The country and the platform, or the issue of nanofundia

AGUSTÍN BERTI

Aarhus

Congreso; ELO 2021, Platform (Post?) Pandemic; 2021

Aarhus University

This paper discusses the issue of the platformization of culture from a Latin-American perspective. The issue of latifundia and the consolidation of vast productive land a very reduced minority of wealthy elites has been one of the distinctive traits of lasting inequalities in Latin-American countries. And the diaspora of migrants to the slums of major cities has been a defining trait of the 20th century. This has seemingly nothing to do with digital culture, and yet this paper will stress the links between the reprimarization of production in the developing world and the digital extractivism of platform economy described by Pasquinelli and Joler (2020) in order to assess the consolidation of culture enhanced by digital technologies. Such consolidation goes well beyond the scope described in Adorno and Horkheimer?s definition of cultural industry, since everything digitized con be treated as "digital content". Drawing from previous work on the ontology of digital objects (Blanco & Berti, 2016), and my critique of "content dynamics" (Berti, 2015). Platforms strive on the automated algorithmic administration of access and reproduction of creative works (be they text, sound, video, o code-based). The common trait of current platform culture is the maximization of profit by means of garnering data and attention in order to capture more attention (and more data). My claim is that this data extactivism is enabled by the ability to treat artistic works as interchangeable digital content. It is a form of standardization of cultural production akin to that of nature into agricultural parceled land. The emergence of corporate cultural platforms has led to an unprecedented concentration of media and cultural production ownership that flourished in the platform ecosystem that the COVID-19 pandemic has once accelerated, configuring what I will discusses as the specific form of primitive accumulation in digitized societies. A phenomenom well characterized by Snricek (2017), platform economy is the way of capturing surplus value in the age of digital connection. In previous shared research (Berti, 2015, Ré & Berti, 2021; Ré, Costa, Célis Bueno & Berti, 2020), I have explored the attempts to obstruct digital addressability in electronic literature and digital arts as a reaction to the extraction of surplus by means of the normalization of content. My partial assessment is that these aesthetic strategies provide examples of resistance rather than an alternative model of digital (and platform) culture. Meanwhile corporate media has advance towards the consolidation of actual nanofundia characterized by the massive purchased of copyrights and of infrastructure ownership, strategically located in the global North. Taking on from Williams (1973) classical study of English literature, if there is to be a politics of electronic literature, the class struggle will be located on the servers and the protocols. Expanding Jameson?s concept of a "geopolitical aesthetics" (2018), if there is to be a geopolitics of electronic literature, the struggles will be about national and regional digital infraestructures and the local regulations over the globalized attention economies. The problem is about how much can we tolerate the expansion of cultural nanofundia.