where incumbent legacy actors try to set legal precedents in thorny governance issues regarding copyright and data ownership. If there is one important issue for academics to take on over the next few years, it is the question of digital sovereignty in the face of economic and political power concentration. At the same time, though, more attention could be paid to how AI foundation models might function as open and transparent systems, run on decentralized servers, and fed by publicly owned databases while respecting values like privacy and protecting security (Ferrari et al., 2023). The design of alternative (public) foundation models and the conditions for training them opens a whole new set of questions regarding the architecture of platform ecosystems as well as their governance structures. It also opens up a can of worms because architectures based on open source and transparency values may both strengthen and threaten states’ digital sovereignty, given the contingencies of having multiple actors involved in such projects, and knowing that Big Tech firms leverage open-source models strategically. Besides openness, transparency, privacy, and sovereignty, we also need to stress the importance of sustainability as a public value in the wake of GenAI's energy-consuming training practices.

Finally, this new journal might itself become a new “platform”: a platform for deliberation and analysis but also for design thinking and imaginative scenarios. The academic world is already well equipped when it comes to publication channels; there are many journals and book series that accommodate empirical and analytical work on platforms and digitization. However, expansive scenarios that require not just analytical rigor, but also inventive power are a lot more difficult to get published. And yet, it is through such creative endeavors that transformation often begins. Therefore, I am delighted to read how Platforms & Society wants to “encourage scholars to foreground how different communities and collectives repurpose or reinvent platforms as well as platform thinking, through alternative infrastructural, legal, organizational and/or economic configurations” (Editorial introduction). Just like climate change, the transformation of platform societies will affect individuals, institutions, democracies, and governments across the globe. A concerted effort toward designing alternative architectures and enabling new models of interaction will help build and sustain a livable digital future.