Seeing Like a Platform

While industrial modernity saw society as a machinery to be designed according to detailed blueprints, digital modernity views society as organic and alive, to be herded and nudged through digital infrastructures, AI, and algorithms.This book explores the history, meaning and far-reaching consequences of this epistemological shift.

Petter Törnberg is Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science at the University of Amsterdam. He studies the intersection of AI, social media, and politics using computational methods and digital data for critical inquiry. His most recent book is Intimate Communities of Hate: Why Social Media Fuels Far-Right Extremism (with Anton Törnberg). Justus Uitermark is a geographer and sociologist at the University of Amsterdam. He holds a chair in Urban Geography and directs the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research. Uitermark has written widely on cities, social movements, and digital platforms. His books include On Display: Instagram, the Self, and the City (with John Boy), Cities and Social Movements (with Walter Nicholls), and Dynamics of Power in Dutch Integration Politics.

1. Introduction 2. The social science of complexity 3. Complex cities: Longing for Wikitopia 4. Complex bureaucracies: Self-organization in Wikipedia 5. Complex media: The epistemology of digital capitalism 6. Complex contention: Anonymous' power dynamics 7. Digital Platforms: Complexity and power in the digital economy 8. Conclusion: The biopolitics of Artificial Intelligence