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. Through a series of case studies, it explores how, despite universal aspirations, big tech's drive for global expansion and appeal is realized only through encounters with diverse local contexts. It is in these frictional encounters that the exact contours of platform power and dominance are negotiated. The collection examines how frictions arising in key domains like policy, platform design, gig labor, and platform market relations can both contest and reinforce platform power. From user pushback to platform policy changes to the challenges facing platform cooperatives, the case studies explore the nuanced realities of actually existing platformization, illustrating how local adaptations and resistances shape expanding digital platforms services, economies, cultures, and ideologies. This volume contributes an urgent and critical perspective to platform studies, foregrounding local power dynamics, values, and cultures that give the platform economy its actually existing forms. It is essential reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the complexities and contingencies in the age of global platform dominance. It was originally published as a special issue of Information, Communication & Society.

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