Anticolonial Platform Studies

Abstract

Platforms like Amazon, Google, Uber, Apple iOS, and Pinduoduo currently coordinate planetary activity on a massive scale. Critical theorists concerned with labor, education, incarceration, sex, migration, or life on earth must reckon with the global dominance of platforms. Expert insight comes from the twenty‐year‐old field of platform studies, which documents, explains, and tackles the rise of corporate platforms. However, platform studies fails to incorporate the insights of colonial theory. This article opens up an urgent conversation between platform scholars and colonial theorists by offering a primer to the field and then arguing that the East India Company (EIC) fits the definition of a platform. While platforms are theorized as new, neoliberal inventions, this article argues that platforms are a continuation of long‐standing colonial business as usual. The EIC features every characteristic of a platform: a corporation that fostered and facilitated trade within its ecosystem, administering law, collecting taxes, sentencing life and death, and cultivating obedience in order to streamline and stabilize the profits—as well as cultures of radical subversion and resistance. Using the example of the EIC in British Malaya, this article models an anticolonial platform studies that zooms out four hundred years to understand the history behind how modern platform granular classification systems invigorate ethnic conflict, how platform automated ranking systems galvanize identity politics, and how platform grammars always segment populations into exploitable and condemnable differences. The objective of this article is to engage colonial and platform scholars, together, to tackle the crises posed by modern corporate platforms.