August 13, 2025

Petter Törnberg and Justus Uitermark, "Seeing Like a Platform: An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity" (Taylor & Francis, 2025)

58 minutes

'Seeing Like a Platform: An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity (Taylor & Francis, 2025)' by Petter Törnberg & Justus Uitermark

In my conversation with Petter Törnberg about Seeing Like a Platform, we kept returning to a simple but unsettling point: platforms don't just carry our messages or connect us to information. They've created an entirely new way of knowing the world. His book with Justus Uitermark argues that when everything must be tagged, ranked, and fed through recommendation engines, we get a reality that only makes sense through those mechanisms.

This goes beyond previous technological shifts. The printing press expanded what we could know. Television changed how quickly we could know it. But platforms have altered the conditions of knowledge itself. When a platform "sees" the world, it only recognizes what can be counted, sorted, and optimized. Everything else becomes invisible or, worse, stops seeming real. We start mistaking the map for the territory, except now the map is writing itself based on our clicks and swipes.

What troubles me most about Törnberg's analysis is how naturally we've adapted to this new epistemology. We optimize our research for algorithmic discovery. We think in terms of engagement rather than understanding. The platform's logic becomes so embedded in daily life that other ways of organizing knowledge start to feel antiquated, inefficient. For STS researchers, this creates a genuine bind: we're trying to study platform society while swimming in its assumptions. The challenge isn't escaping platform thinking but remembering that there are other ways to think.

Notes:

The Ascendance Of Algorithmic Tyranny

Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job (Collection on Technology and Work)

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