Platformativity

For the technologically inclined, their life is structured around asymmetrical relationships with a particular dynamic. The singular user is situated below a machine into which they plug. This dynamic informs technological structure. The single user appears again in the form of the client, connecting to the server through the HTTP protocol. The machine to be plugged into opens up as a world, an environment, within which the user slots into.

The user enters the machine in order to engage in mechanisms which the machine offers to the user to input libidinal energies. These mechanisms are platforms, various forms which enable content creation. Content expresses itself through the form of the platform, the website, the trend, the game, the toolkit, etc.

The products of these platforms interact with each other in ways which spawn new mutations via linguistic interactions of interpretation during the user’s reception of the products of their machines. In turn, as new products emerge, the users are inspired to input into higher order platforms with creating sub-platforms of their own. These dynamics can be seen at play in meme culture and in game creation. In both, the original creates a product, the meme shared and read or the game experience, which is consumed and reinterpreted. When this interpretation occurs via an act of writing sublimated into the platform, the platform’s products mutate via plurality of products in one space, thus allowing for mutation to occur.

The question then arises of how these memes turn into platforms or rather function as platforms. The answer lies in the nature of online revenue, which is gained through clicks or ads, the attention economy. Return again to the schema of the user and their machine. The individual user is plugged into a device alien to themselves, sublimating their libidinal energies into a form. By this, the meme itself functions as integral to the platform, as viewing or interacting with it in consumptive fashion requires some amount of plugging-into the platform, even if that plugging-in does not result in production of any tangible results.

Recognition of this has been building in the objective metrics of libido sacrificed to a platform chased after by those who convert these metrics into currency via ancient occult techniques of turning mass libido into monetary liquid. The interlinked social media presences and brand sales of an e-celeb are done in order to make their presence more than mere personhood, but rather a complete machine into which their users can plug hours upon hours of time into. Mobage companies have recognized this as well, seeing the success Touhou Project was able to attain by using its mythological structure to create a platform of infinite interpretation, fanworks are encouraged as the lowest pieces of a vertical structure, for the purpose of getting libido inputted into the gacha game, converted into currency and power for those at the top.