Platforms, Power, and Friction

This edited book deconstructs the myth of frictionless digital platform expansion, revealing the persistent "platform frictions" that shape platform economies and politics.

Pawel Popiel is an Assistant Professor at the Murrow College for Communication, Washington State University. His work focuses on the political economy and regulation of digital media and emergent ICT technologies under platform capitalism. Krishnan Vasudevan is an Associate Professor at the Phillip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. His work critically examines capitalism through the study of design, labor, media and culture.

Introduction: Platform frictions, platform power, and the politics of platformization 1. Patrons of commerce: asymmetrical reciprocity and moral economies of platform power 2. Competing digital capacities: between state-led digital governance and local data center tradeoffs 3. Frictions and flows in Twitch's platform economy: viewer spending, platform features and user behaviours 4. Dreaming of seamless interfaces: media and friction from the feuilleton to personal computing 5. Ecologies of friction in digital platform investment 6. Smooth operator: sleuthing Homo oeconomicus on social media platforms through a close reading of design 7. The specter of global ByteDance: platforms, regulatory arbitrage, and politics 8. Disassemblages of AI: repair labor and resistance in the automated workplace