1st Edition

Seeing Like a Platform An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity

By Petter Törnberg, Justus Uitermark Copyright 2025
164 Pages 9 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

164 Pages 9 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Power needs abstraction, to make the unwieldy complexity of the social world legible and manageable. The proposition at the heart of Seeing Like a Platform is that digital technology brings new metaphors through which power operates. While industrial modernity saw society as a machinery to be designed according to detailed blueprints, digital modernity views society as organic and alive, to... Read more

1. Introduction

2. The social science of complexity

3. Complex cities: Longing for Wikitopia

4. Complex bureaucracies: Self-organization in Wikipedia

With Emiel Rijshouwer and Willem de Koster

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

Biography

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.