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PART I

REDISTRIBUTION

INSTITUTIONAL

INTERVENTIONS

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ONE

ONE USER BE USED

Lev er a ging t h e Coer c iv e Hos pit a l it y of Cor por at e Pl at f or ms

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et us begin with what is for many today the most recognizable — if also the most invisible — example of the privatization of openness: the big tech platform. The platform economy is paradigmatic of the logic of con-solidated power and one- way accountability that this book examines. Big tech platforms capture the underlying architecture of coercive hospitality, wherein corporate technologies sold as enabling access and sharing con-tain hidden costs borne by the user. Such technologies have helped an ever- narrowing number of monopolies accrue power and influence by concealing their authority. Megacorporations like Google and Amazon have presented themselves as hospitable services — as mere hosts and intermediaries, mere

“platforms” — to gain sway over the market, extracting user data and amass-ing capital, even as they are increasamass-ingly unanswerable to users, workers, and governments. The term platform suggests a progressive and fair arrange-ment that promises to support those who rely on it. Mobilizing the rheto-ric of democracy in order to privatize public goods and services, these mo-nopolies use the appearance of openness to facilitate closedness — fueling inequality, killing off competition, and limiting opportunities for workers and local communities.

This chapter examines how global corporations have also gotten in on the act, as companies like Walmart and McDonald’s have borrowed this playbook. More specifically, the chapter investigates how these companies have sought to adopt for themselves the image of digital technology as neu-tral and egalitarian in order to obscure their ever more predatorial busi-ness practices, as they have invented new methods for making the poor pay

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(literally) for their own immiseration. By embracing the rhetoric and affect of the digital, by presenting themselves as virtual (rather than a physical presence) and their actions as automated (rather than strategic calculations), these corporations have made it harder for workers and consumers to chal-lenge them or to build a lasting grassroots response to their impacts.¹ When threatened with exposure for manipulating the appearance of hospitality to exploitative ends, these corporations adopt the appearance of network protocol (the neutral authority of the faceless administrator) to sidestep ac-countability for their actions.

Corporate monopolies’ wish to appear caring, charitable, and accessible need not be a subjective desire but may be an economic calculation; the ques-tion is not the cause of their performance of hospitality but its effects and the ends to which it is used. Can this pretense of openness be turned against them? To answer this question, I look to a series of artistic and social col-lectivist experiments that test the possibility of using the market’s supposed openness to bend the arc of privatization instead toward recommunalization and redistribution. These experiments include Robin Hood Cooperative’s

“Parasite” algorithm (which mirrors the investment patterns of the most successful traders on Wall Street) and Ubermorgen’s Google Will Eat Itself (2005 – 8), made in collaboration with Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio.

Whether they aim at divesting from finance or platform capitalism using the stock market or attempting to take down Google using its own advertising revenue (or, in another, similar effort, to buy Kickstarter using Kickstarter), these parasitical works model how performances of exaggerated complicity might open up new political scripts. Ubermorgen and Robin Hood Coop-erative employ imitative tactics in order to siphon resources from the data economy and redirect them toward social groups or causes that seek to “re-build the commons.” By literally investing in the very structures that they seek to dismantle, these works model the parasite as a political actor with the potential to harness platform capitalism to different ends, if with largely ambiguous results and symbolic returns.

AN OPEN PLATFORM

The platform is but a recent variant of digital capitalism’s long- standing in-vestment in the rhetoric of openness. The digital’s much- touted virtue of openness — its collapse of hierarchy, explosion of secrecy, democratization of knowledge — is central to how the medium has been defined from its in-ception. Sold as “the great equalizer” enabling circulation and free access to

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information for all, the early internet — the network — heralded a brave new world of viral circulation, even as it was used to overstate both the equalizing effects of circulation and the reciprocity of exchange, as if speed alone could lubricate democracy or level socioeconomic disparity. With the privatiza-tion of the internet in the mid- 1990s (placing the once public project in the hands of corporations), the rhetoric of openness and access, as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun has shown, served to grease the wheels of capital in the name of democracy.² This rhetoric advanced a false equivalency between individual users and corporate actors, addressing all “users” — states, corporations, and individuals alike — as commensurate nodes within the network.

Yet, as Andrew L. Russell argues, the digital’s constitutive “openness” is in fact deeply ideological, for it redefines access for commercial ends: “For individuals, ‘open’ is shorthand for transparent, welcoming, participatory, and entrepreneurial; for society at large, ‘open’ signifies a vast increase in the flow of goods and information through a global, market- oriented sys-tem of exchange. In the most general sense, it conveys independence from the threats of arbitrary power and centralized control.”³ And yet this form of power and control is precisely what this rhetoric is used to install. “When a new app is said to be democratizing something — whether robotic per-sonal assistants or sepia- toned selfies,” argues Nathan Schneider, “it means allowing more people to access that something. Just access, along with a big, fat terms of service. Gone are those old associations of town meetings and voting booths; gone are co- ownership, co- governance, and accountability.”⁴ The celebrated openness of the digital, Astra Taylor points out, rather than serving as a leveling force, amplifies already existing disparities. “Online, just as off- line, attention and influence largely accrue to those who already have plenty of both,” she writes. Big media have thus given way “not [to]

a revolution but a rearrangement” in which “giants like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook remain the gatekeepers” and “the new order looks suspiciously like the old one.”⁵ What is perhaps new is the mask of egalitari-anism. Taylor observes that this rhetorical ploy is often wielded in ways that sidestep “discussions of ownership and equity”: “While openness has many virtues, it is also undeniably ambiguous. Is open a means or an end? What is open and to whom? Mark Zuckerberg said he designed Facebook because he wanted to make the world more ‘open and connected,’ but his company does everything it can to keep users within its confines and exclusively re-tains the data they emit.”⁶

More recently big media corporations’ adoption of the strategic position of the platform has demonstrated their use of openness as a tool of

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ful misdirection. As Tarleton Gillespie has shown, the term is a “discursive resting point” employed by corporations to subtly but meaningfully reca-librate their responsibility to others. According to Gillespie, these entities selectively perform their agency: they present themselves as a valuable ser-vice in some moments and as a mere platform in others. When companies position themselves as platforms — as simply accommodating the activity of others — they are able to monetize content without having to be liable for it.⁷ Nick Srnicek elaborates: “While often presenting themselves as empty spaces for others to interact on, they in fact embody a politics. The rules of the prod-uct and service development, as well as marketplace interactions, are set by the platform owner. Uber, despite presenting itself as an empty vessel for market forces, shapes the appearance of the market. . . . In their position as an intermediary, platforms gain not only access to more data but also control and governance over the rules of the game.”⁸ We can see this active position-ing when Google and Facebook executives speak, for example, about their role in policy and legislative matters as being those of mere hosts, conduits, or carriers of content, as opposed to publishers. They present themselves as neither promoting nor championing the content they disseminate, and therefore as not liable for offensive, dangerous, or hateful material that might appear on their platform.⁹

What distinguishes the platform model from the traditional, transac-tional business model is the posture by which, despite the visible presence of site- based advertising (not to mention other invisible forms of marketing), these corporations insist on their role as hosts rather than users in their own right. (While companies like Facebook, Google, Airbnb, and Uber are the most commonly cited examples of platforms, Walmart and others in-creasingly also position themselves as platforms, pioneering supply- chain management practices that do not buy products but effectively contract with suppliers to rent shelf space, paying their contractors only for the items that sell.)¹⁰ Such platforms position themselves as hosts, providing infrastructure and facilitating interaction, while at the same time nontransparently mon-etizing the data they acquire through these services.

One might call the platform economy a parasitical outgrowth of the postcrisis era. It has been suggested that the 2008 global financial crisis was “a key enabling condition” for the rise of the platform economy.¹¹ The neoliberal advancement of deregulation, privatization, the unraveling of the public sector, a low interest rate climate for venture capital, and high levels of unemployment (leaving behind a precarious class of workers with few protections), as Srnicek and Gary Hall have shown, helped companies like

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Airbnb and Uber become unavoidable almost overnight.¹² Operating on a postwelfare model of capitalism, these companies repackage hospitality as rent. They turn acts of generosity like ridesharing and couch- surfing into commodities. Writes Hall:

In the case of Uber and Airbnb . . . these assets take the form of seats in vehicles and rooms in properties that are otherwise occupied on an infre-quent and temporary basis. In other words, they are idle resources it has up to now been difficult for capital to commodify and whose value from an entrepreneurial point of view has therefore been wasted. . . . Even if this form of economy is presented as a revival of community spirit, it ac-tually has very little to do with sharing this access to goods, activities, and services and everything to do with selling this access. (Many people insist on referring to it not as the sharing economy but as the renting economy for just this reason.)¹³

While Airbnb and Uber sell hospitality as rent, Facebook and Google purport to provide it for free. They overstate the individual user’s agency by downplaying the platform’s authority to set the terms and conditions of use:

the companies sell themselves as free services and insist that online sub-jects are their equals, counterparts able to use and be used equally, all while quietly transforming the content and information produced by such usage into data sold for enormous profit. Facebook boasts, “It’s free and always will be”; Google, as Siva Vaidhyanathan points out, accepts no money for the algorithmic labor it performs to give the appearance of simplicity to the messy work of sorting and ranking search results.¹⁴ The pervasive rhetoric of the online “user” does similar work for the seductive fiction that digital technologies are hospitable by quietly flattening and neutralizing ethical and political distinctions and placing practices of consumption and participa-tion alongside those of exploitaparticipa-tion. The narrative of user empowerment is at best incomplete. These rhetorical sleights of hand intentionally muddy the question of who is in control — of who is a host and who is a guest — and the precarity of the latter position (the terms of use serve not the user but the corporation).

Yet increasingly, digital corporate platforms are an invitation that cannot be refused. More and more our relationships with corporate and state enti-ties are predetermined by contracts that shift legal and ethical responsibility onto individual users, consumers, and citizens. To participate online is to find oneself tacitly or automatically conscripted into a larger matrix of con-trol.¹⁵ As Vaidhyanathan argues of Google’s “choice architecture,” the choice

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to “opt out” can mean very little when, simply “by accepting the invitation to participate, the user finds him or herself implicitly engaged in a contract that is subject to ongoing modification without warning and whose terms can only ever be accepted or declined.”¹⁶ There is, to borrow a phrase from The-odor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “no mechanism of reply” — at least not if the answer is no.¹⁷ Without the capacity to respond, to negotiate, users find themselves subject to the will of a system of social control and power. Even those users in the Global North for whom internet access is a given are all too aware, Vaidhyanathan notes, that it is not a privilege that can be forgone, for it would mean being shut out from a valued, even indispensable service.

Such is the coercive hospitality of platform capitalism, whereby the very terms of participation (as use) are premised on accepting an invitation that can be declined only at significant cost, if at all. The rhetoric of the user, wherein to be a digital citizen is to participate as a user in a community of users, compels a reappraisal of the ideological work of use. The nomination user (unlike guest) suggests active agency; it overstates the individual’s voli-tion within online space and understates the dominance of platforms. “In order to operate . . . the Internet turns every spectator into a spectacle,” ar-gues Chun. “Users are used as they use.”¹⁸

PERFORMING PROTOCOL

The language of the r fc was warm and welcoming.— KATE HAFNER AND MATTHEW LYON, WHERE WIZARDS STAY UP LATE

Even before corporate platforms like Amazon and Google existed, hospital-ity was the founding logic of the networking protocol on which the internet is built. The idiom of host domains, servers, clients, and feeds is not arbitrary;

it lifts into view the ideological armature of new media. In 1967 a small group of Advanced Research Projects Agency (a r pa) researchers gathered in Ann Arbor to discuss plans for a system of resource- sharing that would not rely on a centralized computer and thus be less vulnerable to attack. It was at this meeting that Larry Roberts put forward the idea of a national network of “host computers” connected to each other over dial- up telephone lines.¹⁹ Networking functions, Roberts proposed, could be handled by “hosts” that would act as both research computers and communications routers. Later, Wes Clark would suggest an ingenious modification: insert smaller com-puters between the host comcom-puters to map a subnetwork of interconnected nodes. These separate computers, dubbed “Interface Message Processors”

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or imps, would act as packet- switching nodes (what we call routers today), serving as messengers between the host computers.²⁰ This “Host- imp” to-pology would serve as an early blueprint for the infrastructure of Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPAnet) protocols (figure 1.1).²¹ As the semantic and logistical bedrock of early network protocol, then, hospitality is the implicit structure that makes the very idea of the internet thinkable.²² As such, it constitutes the proto- language of protocol and the paradigm of political economy in which the system insistently and unreflexively traffics.

The language host appears self- evident, attributed by default, ideologically null. And yet how deeply strange, and ultimately symptomatic, it is that a medium premised on exchange — on the sending and receiving of messages — would be imagined as a network made up only of hosts.

Protocol, writes Alexander Galloway, is the “set of recommendations and rules that outlines the computational standards or procedures by which technologies function.” Protocol’s ambition is to be a good host: “It must ac-cept everything, no matter what source, sender, or destination.”²³ In his book Ethical Programs: Hospitality and the Rhetorics of Software, James J. Brown Jr. notes the ethical dilemma of networks’ invitation to open yourself up to a form of one- way access, when you never “really [get] to decide in any thor-oughgoing way who or what enters your ‘home’ (your apartment, your lap-top, your iPhone, your thermostat).”²⁴ A term associated with performances of social etiquette, protocol is “a method of correct behavior under a given chain of command.”²⁵ Like protocols that govern social or political practices, networking protocols establish the common rules of ceremony or

formal-FIGURE 1.1 Early ARPAnet sketch, “The Subnet and Hosts.”

Source: James Pelkey.

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ity that enable systems to function effectively.²⁶ Galloway explains this, but also insists on the limits of the analogy, for “instead of governing social or political practices as did their diplomatic predecessors, computer protocols govern how specific technologies are agreed to, adopted, implemented, and ultimately used by people around the world. What was once a question of consideration and sense is now a question of logic and physics.”²⁷

While the protocols of hospitality built into the ARPAnet may have little to do with the kind of hospitality performed by today’s corporate platforms, the relationship between hospitality and digital protocol is nevertheless in-structive. Here we might probe Galloway’s sharp distinction between the sociopolitical and the technological for what it can tell us about the perfor-mance of protocol. When Galloway argues that protocols “encapsulate in-formation inside a technically defined wrapper, while remaining relatively indifferent to the content of information contained within,” he appears to leave the fiction of hospitality intact; he does not address the way that tech-nological protocols create and inform social protocols.²⁸ So why does this matter? Representing protocol as nonideological and ideal receptivity ob-fuscates the system’s interestedness. When protocol is posed as logical, it enables hosts to dodge acknowledging the rules or agreed- upon conventions that most benefit those who make them. In other words, protocol is what systems use to perform logicality as a means of disavowing their agency. We must be wary of the façade of hospitality that alibis networks’ adherence to protocols, which instrumentally impose and regulate a distinction between the so- called hosts and guests of the system.

Informatic protocol pervades the texture of daily life, even in offline interactions; everyday interactions with corporations more and more as-sume the air of navigating a website. The rare exchange with a human em-ployee follows a predetermined script, taking on a protocological affectation.

Agency — even for the corporation’s appointed representatives — only ever seems to exist elsewhere. This kind of technological standardization, on-line and offon-line, is a widely accepted mode of corporate performance within a digital service economy that, Noam Chomsky asserts, works to “transfer

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