Platform Visions and Invasions: Spatial (Re)imaginations in Big Tech Discourse

Abstract

This panel analyzes the textual and audiovisual discourses in which big tech companies envision social spaces and their platforms’ roles in relation to those spaces. The panel asks: What are the visions of human life and technology that big tech companies narrate in relation to public and social spaces? And how do these tech-generated visions compare to current insights in and critiques of how these companies intervene in and disrupt social spaces? Situated within the field of critical platform studies, the panel’s premise is that the discourses produced by tech companies form an integral part of these companies’ interventions in people’s relations with themselves, others, and their environments. In order to develop a critical understanding of the platform society, it is crucial to examine those discourses through which tech companies present themselves almost as state-like powers that can be trusted with “public” services. Employing methods of textual and visual analysis, this panel offers such perspective. In its analysis of big tech’s spatial visions, the panel moves between different scales of spaces (domestic, educational, urban, extraterrestrial). In relation to these spaces, the panel articulates a discrepancy between the visions of life produced by tech companies and big tech’s invasive, perhaps even extractivist and colonial logic.