Abstracts of contribution

In this lecture, the concern is not with platforms as elements within digital technology but rather with evidence for how the organisation of everyday life has changed as a result of the extraordinary ubiquity of one particular platform – the smartphone. Based on the research of eleven researchers who each spent 16 months examining the use of smartphones by older people all around the world (the ASSA project), we are starting to delineate the most significant consequences of smartphones in the way human beings relate to information, location, relationships and themselves. An important part of this is the way the smartphone does not reduce down to its component apps and platforms, but rather aggregates these in a manner that transcends them. Equally, it functions in a similar way to integrate what otherwise might have been more separate platforms of life, such as work, family and leisure.

Digital platform firms today are gatekeepers for increasingly large swathes of the economy and this had only been reinforced by the Covid 19 pandemic. We explore the contradictory impact that platforms have on entrepreneurship. The ecosystem metaphor used to describe the network of interdependence among the members is intrinsically flawed because it obscures the power of the platform owners. In fact, complementors are platform-dependent businesses whose existence is largely determined by the platform owner. On the positive side, digital platforms ease entrepreneurial entry by lowering costs, providing access to customers, and providing technical and informational boundary resources to attract and support complementors. And yet, platform owners have panoptic visibility into the activities of all participants and the ability to unilaterally change any and all conditions of participation. The relegation of entrepreneurs to dependence requires a new way of thinking about entrepreneurship as the platform economy continues to become ever more central to the global economy.

The contemporary socio-economic context is highly dynamic and an expression of key digital and physical transformations. Within this panorama, digital platforms play a dominant role, imposing their power on economic and social processes. Consumer culture is an essential trait in the social and cultural landscapes of the global digital society. Within this framework we will analyse the role of the prosumer as a subject contemporary empowered and exploited by the affordances of the digital platforms economy. Consumption, labour, education, savings and culture will be observed through the lens of digital sociology.

In this contribution I firstly want to distinguish between prosumption and co-programming in order to argue that the production of the consumer has been increasingly expanded beyond ‘prosumption’ defined as physical on-site assemblage. The expansion also includes logistical and imaginative assemblage. By comprising these three dimensions of ‘assembly work’ prosumers are supposed to contribute in retail shops and by terming this work co-programming, I show that the prosumers’ contribution itself is deeply rooted in the digital logic. 

The emerging platform society, dominated by a small number of global corporations, poses obvious risks to the democratic process. These are added to other previous never solved problems, neither from representative nor direct democratic approaches. Contrary to the capitalism of large corporations, contrary to technocratic trends and even contrary (or complementary) to representation based on conventional parties, democratizing experiences have proliferated throughout the world during the past decade. Many of these experiences have used specific digital platforms to encourage participation and deliberation in decision-making processes. A large part of these initiatives has taken place in local urban areas, often linked to social movements and citizens outside mainstream political parties. However, these experiences have obtained very limited results when it comes to improving the democratic process and the well-being of citizens.

This presentation shows the aims and results of one of the most ambitious urban democratizing experiences in the world, which took place in Madrid between 2015 and 2019. The limited approach and results of this experience will serve to reflect on the opportunity to promote a new kind of public platforms together with genuine new formulas of political representation that favour a more participatory, deliberative, and representative democratic process, adapted to the colossal challenges, but also opportunities, offered by the emerging platform society. The presumption is that, with a new realistic approach, the emerging platform society could effectively be a society of citizens so that they are the ones who really decide on their acts of production and consumption in a conscious and sustainable way, balancing limitations and possibilities offered by globally integrated local levels, both from a functional and territorial point of view.

The Global Smartphone
The smartphone is often literally right in front of our nose, so you would think we would know what it is. But do we? To find out, 11 anthropologists each spent 16 months living in communities in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America, focusing on the take up of smartphones by older people. Their research reveals that smartphones are technology for everyone, not just for the young.
The Global Smartphone presents a series of original perspectives deriving from this global and comparative research project. Smartphones have become as much a place within which we live as a device we use to provide ‘perpetual opportunism’, as they are always with us. The authors show how the smartphone is more than an ‘app device’ and explore differences between what people say about smartphones and how they use them.
The smartphone is unprecedented in the degree to which we can transform it. As a result, it quickly assimilates personal values. In order to comprehend it, we must take into consideration a range of national and cultural nuances, such as visual communication in China and Japan, mobile money in Cameroon and Uganda, and access to health information in Chile and Ireland – all alongside diverse trajectories of ageing in Al Quds, Brazil and Italy. Only then can we know what a smartphone is and understand its consequences for people’s lives around the world.

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy 
‘Who am I at this (st)age? Where am I and where should I be, and how and where should I live?’ These questions, which individuals ask themselves throughout their lives, are among the central themes of this book, which presents an anthropological account of the everyday experiences of age and ageing in an inner-city neighbourhood in Milan, and in places and spaces beyond. Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy explores ageing and digital technologies amidst a backdrop of rapid global technological innovation, including mHealth (mobile health) and smart cities, and a number of wider socio-economic and technological transformations that have brought about significant changes in how people live, work and retire, and how they communicate and care for each other.
Based on 16 months of urban digital ethnographic research in Milan, the smartphone is shown to be a ‘constant companion’ in, of and for contemporary life. It accompanies people throughout the day and night, and through individual and collective experiences of movement, change and rupture. Smartphone practices tap into and reflect the moral anxieties of the present moment, while posing questions related to life values and purpose, identities and belonging, privacy and sociability.
Through her extensive investigation, Shireen Walton argues that ageing with smartphones in this contemporary urban Italian context is about living with ambiguity, change and contradiction, as well as developing curiosities about a changing world, our changing selves, and changing relationships with and to others. Ageing with smartphones is about figuring out how best to live together, differently.

Building on current sociological research on payments and the data economy, the talk proposes that payment apps are central devices in the digital economy: They provide for streams of user-generated transactional data – the economic assets – including purchasing preferences, amount spent, location, and time. Moreover, payment apps also produce transactional data that can be linked to other streams of trace data from that shopper’s smartphone. Such transactional data bring into focus relations between payment app users, retailers, banks, fintech intermediaries, and marketing agencies. The talk suggests that digital payments alter existing and create new relations. For companies, payment apps may serve as the so far missing prism to see whole chains of transactions between users, customers, banking industry, retailers, and brands, which in turn allow for enhanced “personalized recommendations.” For users, payment apps may become social media, ease and increase consumption—they are also another element in the engineered reciprocal relations of data given to receive services. The talk contends that in digital payments two fundamental mechanisms of the digital economy concomitantly interconnect: processes of personalization and relational embedding on the basis of transactional data.

Within the platform literature, there is scant attention on the elderly in platform ecosystems. In this paper, by specifically looking at their payments with such ecosystems, we demonstrate that platforms play a key role in extensive socio-technical networks of care for the elderly referred to as care collectives. We draw on a long-term ethnography with elderly Anglo Indians in the city of Kolkata. We argue that platforms serve as key gateways for the elderly to engage with digital monies, through collaborative use with others (such as friends, kin, and neighbours) in their care collectives. Indeed, through the deeper examination of payments in platforms as a case, we can observe how such collaborative money work is itself a form of elder care.

Markets changed. Monies changed faster. The proliferation of cryptocurrecies and the remarkable expansion of platformization pose an unprecedented challenge to the established ways of studying markets and monies. This paper contributes to recent studies of platformization with an analysis of the materiality of money making and circulation in cryptocurrency exchange platforms. Drawing on fieldwork, economic surveys, and big data analysis of 1) the terms of service agreements of all cryptocurrency exchange platforms and 2) cryptocurrency white papers whose corresponding monies dominate 90% of world cryptocurrency capitalization, and this paper proposes an evidence-based framework to analyze cryptocurrency as data money. Demonstrating that these platforms go beyond market relations in that they fulfil a multiplicity of functions such as banking, exchange infrastructuring, minting, payment system maintenance, software development, security, and centralized extra-blockchain accounting, the paper proposes “stack” as a theoretical construct to qualify a new socio-digital economization process taking place in these data money exchanges. The paper ends by discussing how data money exchange platforms as economization stacks of multiple interactive layers deploy, make, deform new monies as they make money out of them.

With the introduction of privatized ‘e-money’ in Indonesia, platform companies such as Gojek and Grab have been able to convert customers of their transport services into consumers of new financial services. A conversion facilitated to large extent by their existing driver-fleets who now also function as exchange agents between cash and digital money. Here, labourers of the so-called ‘gig-economy’ are not only algorithmically managed to facilitate the transport of people and goods, but to facilitate the circulation of money itself. Drawing on fieldwork in Yogyakarta between 2018 and 2019, I examine this circulation of digital and cash money within and parallel to the Indonesian platform ecosystem, illustrating how they introduce certain transactional dynamics as they
reconfigure customers and drivers as ‘consumer-cyborgs’ and ‘driver-partners’. I show how these socio-technological infrastructures not only affect modes of payment but are also transactional constellations that ultimately serve the financial interests of the companies themselves as new sites of data extraction.

The Covid-19 outbreak brought major disruption to the Chinese economy causing many workers to miss debt repayments, many of which related to monies borrowed from online personal finance platforms. This paper examines how Chinese debtors and credit collection callers responded to the uncertainties surrounding the handling of debt in the immediate weeks following the initial outbreak. Financial institutions expected debt collection agents to persist in pursuing repayments from defaulters, albeit in a socially-distanced manner. Meanwhile, desperate debtors formed a loosely structured “anti-collection alliance” through multiple online platforms to propose counterstrategies against the debt collectors by referring to the vague state regulations as the third-party authority. We argue that amidst “moral ambiguity” over the rules of handling debt during a national crisis, both parties sought to establish their own moral justifications with regards to debt obligations, by creating their own recontextualizations of debt.