Platforms are reshaping collective life. Developed in the technology sector and replicated in institutions across the globe, platforms promise connection, flexibility, and scale. They also extract, sort, and govern, all while concealing the labor and energy that support them. So much has been written about digital platforms that even the sharpest critiques feel familiar. Limn 14 breaks that spell by turning the platform upside down and inside out. “This is not a platform” loosens the hold of a term that has become too stable, too certain.
In This Issue
Upending the economy of appearances
The hidden substrates of machine learning
Eighty-five, there goes our social lives!
How the porn scene mutates across platforms
On making high heels work
Aspirational health is not cheap
Seeing the relationships that leak from the frame
UN Live’s promise of social repair through teleconferencing
Communicative space is a forgotten remedy
Learning modules and the possibilities of cross-pollination
Vaccine platforms reveal the limits of global health’s imagination
The promises and parasites of tsunami prediction
Decommissioning an oil platform can be as hard as building one
We have heard about the emperor’s clothes, but what about the sovereign’s appetite?
The digital idioms of democracy
When you deposit frozen fish in someone’s safe deposit box