Digital platforms and the companies that own them play an outsized and ambivalent role in contemporary life. They facilitate countless connections and exchanges, while tracking, storing, and profiting from the user data collected in the process. They support novel disaster responses and civic engagement initiatives, but also military and surveillance projects. Dependent on vast infrastructures that strain environmental and civic limits, they can also be used to facilitate sustainability and citizen science.

As models developed in the technology sector are replicated in governance, healthcare, education, and other fields, platforms have become hard to pin down, let alone regulate. As power and wealth become more concentrated, institutions are compromised, expertise is contested, critique calcifies into cynicism, and deliberative politics tilt toward volatility, authoritarianism, and populism.

Limn 14 turns the platform upside down and inside out to recast conversations around this complicated conjuncture. So much has been written about digital platforms that, by now, even the sharpest critiques can feel instantly familiar. Our theme, this is not a platform, represents a modest collective attempt to break the spell of recognition—to loosen the hold of a term that has become too stable, too certain. The not clears the slate so that we can look again. This issue invites you to do just that, not by advancing a single thesis, but by juxtaposing platforms from a wide range of times, spaces, and domains. Payphones and high heel shoes. Gig work and oil platforms. Bingo halls and Zoom calls. Porn scenes and detox dusts. Machine learning and feedback loops. Like past issues of Limn, we have curated this collection to generate moments of surprise for readers and ourselves.¹

How Did We Get Here?

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the term “platform” migrated from the worlds of architecture and engineering into the ascendant vernacular of software development and, from there, into social media and e-commerce. It became a shorthand for a new breed of organizational and business models designed to facilitate connections and transactions among users of all kinds. Trading on the language of elevation and support associated with the platforms of the past, these new digital platforms promised everything: flexibility, speed, scale, and efficiency—doing more with less and reaching everyone from anywhere. A platform could be a marketplace or a public square. And it could appear to be neutral ground, even as its operators manipulated the scene from below, determining winners and losers.

Digital platforms did more than facilitate exchange: they reorganized it. They became infrastructures that spanned work, consumption, and social life, and then captured the data that all those interactions generated. This model was adopted in new domains. From biometric tracking to gig pricing to the commodification of care, platforms extracted far more than just data—they calibrated bodies, labor, and everyday life. Over time, growth was no longer measured in users alone, but in converting participation into revenue.²

As these systems became pervasive, they also reorganized political life. From the Arab Spring to Occupy to #MeToo, platforms enabled rapid circulation, visibility, and forms of collective expression that materialized new publics. Yet expanded connectivity seemed to go hand-in-hand with shallower forms of engagement; widely circulated gestures of solidarity, signals of alignment, and scenes of participation were only loosely tied to durable institutional change.³

In the 2020s, a chorus of criticism grew. As the mass migration of work, sociality, and politics onto online platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic intensified our dependence, scandals around data extraction and manipulation exposed power asymmetries. Industry defectors, journalists, politicians, and scholars observed how the utopian promise of openness and connection had given way to control, surveillance, and degradation.⁴

Breaking the Spell of Recognition

A platform can stage a world that feels complete and internally coherent—an experience that depends on both elevation and concealment. In theatre, for example, the stage defines the performance space in ways that help the audience to suspend disbelief. In the wings, out of sight, props are readied and costumes are changed. Beneath the floorboards, technicians monitor the action and pull the levers that let actors move unseen through trap doors and hidden corridors.

We know that platforms are not neutral. We know that they extract, sort, and govern. We know, too, that much of what sustains the platform model—underpaid labor, cheap energy, the earth itself—is concealed. This awareness has played a vital role in diagnosing problems and proposing remedies in the areas of policy, law, and design. And yet, the platform is not just an infrastructure; it’s a metaphor for how we know, how we relate, and how we value—a mode of sense-making that is embedded in our interactions, routines, and aspirations.⁵ To refuse the platform, then, means contesting its operations and, perhaps less obviously, short-circuiting a way of thinking that assembles relations too quickly and presents their worth as self-evident.

What would it mean to upend this economy of appearances?⁶ To break the suspension of disbelief? In 1929, the surrealist René Magritte painted a curving stem connecting a wood-brown bowl to a black mouthpiece. Beneath, he inscribed, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe). This work, The Treachery of Images, doesn’t just remind us that appearances are unreliable. It unsettles the ease with which word, image, and object are made to coincide. The painting offers something immediately recognizable, then withdraws it. This is not an invitation to decode the image, but a challenge to confront the contradictions that hold it together.

The pieces that follow are not about platforms—not exactly. They are about what platforms obscure. What they enable. What they suppress. What leaks, slops, and rots. This is a geography of the glitchy, the broken, the repurposed. An archive of unexpected workarounds and anti-platform curiosities. And perhaps, among the ruins, the first sketches of a post-platform politics. ✳

1. See Stephen J. Collier et al., “Limn: Experimenting with Collaboration,” in Collaborative Anthropology Today: A Collection of Exceptions, ed. Dominic Boyer and George E. Marcus (Cornell University Press, 2021), https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501753343.003.0007. ↩︎
2. On how platforms reconfigure infrastructures and mediate the circulation of capital, see Jean-Christophe Plantin et al., “Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook,” New Media & Society 20, no. 1 (2018): 293–310, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553; and Paul Langley and Andrew Leyshon, “Platform Capitalism: The Intermediation and Capitalisation of Digital Economic Circulation,” Finance and Society 3, no. 1 (2017): 11–31, https://doi.org/10.2218/finsoc.v3i1.1936. ↩︎
3. On the sociopolitical affordances of platforms, including their role in structuring
   publics, governance, and asymmetries of power, see José Van Dijck, Thomas Poell, and Martijn de Waal, The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World (Oxford University Press, 2018); Daniel Curto- Millet and Alberto Corsín Jiménez, “The Sustainability of Open Source Commons,” European Journal of Information Systems 32, no. 5 (2023): 763–781, https://doi.org/10.1080/0960085X.2022.2046516; and Zeynep Tufecki, “The Medium and the Movement: Digital Tools, Social Movement Politics, and the End of the Free Rider Problem,” Policy & Internet 6, no. 2 (2014): 202–208, https://doi.org/10.1002/1944-2866.POI362. ↩︎
4. Cory Doctorow’s influential neologism “enshittification” skewers the systematic degradation of digital platforms that takes place when value extraction for shareholders displaces user experience; Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It (Verso Books, 2025). See also: Tim Wu, The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity (Penguin Random House, 2025). ↩︎
5. Tarleton Gillespie, “Is ‘Platform’ the Right Metaphor for the Technology Companies that Dominate Digital Media?” Nieman Lab, August 25, 2017, https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/08/is-platform-the-right-metaphor-for-the-technology-companies-that-dominate-digital-media/. ↩︎
6. Anna Tsing, “Inside the Economyof Appearances,” Public Culture 12, no. 1
   (2000): 115–144, https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-12-1-115. ↩︎