Platforms

Around, In Between,
and Through

Edited by Aarti Sunder

Platforms
Around, In Between,
and Through

Edited by Aarti Sunder


Platforms: Around, In Between, and Through
Edited by Aarti Sunder
2022
Published with the support of Natasha, Singapore
Biennale 2022, organised by the Singapore Art Museum,
16 October 2022 to 19 March 2023. The Biennale is
commissioned by the National Arts Council, Singapore,
and supported by the Ministry of Culture, Community,
and Youth, Singapore.
Publication Design: Roshan Shakeel
Printed by: Sudarsan Graphics Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
The copyright of each article remains with the authors
acknowledgements
I would like to thank Nida Ghouse and June Yap for the invi-
tation and for helping me consolidate my ideas for the book.
And thanks to Nida for her precise questions, considerations,
and feedback at crucial moments within the last six months.
Nihaal Faizal has helped me navigate the ins and outs of what
goes into making books — I owe him a big thanks. Special
thanks to Si Xuan Chok, Dylan Chan, Syaheedah Iskander,
Priyageetha Dia, Chand Chandramohan, Ryan Loren Lee,
Ariana Mercado, Racy Lim, and Janice Lum for their par-
ticipation in the workshops over the week in Singapore, for
producing beautiful drawings, and for their conversation
and laughter. Their presence and contribution to the book
has been of utmost importance. Thanks to Duncan Bass for
hanging out with me, for engaging conversations and for
his inputs.
And most importantly, thanks to Mummee and her five
children for sleeping around me all day and meowing only
when hungry.
This publication also stems from a long-term project, the
research for which I began while a student at MIT. I remain
indebted to Nida Sinnokrot who spent many meticulous
hours with me to sculpt and tease out my thoughts. As have
Judith Barry, Tobias Putrih, Gediminas Urbonas, Renee
Green, and Graham Yaeger. I am always grateful to The
Work of the Future research group which was instrumental
in kicking off this project almost three years ago. Full credit
to my perpetual sounding boards Chucho Ocampo, Faruk
Sabanovic, Chi Pohao, Emma Zhu, and Nancy Valladares.
contents

Pg. 6 Introduction
Aarti Sunder

Pg. 20 Platforming and Perspectivism

Zé Antonio Magalhães

Pg. 38 Between Entities and Identities: The Internet

of Egregores
Gary Zhexi Zhang

Pg. 56 Performing Specters: Deliberate Images,

Intended Metaphors
Aarti Sunder

Pg. 74 Sinking Back into Ourselves: Experimental

approaches to teaching labor and technology
Noopur Raval

Pg. 88 Fair Work in the Gig Economy

Mark Graham & John Philip Sage

Pg. 93 About the Contributors

 18 19

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 20
Platforming and
Perspectivism
Zé Antonio Magalhães
In this essay, I would like to propose a theoretical experi-
ment. This experiment consists in mobilizing the conceptual
apparatus of cosmological perspectivism in order to account
for certain aspects or dimensions of the contemporary
process we have come to call platformization. This is a very
tentative, very preliminary project. I sketched it for the
first time in a talk at the State University of Rio de Janeiro,
and further developed it in a two-session workshop at the
Foreign Objekt platform, now part of the Posthuman Art
1. See www. Network.1 This essay draws heavily from those instances.
posthumanart.com Let me start with some preliminary definitions of the
two main terms which I shall be discussing throughout:
‘platforming’ and ‘perspectivism’. I use ‘platforming’ to refer
to a specific set of operations through which platforms
institute themselves as such. I will argue that platforming
is defined, in an important sense, by the production of
differences of level, or differences of plane. A platform, in this
sense, is a level or a plane which is differentiated, detached,
abstracted from a neutral plane of reference, which we may
call ‘the ground’. I will discuss this in terms of differences of
plane of agency and differences of visibility.
By ‘perspectivism’, I refer to a family of cosmologies
or ontologies shared by a number of indigenous peoples
from Amazonia and elsewhere with certain common
2. Eduardo Viveiros characteristics, as described by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.2
de Castro (2015b). The I will be working with a simplified version of perspectivism,
Relative Native. Essays
on indigenous conceptual which will be based on an animal–person–spirit triad and
worlds. Chicago: HAU a prey–predator dyad. The conceptual character of the
Books. shaman as well as the situational paradigm of the ‘forest
encounter’ will play important roles in this perspectivist
framework.
In perspectivist ontologies, everyone (or everybody)
appears as people to themselves and to their own kind.
21
We appear to ourselves as people, and others (say, jaguars)
appear to themselves as people. Beings of other kinds usually
appear to us as either animals or spirits, though in normal
circumstances spirits are invisible — to say that they appear
to us as spirits is usually to say that they do not appear to
us. It is also possible to see others as people or to actually
see them as spirits, though this implies that the situation is
not normal.
My hypothesis is that the conceptual apparatus of per-
spectivism may allow us to unpack contemporary platform
ontologies in ways which are relevant and cannot necessarily
be obtained through modern/Western conceptual schemes.
This experiment rests on the somewhat militant affirmation
that perspectivist thought cannot be reduced to a cultural
curiosity, a parochial prejudice to be supplanted by more
advanced concepts, or a set of beliefs which might even be
interesting, exotic, but corresponding to some archaic world
which has nothing to do with our planetary, technological,
and hypercomplex society. On the contrary, the power
of the so-called ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology is, to a
great extent, in emphasizing the contemporary potential of
non-modern cosmologies as a philosophical project to be
taken seriously. My goal is not to romanticize indigenous
thought, as if it should give us some kind of redemption,
but to navigate its possibilities in relation to concrete con-
temporary problems.
platforming
In this section, I will first focus on platforming and specif-
ically on how platforming produces two types of level-dif-
ferences: differences of plane of agency and differences in
degrees of visibility. In the remaining sections, I will draw
from cosmological perspectivism as a conceptual framework
to articulate and navigate those differences.
Functional abstraction and the differentiation of levels of agency
What is a platform? First I should distinguish between
the two senses in which I talk about platforms. There is
a broader sense in which a platform is simply a detached
plane or level in which certain functions are afforded which
Platforming and Perspectivism
3. Ray Brassier (2013).
“Unfree Improvisation/
Compulsive Freedom.”
Available online at http://
www.mattin.org/essays/
unfree_improvisation-
compulsive_freedom.html,
accessed on 7/30/2022;
Wilfrid Sellars (1954).
“Some Reflections on
Language Games.” Philos.
of Sci. vol. 21 issue 3.
Pgs 204–228. DOI:
10.1086/287344.
4. Bruno Latour (1993).
We have never been modern.
Cambridge Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
5. Carl Schmitt (2003).
The Nomos of the Earth in
the International Law of the
Jus Publicum Europaeum.
New York: Telos Press.
22
are different from what we may call a ground level or simply
a relatively lower level of abstraction. And then there is a
specific contemporary phenomenon, which we might for
lack of a better term call ‘algorithmic platforms’, which
produce abstraction in a particular way that has to do with
algorithmic governance or ‘algorithmics’.
The most basic sense of platform is simply a detached
surface or plane which may serve as a ground, but is removed
from the level of the ground. Then we speak of political
platforms, technological platforms, computational plat-
forms, business platforms. All of these function by affording
a special plane where certain actions become possible.
We can say that language or normativity or moder-
nity or reason or humanity are platforms in this sense.
Normativity produces the plane of reason, freedom, and
culture as functionally detached in relation to nature. That
is possible because rules that were simply exemplified as
patterns abstract themselves from those patterns and start
to act as reasons for acting.3
So if there is such a thing as what Latour4 calls the
‘Constitution of the Moderns’, that’s not simply by fiat,
but because a certain platform is constructed through the
organization of networks of constraints. We may call this,
drawing from Schmitt,5 a certain nomic order, what we may
call the modern nomos, or the humanist nomos — and we may
argue about what is the correct time frame in which to
situate it.
My working hypothesis, however, is that the current
process of platformization might constitute a proper nomic
transition: that is, the diagram of constraints which struc-
tures our worlds might be changing to such an extent that
the modern way to separate the planes of culture and nature,
normativity and causality, human subjects and non-human
objects might begin to lose its grip on some of our concrete
experiences and problems.
So how do algorithmic platforms produce themselves
as functionally abstracted planes of agency? I would say
that, paradigmatically, they function by formalizing or coding
certain functions and making them available to potential users.
Zé Antonio Magalhães
6. Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari (1980).
Mille Plateaux. Capitalisme
et schizophrénie II. Paris:
Les Éditions de Minuit
(Critique); Manuel
DeLanda (2006). A New
Philosophy of Society.
Assemblage theory and
social complexity. London:
Continuum; ——— (2016)
Assemblage Theory.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Speculative realism.
7. Gilles Deleuze (2001).
Difference and Repetition.
London, New York: Con-
tinuum.
8. Antoinette Rouvroy
and Thomas Berns (2013).
“Gouvernementalité
algorithmique et perspec-
tives d’émancipation.”
Réseaux vol 177 issue 1.
Pg 163. DOI: 10.3917/
res.177.0163.
23
For example, Uber codes functions like ‘taking a ride’ and
‘offering a ride’. Often this is done by taking a pattern of
behavior from the social milieu and coding it in the form of
an application.
Platforms instantiate their applications in devices,
whether personal, mobile, or distributed in all kinds of
spaces. Speaking in terms of Deleuzoguattarian ‘assemblage
theory’,6 devices couple organized matters as hardware and
formed functions as software. Software overcodes itself in a
series of layers until, in the most elevated layers of the software
stack, applications offer formed functions to users. These
are phenomenologically manifested to users in the form of
user interfaces.
Applications are software, that is, they’re formed
functions. Their specificity among software is they have a
double implementation — they correlate to two different
types of organized matters: not only to their hardware but
also to potential users or demes that emerge from a social or
demic milieu. Hardware both in my phone and elsewhere
(in the cloud) implements Uber by executing the necessary
commands for its functioning, and users implement Uber by
taking and offering rides.
The user, in my sense, is thus a two-sided figure. There
is a user-form which is coded and embedded as a part of the
application. This is made of rules. And there is a user-content
which emerges from the social milieu to actualize itself as a
user on the platform. Before relating to the user-form, the
potential user is not necessarily a subject but simply part of
an indistinct demic multitude.
I tend to conceive of what I am calling the social
milieu, or demes, as a multiplicity considered in terms of its
potentialities or virtualities.7 There are always N conducts
or patterns of behavior which could emerge out of a demic
milieu. And what platforms seek to do is to map out the
relevant variables and parameters which make it possible for
them, through strategic interventions, to actualize certain
conducts as opposed to others.8 Social patterns are made
into rules which become embedded in the computational
structure of the platform, and it starts to act on the social
Platforming and Perspectivism 24
milieu to produce, in the sense of bringing forth, potential
analogous conducts along with their agents.
It would seem that these rules are abstracted and start
to circulate on a functionally autonomous level, even though
they are not embedded or represented in human brains or
consciousnesses. There seems to be some sort of ‘involution’
in the sense in which Brassier uses the word, but at a differ-
ent level, or perhaps on multiple levels. Those levels don’t
correspond necessarily to the scale of the human biological
individual and they are not obviously submitted by con-
scious deliberation by any humans. This particular mode of
abstracting and circulating rules is often called algorithmic
9. Christian Katzenbach governance.9
and Lena Ulbricht (2019). Algorithmic governance platforms are often considered
“Algorithmic Governance.”
Internet Policy Review to operate in three phases. (1) They formalize functions and
vol 8 issue 4. DOI: offer them to potential users; (2) they gather large masses
10.14763/2019.4.1424. of data from the conducts they afford and extract statistical
correlations from those data, and (3) on the basis of those
correlations, they act upon actions so as to actualize certain
types of potential conducts in the social milieu. This is not
to say that social life is formless. There are of course very
many structured and formalized functions already going
on in society. Many of these are rule-following and in this
sense are conducts freely performed by humans who see
themselves and recognize each other as subjects or agents.
It seems to me, however, that seen from the point of
view of algorithmic governance agencies, those same actions
may become relevant as patterns or, if you will, appear as
patterns rather than as free actions. It doesn’t matter if for
you clicking ‘like’ or calling an Uber is any more voluntary
than, say, having certain eye-movements when confronted
with an ad. For the platform, all of those count as patterns
which, inasmuch as they can be correlated to multiple anal-
ogous patterns and can be triggered with a certain reliability
in a population of potential users, allow the controlled
circulation of rules through the platform.
The point here — which will later connect to perspectiv-
ism — is that the multilayer and decentralized platforming
we are seeing may produce platformed agencies and users
Zé Antonio Magalhães 25
on multiple levels acting on variable planes, so that what
counts to each of them as a free action or as a causal pattern
may vary according to their relative positions in the diagram
of a multiplatform socio-technical milieu.
Interfaciality and the differentiation of visibilities
In order to visualize what I mean in referring to the differ-
entiation of visibilities operated by algorithmic platforms, I
would prompt the reader to take a look at an audiovisual
10. Watch Film — Current piece titled Current.10
Cam: http://current.cam/ Current is meant and executed as a cinematic specula-
film
tion about the future of ‘cinema’ broadly conceived, based
on the intersection of a number of current tendencies in the
technologies of visibility, namely (1) virtual and augmented
reality devices, such as glasses or optical implants; (2) algo-
rithmic curation of content feeds; (3) volumetric cinema;
(4) deep fakes; (5) streaming culture; and (6) the possibility
of the decentralized financializing of the visible through
cryptocurrencies and smart contracts.
Recently there has also been a lot of discussion about
the notion of ‘metaverse’, which of course has to do with
the theme of this essay, though Mark Zuckerberg’s version
of it is quite unimaginative. The fundamental premise,
anyway, seems to be that platforms no longer manifest
primarily through screens, but rather as augmented/virtual
reality interfaces which are superimposed on our lifeworlds.
Vision is not the only aspect of this, but seems to be a key
dimension — it is above all the headset which is the privi-
leged device, even if other types of sensorial input may be
added through other technologies. It would be impossible
for users to meaningfully act on the level of platforms if they
did not receive sufficient sensory input corresponding to
the plane on which they are meant to act — what objects can
they interact with, what the available actions are, what their
limits are, etc. In many cases, they should also be perceived
by others operating on the same plane so that they can have
meaningful interactions. All of this happens through user
interfaces. Therefore, the platforming of actions seems to
imply some sort of corresponding platforming of sensation,
which is a question of interfaciality.
Platforming and Perspectivism
11. Michel Foucault
(1975). Surveiller et
Punir. Naissance de la
prison. Paris: Gallimard.
Bibliothèque des histoires.
12. Shoshana Zuboff
(2019). The Age of
Surveillance Capitalism.
The fight for a human future
at the new frontier of power.
Shoshana Zuboff. New
York; NY: PublicAffairs.
13. Michel Foucault
(2004). Sécurité, Territoire,
Population. Cours au
Collège de France (1977–
1978). Paris: Gallimard/
Seuil. ISSN 0291-402.
14. Gilles Deleuze (1992).
“Postscript on the Societies
of Control.” October vol
59 MIT Press. Pgs 3–7.
26
It is common today to affirm that the internet, the
smartphone, or what have you is a prison, often with explicit
or implicit reference to the famous philosophical trope of
Bentham’s/Foucault’s panopticon.11 We have hyped concepts
such as ‘surveillance capitalism’,12 which amounts to trying
to interpret the regime of visibility of algorithmic platforms
as what Foucault called a disciplinary regime. However,
algorithmic platforms are closer to what Foucault13 defined
as governmentality, or what Deleuze14 called control. Instead
of fixing differences of visibility through static architectures,
algorithmic platforms distribute visibilities and sensibilities
by mapping statistical correlations within large populations
of human and non-human agents that constitute a demic
milieu by mapping correlations and then modulating flows
of vision and sensibility based on those correlations. It is
no longer a question of fixing differences of visibility, but
of constantly redistributing visibility according to recursive
probabilistic diagrams.
Machine vision and deep fakes, as well as AI-generated
art can give us good examples of this regime of visibility.
When we have to prove we are not robots, we help auto-
nomous vehicles learn to see by determining visual patterns
corresponding to cars, traffic lights, crosswalks, etc. In order
to be able to see faces, algorithmic platforms feed from our
faces as we put them to use in social interaction, and then
these faces allow AI to produce human faces which don’t
belong to anyone in particular. A whole machinic imaginary
or delirium, which has been compared to a ‘deep dream’,
is mined by platforms out of demic milieus and this then
serves not only as a foundation for pattern recognition but
may be circled back productively, as we see in Current in the
form of an algorithmically curated visual experience.
The debate about the metaverse is interesting here
precisely because of how much Facebook’s, or now Meta’s,
promotional imagery doesn’t show those possibilities.
In their image of the metaverse, the main organ of social
platforms — the algorithmically curated feed — is nowhere
to be found. Of course, it is nowhere because it would, for
sure, be everywhere. Experience in general would present as
Zé Antonio Magalhães 27
an algorithmic feed. But, understandably, Meta are not in a
hurry to show us what that would probably look like.
Zuckerberg shows us a metaverse which is highly
inclusive and egalitarian, but what we seem likely to see is
a radical augmentation of the possibilities of differentiation
and discrimination. Differently platformed users may live
in completely different worlds even as they share the same
physical space, and they may, to some extent, share the same
virtual space but with very different conditions. Even how
one user appears to the other would probably emerge as a
function of the correlation between their data profiles.
This is already the case in a ‘metaversalist’ project like
Meta’s — a universalism of the metaverse, in which the latter
should be unified through a single platform. If, however,
we think of the possibility of multiple ‘metaverses’ — what
we may call a platform ‘multiverse’ — the negotiation of
visibilities becomes much more complex. How human and
non-human users linked to different platforms may appear
(or not) to each other in this context would seem to not only
vary widely from user to user, but from moment to moment,
depending on the diagrammatic configurations that inform
their conditions of interfaciality at each juncture. This
along with the differentiation of planes of action which
accompanies it and, to some extent, is indiscernible from it
is what I will seek to unpack by drawing from the conceptual
apparatus of cosmological perspectivism.
the perspectivism of platforms
15. Eduardo Viveiros Viveiros de Castro15 defines perspectivism as “the concep-
de Castro (2015b). The tion, common to many peoples of the [American] continent,
Relative Native. Essays
on indigenous conceptual according to which the world is inhabited by different sorts
worlds. Chicago: HAU of subjects or persons, human and non-human, which
Books. Pg 45. apprehend reality from different points of view.” You have
subjects or people who may be human or not. There is a dif-
ferentiation between the categories of people and human, as
there are not only human but also non-human people.
Everyone or everybody, therefore, is people. But this
status of a subject or person is itself always relative to a per-
spective. Humans are people to humans; jaguars are people
Platforming and Perspectivism
16. Eduardo Viveiros de
Castro (2013). A Inconstân-
cia da Alma Selvagem. E
outros ensaios de antropo-
logia. 5a edição. São Paulo:
CosacNaify. p. 380. Trans-
lated by the author.
28
to jaguars; but jaguars are (normally) jaguars to humans,
and humans are not humans to jaguars either — they might
appear as prey animals such as peccaries, or in different con-
ditions they may appear as predator animals or even spirits.
Personhood or perspectivity, in Viveiros de Castro’s
terms, which is to say “the capacity to occupy a point of view”
is “a question of degree and/or context.” You may become
more or less of a person depending on the context — not
simply your context, but the context in which the encounter
between your perspective and someone else’s happens.
To be a person, in perspectivism, is to have a perspective
and to occupy the position of an agent. Needless to say, this
is what the discussion above about differences of agency and
of visibility was designed to lead to: Perspectivism seems to
be, in some sense, about the distribution of relative positions or
degrees of agency and visibility.
Viveiros de Castro emphasizes that Amerindian terms
for ‘people’ usually operate as pronouns rather than as
names: They indicate a position of agency rather than an
essence or substance. The position of a person is occupied
as long as someone is capable of gaining the position of an
agent in some perspectival relation.
Some non-human beings may, in fact, “have powers
of agency far superior than humans, and in this sense are
‘more persons’ than the latter.” A similar relativity affects
visibility: The distribution of ‘appearing-as’ and ‘seeing-as’
depends on a negotiation of perspectives. And — this is very
important — perspectives are a function of bodies, not of souls.
Differences of perspective follow from somatic differences,
not spiritual ones. “Animals see different things than we
do the same way we do because their bodies are different
from ours.” 16
The perspectivist notion of body that is relevant here
is not physiological. In these terms, for perspectivists,
everyone has similar, human bodies. The relevant somatic
difference relates to “the affects, affections, and capacities
which singularize each type of body: What does it eat, how
does it move, how does it communicate, is it gregarious or
solitary?” A body is “a set of manners or modes of being
which constitute a habitus. Between the formal subjectivity
Zé Antonio Magalhães
17. Gilles Deleuze (1978).
“Kant: Synthesis and
time.” March-April 1978.
The Deleuze Seminars.
Available online at https://
deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/
node/50. Accessed on
8/26/2020.
18. Eduardo Viveiros de
Castro (2013). A incon-
stância da alma selvagem. E
outros ensaios de antropo-
logia. 5a edição. São Paulo:
CosacNaify. p. 351. Trans-
lated by the author.
19. Ibid.
20. Ludwig Wittgenstein
(2009). Philosophical
Investigations. Rev. 4th
ed. Edited by P.M.S.
Hacker and Joachim
Schulte. Chichester: Wiley-
Blackwell.
29
of souls and the material substantiality of organisms, there is
this central plane which is the body as a stream of affections
and capacities, and which is the origin of perspectives. […]
Perspectivism is a corporeal mannerism.”
This notion of the body, I believe, may be connected to
Deleuze’s treatment of the Kantian schema, when he argues
that lions are Kantian, which will finally result in the concept
of the diagram. For Deleuze,17 the schema or the diagram of
the Lion is not the definition of the lion (“big animal, mam-
mal, with a mane, growling”), but “spatio-temporal rhythms,
spatio-temporal mannerisms. […] An animal’s territory and
an animal’s domain, with its paths, the traces that it leaves in
its domain, the times that it uses a particular path.”
“The lion is Kantian.” Deleuze says, “All animals are
Kantian. What is the schema of the spider? The schema of
the spider is the web.” Deleuze makes the schema — which
is how concepts are correlated to intuitions in the tran-
scendental problematic — into a spatio-temporal dynamism
which is characteristically animal, not human; bodily, but
not anatomical: a bundle of rhythms and mannerisms.
This seems like an exteriorization, or an immanentization
(depending on your reference point) of the transcendental.
I wonder if Viveiros de Castro18 (my translation) had this
passage in mind when he came up with this particular way to
translate the perspectivist conception of the body. And how
we might connect it to the definition of a shaman as a “master
of cosmic schematism.” 19 I also suspect that when Deleuze
picks the example of the lion, of all animals, he might be
playing with Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘form of life’ — how
even if the lion spoke the same language as us, we couldn’t
understand him, because we don’t share the same form of
life.20 Viveiros de Castro writes that in the Jaguar’s diction-
ary the word ‘beer’ has the same definition it has in ours, but
jaguars use it to refer to a different thing, namely blood. This
is why we don’t understand jaguars — not because they have
a different language, even a different world, but because
they have a different form of life, that is, a different body.
Hence, in perspectivism we have all kinds of dif-
ferences in agency and visibility which are expressed in
perspectival differences, and those differences are functions
Platforming and Perspectivism 30
of an encounter between bodies considered as ethograms,
rhythms, and mannerisms. Whether someone will appear as
a person, an animal or a spirit to someone else, thus depends
not just on their own body or life-form, but on how different
bodies, different forms of life, different schemas/diagrams
meet and interact.
How does this play out in the context of platforms?
The idea for this exercise comes from some very simple,
perhaps even naïf parallels. First, when it comes to subjects,
persons or agents, the multiscalar environment of plat-
forms produces multiple different levels which users might
occupy. The user-content in question might correspond to
individuals or groups of biological humans, in which case
differences of agency might be created within the species.
The user-content may also be non-human, especially if we
consider contemporary phenomena such as the internet of
things, self-driving cars, different types or levels of artificial
intelligences, algorithmic governance agencies, and even
animal users, as seen with the device-equipped polar bear in
the Current video. In a perspectivist framework, all of those
users may appear as people to themselves and similar users.
In the second place, there is appearing as an animal.
Starting from our own experience and conception of them,
animals usually matter to humans in terms of their material-
ity, energy, substance, and affects. On the one hand, we may
feed on their bodies or use their force or extract their skins,
feathers, teeth, or horns. On the other, in their physical
force — speed, for instance — they may constitute a threat of
predation, in which case it is our bodies that might serve as a
source of substance and energy for them. Finally, they might
be friends or companions to us, as in the case of pets. In this
sense, I suspect that we biological humans might appear to
certain digital platforms or certain types of their users as
animals, and especially as prey animals, that is, as bodies
available to be consumed in their matter. As platformed
entities constitute superior capabilities for agency and
intelligence, the type of intelligence we present on our level
may become so different and of so little relevance that we
may start to appear as animals. Think of how, in an example
Zé Antonio Magalhães
21. Ludwig Wittgenstein
(2009). Philosophical
Investigations. Rev. 4th
ed. Edited by P.M.S.
Hacker and Joachim
Schulte. Chichester: Wiley-
Blackwell.
31
mentioned by Viveiros de Castro, from the point of view of
the sun and the moon, humans appear as monkeys.
And, third, there’s appearing (or disappearing) as spirits.
Viveiros de Castro defines spirits as “entities of Amerindian
worlds that do not have a stable, normally visible bodily
form, evincing in a superlative manner the metamorphic
capacity proper to all persons: spirits are, in a sense, more-
than-human persons, or meta-persons.” So it is neither the
case that spirits are not people or that they do not have
bodies — they have bodies of a type that is very different
from our own, which exist in densities, scales, or levels too
different from ours for us to either comprehend their actions
as such or to perceive them intuitively.
It would seem, thus, that to relate to a spirit is to estab-
lish a relation with an agent that is on a level of abstraction
higher than our own. To quote, “the notion of animal spirit
‘masters’ (‘mothers of the game’, ‘master of the white-lipped
peccaries’, etc.) is widely spread throughout the continent.
These spirit masters, clearly endowed with a type of
intentionality-based agency analogous to that of humans,
function as hypostases of the animal species with which
they are associated, thereby creating an intersubjective field
for human–animal relations even where empirical animals
are not spiritualized.” 21
In our digital platform environment, therefore, we may
speculate that a platformed entity may appear as a spirit,
for instance, in the sense of existing and acting on a level of
abstraction which cannot be phenomenologically experi-
enced by us, depending on what kind of body corresponds
to this ‘us’. We may think, for example, of an algorithmic
governance agency whose technical implementation is
distributed across servers and informational networks
across continents, and whose social implementation encom-
passes entire populations. Furthermore, as those platforms
platform different users differently, users may appear as
spirits in relation to less platformed users. In his version of
the Metaverse, Zuckerberg might be capable of seeing us
transparently, while he may be an invisible abstract entity
that appears to us only when and how he decides to, that is,
a spirit, or even a god.
Platforming and Perspectivism 32 Zé Antonio Magalhães 33

22. Ash Kramer. Flat
Ontology. Available
online at https://scalar.
usc.edu/works/material_
philosophy/flat-ontology,
Accessed on 7/30/2022.
Philosophical materialism.
23. Levi R. Bryant
(2011). The Democracy of
Objects. Michigan: Open
Humanities Press. New
metaphysics.
24. Eduardo Viveiros
de Castro (2019). “On
Models and Examples.
Engineers and bricoleurs
in the Anthropocene.”
Current Anthropology vol
60 (Supple-ment 20). Pgs
S296–S308.
25. Pierre Clastres (1974).
Société Contre l’État. S.l:
Les Éditions de Minuit.
the forest encounter and (techno) shamanism
I believe, in this sense, that the differences of agency and
appearing that we find in perspectivism seem to imply scale
or level differences — which may seem to conflict with the
common association of the ontological turn with so-called
‘flat ontologies’ — though I do not remember Viveiros de
Castro ever using that particular expression.
The top definition Google gave me of ‘flat ontology’ is
“a model for reality that says that all objects have the same
degree of being-ness as any other object. No object is more a
subject than any other.” 22 In this sense, Viveiros de Castro’s
reconstruction of perspectivism does not seem like a flat
ontology, since we have just seen him define Amerindian
spirits as having a relatively greater degree of subject-ness
than us.
There is also a definition by Levi Bryant,23 in which “flat
ontology rejects any ontology of transcendence or presence
that privileges one sort of entity as the origin of all others
and as fully present to itself ” and it “signifies that the world
or the universe doesn’t exist.” This seems far more compat-
ible — though I don’t see any reason to call this flat, an image
that seems to arbitrarily privilege the bi-dimensional plane
over other topologies. Why a plane, we might ask, and not a
dot, not a line, not a cube?
Flat ontology, as cosmopolitically linked to what Bryant
calls a “democracy of objects” seems to be an ontology which
is in principle non-hierarchical. All beings are in the same
sense and in the same degree. We may call this ‘ontological
liberal democracy’. What Viveiros de Castro24 proposes
explicitly, notably in his essay ‘On models and examples’,
is instead an ‘ontological anarchism’. The difference, I
would argue, is that he is not affirming that ontology is
non-hierarchical (or ‘flat’) in principle or neutrally; he is
affirming a cosmopolitical commitment to de-hierarchize or
‘flatten’ ontology. I suspect this is linked to Pierre Clastres’
notion of ‘Societies against the State’, 25 and that perhaps
in our context we may speak of peoples or forms of life
against platforming.
This I think is a far more subtle and interesting position,
though I am not sure I agree with it — that is, I am not sure
26. Wilfrid Sellars
(2007). “In the Space of
Reasons.” Selected Essays of
Wilfrid Sellars. Edited by
Kevin Scharp and Robert
Brandom. Cambridge,
Mass., London: Harvard
University Press.
27. Bogna Konior (2020).
The Dark Forest Theory of
the Internet. Pittisburgh and
New York: Flugschriften.
Available online at https://
flugschriftencom.files.
wordpress.com/2020/07/
flugschriften-6-bogna-
konior-the-dark-forest-the-
ory-of-the-internet-v.2.pdf.
Accessed on 7/30/2022.
I think the differentiation of levels is inherently bad. In
any case, what I would like to propose in this respect is to
avoid an alternative between these two positions: (1) Flat
ontology: There are no real differences of level. (2) A strong
version of what Viveiros de Castro calls mononaturalism:
There are real differences of level, and therefore there must
be a true general orientation of level differences which the
scientific image of the world should model.26
I would like to suggest a third position compatible with
platform perspectivism, as we are discussing it here. In this
position, there are differences of level which are real, but they
are not perspective-independent: They only acquire a definite
orientation in the concrete encounter between different bodies–
perspectives. Differences of level are real — so much so that
in many cases the fact that we wish they would disappear
does nothing to prevent them from affecting us, just like
the prey is powerless in relation to the predator. But those
differences are produced as such in and by nomic operations
which are political — they don’t have to do primarily with
truth and falsehood, but with differences of force, strategies,
diagrams of power. Truth is important too, but it comes only
afterwards, as it were.
In Amerindian perspectivism, the general paradigm
for this problem is hunting, and the paradigmatic setting
in which perspectives are negotiated is the ‘forest encoun-
ter’. We may contrast the forest and the prison. While the
panoptic diagram of prisons, schools, factories, and other
such apparatuses operates through architecture, through
the disciplining of bodies, through the distribution of light,
and so on to stabilize somatic and perspectival differences,
the forest as a non-disciplined milieu appears as the setting
in which all of those parameters may vary wildly. We may
then ask whether our contemporary platform environment
is more like a prison or more like a forest.
At this point I am reminded of Bogna Konior’s essay The
Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, inspired by Liu Cixin’s ‘dark
forest theory’. 27 If the platform milieu today is anything like
a dark forest, it means that there is no stabilized orientation
of the topological relation between different platforms. Even
though they function by producing differences of level, there
Platforming and Perspectivism
28. Eduardo Viveiros
de Castro (2013). A
Inconstância da Alma
Selvagem. E outros ensaios
de antropologia. 5a edição.
São Paulo: Cosac-Naify;
——— (2015a). Metafísicas
Canibais. Elementos para
uma antropologia pós-
estrutural. São Paulo: N-1
edições: Cosac-Naify.
34 Zé Antonio Magalhães 35
is no final negotiation of their relative positions within the of cosmic schematism’: they intervene in the very diagram
same coherent spatiality. Their level differences are not as of the world they navigate — at the level of the schema, the
much a stable reality as a cosmonomic project. This project form of life, the rule of production or the diagram, which is
is effectuated through algorithmic governance, which is at to say, the body.
once a cognitive and governmental activity and precisely
in this sense a synthetic process. The recursive operation of
algorithmic governance is the diagram of a platform, in the
same sense as the lion had its diagram and the prison had its
diagram, though it is a diagram of a different sort. It is the
platform’s body, its form of life, or what Deleuze also calls in
his discussion of Kant its rule of production.
Although speaking of an ontology of platforms may
seem just as arbitrary as speaking of a flat ontology, I would
argue that it is quite different, because speaking of platforms
as nomic devices is not to say that reality is just made of plat-
forms. It is to conceptualize nomic processes which work to
produce this particular topology. Platforms are ontological
anti-anarchists, ontological makers of hierarchy.
Finally, we should briefly touch the theme of shamanism,
though it would merit a far more extended development.
In the context of cosmopolitical negotiation of all kinds of
level-differences, shamans may be seen as the specialists of
heuristics. In Viveiros de Castro’s picture of Amerindian
perspectivism, shamanism is the practice of navigating
differences of level through somatic metamorphosis — not
so much transformation as transubstantiation.28 We could
discuss how various bodily technologies are used to operate
those transitions, such as dancing, breathing, singing, con-
suming different substances, or manipulating certain instru-
ments. I suspect the same may apply to platforms — what
some might call ‘technoshamanism’, but which is really just
shamanism, since the latter has always been ‘technological’.
If in the platform environment our degrees of agency
and visibility are a function of our bodies, and our bodies
as users are a distributed network of various human and
non-human entities of different types and levels, then any
alteration in any of those elements is a somatic-perspectival
alteration and as such comparable to a form of shamanism.
This is the rigorous sense in which shamans are ‘masters
 93

about the contributors

zé antonio magalhães is a researcher and teacher focusing

on links between legal/political theory, technology, and
ecology. He holds a PhD in Legal Theory from the Pontificial
Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, and is currently linked
to research projects “COHUBICOL — Counting as a Human
Being in the Age of Computational Law” and “The II Russel
Tribunal on the Amazon”. He has offered various courses,
workshops, and seminars at institutions such as Instituto
Norberto Bobbio, Associação de Pesquisas e Práticas em
Humanidades, Codemy, Ubu em Curso, and Foreign Objekt
on themes spanning speculative legal/political theory,
cosmotechnics, platforms, algorithmic governance, and the
intersection between perspectivism and technology. He has
various papers published in peer-reviewed journals, book
chapters, and other productions. He also organizes and
produces media at Transe.

gary zhexi zhang is an artist and writer interested in the

places where concepts begin to fail. His recent work has
revolved around histories of natural disaster, scam nations,
and ecological economics. Recent projects include Dead
Cat Bounce (with Waste Paper Opera), an oratorio about
finance and catastrophe, and Cycle 25, a solo exhibition at
Arts Catalyst/Bloc Projects, Sheffield. As a researcher, he
has held fellowships at the Berggruen Institute in L.A. and
Sakiya - Art Science Agriculture in Ramallah. His writing has
appeared in Frieze, ArtReview, ArtPapers, VERGE Studies in
Global Asias, Steve Bishop: Deliquescing (Sternberg, 2018),
Against Reduction (MIT Press, 2021), and Catastrophe
Time! (also editor; Strange Attractor Press, 2023).

dr noopur r aval is an interdisciplinary socio-technical

researcher, writer, teacher, and maker who is interested in
histories, presents, and futures of work technologies. She is
currently affiliated with The University of California, Santa
 94

Cruz (UCSC), and will be teaching at The University of

California, Los Angeles (UCLA), from 2023. You can find
her writings and work at noopur.xyz

mark gr aham is the Professor of Internet Geography at

Oxford Internet Institute of Oxford University and Director
of the Fairwork project.

john philip sage (he/they) is a Graphic Designer and

Researcher based in London. They design exhibitions,
publications, workshops, and other visual outlets. With a
particular interest in education and academia, they are
currently a lecturer at Kingston University and an associate
member and tutor at storeprojects.org.

a a rti sunder is an artist living and working in India.

She works with moving image, writing, and drawing. Her
interest lies within techno-politics, focusing on the study
of infrastructure — from contemporary labor practices,
fictional edges of protest, myth, digital-terrestrial play to
expanded platform politics. Aarti has exhibited her work at
HKW, MIT, Warehouse421, Goethe-Institut, 1Shanthiroad,
Kunstverein Leipzig, Bauhaus Imaginista, Alserkal Avenue,
ISCP, and the Museum of Yugoslav History. She has
been the recipient of grants and fellowships from MIT,
Sommerakademie Paul Klee, Ashkal Alwan, Harvard FSC
Film Center, Sarai and Khoj, Akademie Der Kunst, and
Sharjah Art Foundation.
Platforms: Around, In Between and Through
approaches the idea of platforms and
platformization, an expanded and broad
mapping of online–offline relationships that
oscillate between the human, non-human,
and the almost-human. Here, digital conduits,
physical infrastructures, and the marketplace
come together, offering methods of thinking
around and investigating interactions that
stem from platforms — a lens with which to
view hidden ruptures, spectral shifts, and
speculative continuities that arise from
immediate and lingering economic formations.
With contributions from Zé Antonio
Magalhães, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Noopur Raval,
Mark Graham and John Philip Sage, and
Aarti Sunder.

Published with the support of Natasha, Singapore Biennale

2022, organised by the Singapore Art Museum