Concept

Platform Agency

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Platform Agency

Platform agency is John West‘s term for the condition in which the decisions that shape a person’s experience online are made by the platform rather than by the person. His formulation is a claim about direction of travel: the story of the internet in its modern incarnation, he writes, ‘is a shift from human agency to platform agency’. The web did not simply acquire intermediaries — the locus of choice moved.

The concept is easily confused with two neighbours it is not. It is not a complaint about quality — that is Cory Doctorow’s enshittification, which names the decay of a product as it turns from serving users to extracting from them. Enshittification describes what a platform becomes; platform agency describes who is deciding, and a platform can take over the deciding while getting better as a product. Nor is it the Agency-Control Trade-off, which concerns how much autonomy to grant an AI agent inside a product — a dial set deliberately by a designer, between a human and a machine acting for them. Platform agency is not set deliberately by anyone and runs between a user and the company mediating them.

The mechanism — where the agency went

West locates the decisive moment inside social media rather than at its arrival: the shift from I follow you and I see your posts to I follow you and an algorithm sits between you and me and decides which posts I see. Before that interposition, the follower graph was an instruction. After it, the graph is an input.

Three further mechanisms recur in his account:

  • Closed feeds replacing open standards. RSS — an open standard for publishing a feed a computer can read — let blogs and readers flourish under rules held in common. It faded, replaced by feeds internal to a platform. West’s image for Google Reader’s closure is a street ripped up, its residents obliged to find new digs.
  • Switching costs. He is candid that competition would help here and that inertia prevents it: the cost of leaving Facebook or LinkedIn is what keeps a new entrant from trying its hand.
  • Frictionlessness. Platforms smooth the passage from thing to thing, and that smoothing is what lets our own products and reading ‘glide past our own attentions’.

The disenchantment argument

West’s account of why platforms behave this way is not primarily economic. Drawing on Marilynne Robinson, he argues that a mechanistic, disenchanted model of the human being is embedded in how platforms understand behaviour, and that the model propagates: it ‘infects our own thinking about what is possible and what is desirable online’. The claim is reflexive rather than merely critical — the platform’s thin picture of the user becomes the user’s picture of themselves. Bring the whole self online, he suggests, and these products would be used very differently, to their cost.

Displacement — the felt form of the loss

Platform agency shows up in experience as displacement. West reaches for homelessness and gentrification, from his own position as a gentrifier in Kingston, New York: what is lost is agency over a community you are a member of but do not own. Changing your own community feels good; having it changed for you is what displacement is. Online, he argues, we are always exposed to this, because we so rarely own the communities we belong to.

Where mainstream views differ

The platforms’ own answer, which West states before rejecting, is that ranking reveals user preference rather than overriding it: the algorithm gives people what their behaviour says they want, and the market system merely surfaces it. On that view there is no transfer of agency at all, only a more accurate reading of it.

West disputes this, and adds a sharper point against a common reform position. There is no neutral algorithm to return to. Any constructed ranking has biases by dint of being constructed — towards engagement, towards friends, towards something — so ‘a neutral algorithm we are tweaking’ is not a baseline that was departed from. He accepts that free-speech infringement online is a real category, but holds that platform-level manipulation of ranking is a different thing, for which we do not yet have good words or frameworks.

A third position, neither his nor the platforms’, is worth naming: that the concept proves too much, since every medium has always shaped what its audience sees, and an editor choosing a front page is also deciding for a reader. West’s implicit answer is scale and opacity — the editor’s judgement is legible and attributable, the ranking is neither.

In the wiki