Platforms, Algorithms and Subjectivities: Active Combination and the Extracting Value Process – An Introductory Essay

Abstract

This chapter provides an introductory overview to the collection, setting out the book’s perspective and argument, its structure and providing an outline of individual chapters. The essay asserts that instead of concentrating on the infrastructural and technological dimensions of platform capitalism, it instead emphasises relational and organisational questions, in particular the ambivalent logic of connection/disconnection, the production of the neoliberal subject and its complex intersectional nature in relation to the internet, issues of what has been termed ‘onlife’, and the transformative potential of these phenomena. The chapter concludes by summarising the collection’s aims as examining digital media as a complex field formed at the intersection of objective structures and subjective practices.