Towards an empowered ‘Platform State’?

Digital Platforms, Infrastructural Power, and the Transformation of State Authority

Abstract

Over the last decade much of the scholarly discussion about the digital transformation of the state has focused on the notion of “platformization”. This term serves to refer to the way in which governments and public services are ever more strictly associated with the operation of various digital platforms, thus seemingly acquiring some of their properties. Despite this centrality of the notion of platformization of the state, to date there has been surprisingly little theoretical reflection about the underlying organizational logic of the “platform state”. Why is the state becoming “platformized”? Is it simply an attempt by government to update its functioning by absorbing the prevailing social logic of organization, as it has already been popularized by various companies; or is there something more structural and profound to this trend? We argue that in fact states and platforms – while pertaining to different categories and domains – share important organizational logics: an “ambient-making” power; a meta-organizational capacity; a centralizing drive; and most importantly a strong “infrastructural” power, to follow the terms of US sociologist Michael Mann. Using this concept we explain the reason why digital platforms appear to have progressively encroached on a variety of functions that tended to be typically state functions: functions that concern identification; the setting up of fundamental conditional operations of society; the affording of various “enabling” systems, lacking which individuals and
collective actors cannot operate. Hence, the convergence between governments and platforms is not just a “marriage of convenience”. Rather the process of platformization is for states an opportunity to reclaim some of their state capacity and practical power – and in particular infrastructural power – that they seem to have previously lost.