Review essay: Perils of aggregating a global zeitgeist

Journalists have reported on the declining economic integration of nation-states for over a decade. China and the United States have established trade barriers, prompting other countries to do the same. The Covid-19 epidemic called attention to the limits of global interdependence with exacerbated supply chain disruptions that show little sign of abating. Many countries are turning inward, leading to claims that we are living in an era of deglobalization. While in press, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to claims of a renewed united Western front levying economic sanctions with nation-states and transnational corporations working together. Even India and China have taken a recent step back from their support of Russia, showing a semblance of unity with the West in what had previously been an increasingly fractured global economy. Yet it’s too early to say whether these alliances signal a return to interdependence or a temporary marriage of convenience. In these tumultuous times, with political and economic principles in flux, it’s harder than it’s been for quite some time to identify global unifying trends.

In a world measured by global information networks, where data flows are sometimes checked by national policy, it’s even harder to aggregate a global zeitgeist. Economic integration has been in decline, but the world has seen the ascendance of digital platforms with charismatic CEOs who wax poetic about the possibilities of global unity via the services their companies provide. Yet an analysis of these digital ecosystems tells a story of division more so than unity. As a result, global internet scholars often pivot to shared philosophical similarities to make sense of the different relationships between economic principles and industry regulations found across the world today. A common categorization pits the Silicon Valley tech giants and the largely unregulated U.S. market against China and its opaque regulatory policies that allow for frequent censorship. In the middle lies the European Union and its free market tendencies with regulatory frameworks that champion values such as privacy and public safety. I return to this tripartite schema later in this review essay, but for now I mention it as the categorization used in The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World by van Dijck et al. (2018). This already influential book has helped make sense of the consequences of the rise of platforms amidst an era marked by change in the global order.

van Dijck et al. (2018) reveal the contemporary role of the big five platform companies (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) in shaping the social order in connection with governments and public institutions. Their perspective has already been employed by seemingly disparate fields that range from popular music scholars looking for ways to theorize the social import of music streaming services to legal scholars seeking ways to disentangle governance issues and intellectual property rights for content distributed by platform companies. The impact of The Platform Society has been huge, and the ideas have been quickly disseminated. The book’s success is well earned, as it offers an analysis grounded in case studies brave enough to take on the perilous task of making macro claims about digital platforms despite the need for frequent caveats and careful distinctions.

A marker of academic accomplishment is the number of times a work is cited, and by this metric The Platform Society (2018) is certainly successful with citations in the thousands with certainly many more on the way. However, another measure of success is how a work shapes a field of inquiry to open new directions for future study. This is harder to quantify but perhaps more meaningful. A new book, The Digital Frontier: Infrastructures of Control on the Global Web by Sangeet Kumar, offers valuable insight, especially for scholars looking for works that push the boundaries established by The Platform Society.

Both texts have much in common. They wrangle with the complex connections between internet infrastructure and the imperatives embedded in the architecture of digital platforms. The authors focus on the social dimension of global networks and the way these tools help shape public values and, by extension, human behavior. Each book finesses the structure/agency binary with care, finding different ways of exploring the interplay between code and culture. And the two books share formal similarities: beginning with two chapters outlining a premise and theoretical orientation, followed by case study chapters, concluding with speculative thoughts on the global resonance of their respective arguments. Ultimately, the two books differ in scope. The Platform Society has an explicit focus on North America and Western Europe, while The Digital Frontier expands this focus to consider what it would mean to include the postcolonial Global South in these discussions.

Kumar (2021) builds his argument on the concept of ‘infrastructures of control’, defined as the ‘standards, conventions, and algorithmic modulations’ that regulate ‘human behavior on the web’ (p. 7). The concept builds on critical infrastructure studies but with more of a focus on its so-called softer elements. The author writes about protocols, interface design elements, and default settings in combination with internet practices shaped by cultural norms. As has been the case for several years, scholars are testing the limits of the concept of infrastructure, extending it to nearly all online behaviors as we work to understand our mutual interdependence with the internet.

The explicit focus on ‘soft’ over ‘hard’ infrastructures serves a purpose, allowing Kumar (2021) to dig deep into the architectures that provide logistical controls over the physical foundations of global connectivity. It’s the softness of these structures that render them so effective as a means of control while simultaneously making it difficult to see them as altering our behavior. Infrastructures of control ‘shape, persuade, nudge, and regulate who we are, what we do, where we belong, and what we know, create, or consume online’ (p. 23). The references to identity and belonging points to an implicit critique of James Carey where Kumar rails against celebration of ritual communication practices arguing that such celebrations merely bolster the ostensible equality these tools are purported to provide.

The title of this review essay is borrowed from Kumar (2021) who employs several memorable turns of phrase in his pithy prose. The author’s constitutive take on infrastructures of control shows that these softer elements are not a neutral conduit for the transmission of information, and therefore, global digital connectivity is not an ‘aggregation of the global zeitgeist’ (p. 8). Instead, these networks have an inherent bias. It’s not a bias informed by space or time necessarily, but a decidedly Western bias. The stakes are clear. The biases of these digital architectures ‘impose a larger burden of change on those furthest from the dominant standard’ (p. 15). The Global South is therefore at a disadvantage, with discourses of equality drowning out the need to attend to the implicit bias. It’s not an argument grounded in a need to bridge the digital divide. For even if access problems were solved, we’d still need to reckon with the network inequality at a cultural level.

The literature review is one of the greatest strengths of The Digital Frontier. Kumar (2021) moves carefully from one area of inquiry to another, from postcolonial studies to media ecology. Arguments for infrastructural imperialism lie most closely to his assertions, and this is apparent in phrases such as ‘the scramble to appropriate the undigitized regions of the world’ (p. 29) by the large platform companies of the West. At one point, Kumar even identifies the problem as ‘digital colonization’ (p. 30). However, his approach is explicitly dialectical with a sophisticated way of locating power.

Kumar (2021) embraces and challenges hybridity. As a result, it would be wrong to label the work as a new application of the cultural imperialism thesis. The center dominates the periphery, and the periphery challenges back, creating alternative cultural forms that go against the idea of cultural homogenization. But Kumar asks, is hybridity enough? And to what extent are power imbalances hidden behind a veneer of glocalization, when we look to the infrastructures of control? Kumar turns to Deleuze as a way of thinking about this duality between freedom and control, showing how both cultural imperialism and hybridity can not only coexist but constitute one another. The author deftly emerges from this dialectic with a synthesis revealed via an analysis of the concrete particulars of the case studies that constitute the body chapters.

One of the more compelling of Kumar’s (2021) case studies is the analysis of Wikipedia as an exploration of the production of knowledge in ways that privilege one epistemology over another. The author offers a careful review of language bias in relation to the discursive positioning of the Wikimedia Foundation, identifying the primacy of Euro-American content among the English language pages despite the global aspirations of the platform. A powerful example is the Wikipedia edit war for the name of a river in India, ‘Ganga’ as the Indian name or ‘Ganges’ as a name stemming from a British colonial past. This edit war has raged since 2006, and the Indian name has tremendous cultural significance from a postcolonial perspective. Wikipedia mandates that an article’s source must be in the same language, ruling out non-English sources for the Ganga/Ganges page. Editors favoring the British name have a wealth of English language resources as support, but the editors in favor of the Indian name are unable to use local sources written in other languages such as Hindi. Kumar turns to van Dijck et al. (2018) to argue for Wikipedia as a digital ecosystem with embedded values that run contrary to its purported ethos of a global perspective. And Kumar (2021) extends this critique to show whose values are neglected among the biases of the platform.

van Dijck et al. (2018) explain how a platform creates value in different ways by selling user data, charging for transactions, using advertisements, and often with a combination of these means. These models are embedded in the infrastructures of the platform and are not neutral means of providing a service. ‘A business model is an intricate part of a site’s philosophy, which is in turn reflected in its architecture’ (p. 11). In this regard, we can see clear resonances between the two books. ‘Technological and economic elements of platforms steer user interaction but simultaneously shape social norms’ (van Dijck et al., 2018: 11). The sentence could have been in Kumar (2021). Neither work is satisfied with content analysis nor do the authors want to focus merely on political economy or institutional practices.

The van Dijck et al.’s concept of a ‘platform ecosystem’ (2018) shares similarities to Kumar’s ‘infrastructures of control’ (2021). And both books carefully identify the multitudes contained within these concepts, and perhaps more importantly, the conflicts within. Ideologies clash between political actors at the local, national, and global levels. For Kumar, however, these ideological contestations sometimes come down to Western and particularly United States’ influence. Both books employ a sophisticated notion of infrastructure. For van Dijck et al., infrastructure is a ‘particular set of mechanisms’ that ‘shapes everyday practices’ (p. 4). Again, we see an implicit turn to the so-called softer elements of internet architecture. For as much as The Platform Society asserts the influence of these architectures, the authors offer a counterpoint against a strict determinist perspective, asserting that users are not ‘puppets’ of the techno-commercial dynamics inscribed in a platform’ (p. 11). And the authors pivot from economics and policy to the interplay of existing social structures both offline and online.

For example, van Dijck et al. (2018) would not say that Airbnb has caused a revolution in the hospitality industry, as that would reduce our understanding to an economic or technological imperative. Instead, the authors strive for a deeper formulation of how the platform builds connections and penetrates existing social structures that allow questions of values to emerge from the analysis. Nevertheless, economics often underpin the structural analysis found in The Platform Society and in The Digital Frontier. A shared focus for analysis is monetization, a key point about the commodification of platforms for van Dijck et al. (2018: 131). Kumar (2021) turns to monetization as a tool for crafting a particular subjectivity in his chapter about aspirational selfhood (p. 131). From selfie culture to influencer marketing, economic incentives offer a false promise of equal participation in a global conversation based on Western ideals of personhood.

Both books rely on conceptual throughlines as ways to unify and organize the ideas. The Platform Society (2018) identifies the social influence of the platform ecosystem via a categorization of ‘datafication, commodification, and selection’ (p. 4). The Digital Frontier (2021) employs the categories of ‘knowledge’, ‘selfhood’, and ‘sovereignty’. van Dijck et al. (2018) carry these concepts across each case study, while Kumar (2021) takes each concept in turn from one case study to the next. Each idea goes through the grinder of the freedom/restraint dialectic. In chapter three, Kumar’s (2021) focus on knowledge reveals the Eurocentric distribution of epistemic production with a hegemonic definition of what is considered legitimate knowledge (p. 30). In chapter four, normative selfhood is seen through the lens of global influence culture with its production of an aspirational subject. And in chapter five, the ostensible erosion of the nation-state in the era of globalization conflicts with the mandates for platforms like Google and Facebook to adapt to regulatory policies. Kumar makes the case that global network power often misdirects a reality where offline nation-state power is expressed through these online entanglements. Kumar’s categories help illuminate a common logic for what’s seemingly decentralized and neutral. The author reveals the imbalance of power that privileges particular ways of knowing, particular subjectivities, and particular countries with their attendant ideologies.

After precise explication of their slightly different arguments carried through individual examples, both books conclude by taking a step back and considering their points in relation to global power dynamics best reflected by political and ideological orientations of the United States and China. Kumar (2021) opens his conclusion with van Dijck et al.’s (2018) explication of the two dominant platform ecosystems with their own ideological and political investments. Both authors highlight the role of the European Union as a third position that troubles a simple schema of individual liberty and freedom of expression against censorship and state control. The epilogue by van Dijck et al. (2018) is titled ‘Geopolitics of Platform Societies’ and includes a careful examination of the conflict and contestation between the U.S. led ecosystems against that of China with Europe as a useful check on the power of Silicon Valley. Since it’s outside the book’s purview, there’s no mention of other countries around the world, with the implied assumption that they merely fall in line somewhere between the U.S., China, and the E.U. And here is where we can see Kumar’s (2021) intervention in the clear light of day, to pose a position that is truly global in its experience.

Kumar (2021) generously nods to a long line of scholars with multiple references to van Dijck et al. (2018), and the connection between the two books is underscored by José van Dijck’s blurb on the back of The Digital Frontier. And while the similarities are many, Kumar (2021) follows a tried-and-true model for academic inquiry by adeptly articulating a discursive position, identifying a gap in that position, and then filling that gap. Kumar’s (2021) intervention is best capture by this quote: ‘For large parts of the world, getting on board the digital bandwagon means doing so under predetermined terms and conditions enfolded within the affordances, conventions, and protocols that mask their own parochial and contextual nature under the guise of universalism and the common global good’ (p. 210). The stated goal is to reach a synthesis that strives for ‘utopian ideals of true global representation’ (p. 33). It’s an admittedly lofty goal, but an important one when seen in relation to the argument of The Platform Society (2018) and its focus on the organization of public and private values. Kumar (2021), on the other hand, is inviting us to consider whose values are brought to bear on these organizational practices.

If there is a critique to be made of The Digital Frontier, it’s on the title and design. In chapter two, Kumar (2021) undermines the notion of a digital frontier as a colonialist formulation where the so-called civilized West provides order to the rest of the world. I assume that makes The Digital Frontier an ironic title. Or perhaps it’s a red herring obliquely designed to call attention to an unconquered digital frontier marked by the push for global connectivity unmarred by differential power. Either way, the title can be rather misleading. The Digital Frontier cover shows a faded map with barely legible compass points, a seeming nod to colonialism. I fear the irony might be lost on a prospective reader who judges a book by its cover. For when I first saw the book and title, I was reminded of the 1990s and idealistic claims about a wired world as a means to redress global inequalities. Nevertheless, the secondary title, ‘infrastructures of control on the global web’, helps signal the critical perspective contained within, sharing this perspective with The Platform Society (2018). These works provide trenchant critiques of our platform-driven media environments, and each book offer useful insights into heretofore underexamined consequences of global connectivity in this historical moment.