Platformization as an object of communicational study: premises, chimeras and emerging lines from the Latin American context
Within the "Latin American Critical Thought Notebooks" Collection, CLACSO presents " Platformization as an object of communicational study: premises, chimeras, and emerging lines from the Latin American context. " – Author: Raul Anthony Olmedo Neri
Platformization as an object of communicational study: premises, chimeras and emerging lines from the Latin American context
Author Raul Anthony Olmedo Neri1
Introduction
It is not new: social media platforms have become key technologies for social, political, cultural, and economic development in Latin America and the Caribbean. However, there have been few efforts to theorize these platforms as objects of study with specific impacts on the region. In this regard, this work provides some key elements for (re)thinking these technological and ideological infrastructures from a situated communicational perspective. Communication is used not only for its epistemological relevance but also for its interdisciplinary nature; this allows us to (de)articulate the challenges and opportunities from/for the region, with the aim of stimulating debate on their origins, effects, and horizons of possibility.
Platformization as a product
The first element to consider is that platformization can be thought of as both a process and a product. Regarding the former, there are already key contributions that explain how platformization is structured, reproduced, and embedded in social life to develop business models that legitimize its existence, continuity, and governance (Poell, Nieborg, and van Dijck, 2019). However, this starting point is insufficient, as it could generate the false perception of a separation between the historical processes that have shaped the subject-technology relationship, on the one hand, and the integration of platforms into that experiential-media continuum, on the other.
Thus, thinking of platformization as a product makes it possible to recognize two key elements that give it ontological and epistemological substance: the progressive mediatization of social life and the financialization of digital space during the first decade of the 21st century, after the dot-com bubble burst. The former allows us to understand how the subject-technology relationship is historical and has involved a series of gradual reconfigurations of society and subjectivities, to the point of changing the constitution and perception of reality as a consequence of incremental mediacentrism (Boczkowski and Mitchelstein, 2022). Regarding financialization, the internet became the medium through which capitalism transformed social relations, especially those related to ownership (of both information and user data). This not only initiated the process of feudalization and fragmentation of digital space but also stimulated a race to develop platforms and business models through a constant injection of venture capital, thereby reorganizing the market under new neoliberal standards, formats, and rules (Srnicek, 2018; Paraná, 2025). Thus, by recovering the historical context of media, platformization can be understood as a dynamic of mediatization that arises within the emerging capitalist restructuring, whereby digital space and the digital economy become the structural core for accumulation. Thus, platforms cannot be reduced to simple “infrastructures”, but must be defined as meta-infrastructures (infrastructures developed on other infrastructures) that lack a body, that are recursively updated under a “beta” logic and whose function lies in disintermediating both individual/collective social processes and production processes in order to mediate them and, in formal terms, outsource them 2. For this reason, platforms are intrinsically and inseparably articulated with the media, experiences, knowledge and experiences that are (re)produced on the internet.
Thus, platformization becomes both a process (integrated into the continuum of media communication) and a product (of mediatization and financialization) within the framework of both globalization and the structuring of the digital economy. It is precisely this product that has become advanced capital, that is, the productive sector that not only leads the market but also imposes new forms of articulating the mode of production as a competitive advantage that other productive sectors will, at some point, attempt to replicate in their respective niches in order to temporarily increase their profit rate. This is what fuels the profound interest in legitimizing and expanding the discourse and meanings of platformization to sectors historically distant from it, such as agribusiness, real estate speculation, and the food service industry.
From Silicon Valley to the Silicon Empire
Like all technological innovations, platformization requires the production of discourses, narratives, systems of codes and meanings that legitimize its development, naturalize its presence in everyday life, and ignore the social relations of production that underpin it.
In addition to the immaterial dimension, platforming required a spatial materiality that would give it substance; these two elements were captured by Silicon Valley.
In fact, the race to develop platforms during the first decade of the 21st century allowed Silicon Valley to be renewed and consolidated as the technological, cultural, moral and ideological epicenter of the Western digital economy (Marwick, 2018).
Thus, Silicon Valley's relevance lies not only in the technological imprint of contemporary capitalism, but also in its historical ability to (re)orient its course according to capital and refine its narrative of individual success through entrepreneurship in the digital sector (Sadin, 2018). However, all capitalist adaptation and innovation requires a worldview capable of articulating and producing its own meaning, enabling it to be positioned not only within those who drive it, but also outside the social groups that "need" it. In this way, Silicon Valley has become not only the spearhead of technological development, but also the ideological compass of platformization. This has transformed it from a singular place into, as Lins Ribeiro (2003) refers to the role of technology within modernity, the backbone of current capitalist progress.
This is not new, since historically, the goal of technological innovation is not to solve civilizational problems, but to postpone the structural crisis of capitalism. Recognizing the recursive innovation of technology makes it possible to question not only why technology is produced, but also what its purpose is (Castells, 1996). Thus, the ultimate goal of platformization is not human well-being, but the possibility of knowing the future and the individual in their most specific form, since only in this way will it be possible to gain power and control over these two spheres in the present. Byung-Chul Han (2018) defines this process as psychopolitics. And that is why today the influence of Silicon Valley is not limited spatially to the physical place from where the development of platforming is orchestrated, but has managed to build an empire at the expense of the processes of economic, cultural and more recently digital globalization, with which it evades space-time barriers and imposes itself as a competitive advantage to satisfy needs in those same areas and at the same time boasts as the herald of Western development and progress.
In fact, this new techno-ideological empire has served to reconfigure the balance of power among sociopolitical projects in various Western countries. In the case of Latin America and the Caribbean, this empire has become an ally of those projects that align with the worldview imposed by force or coercion from the United States. Thus, Silicon Empire is not only a hub of technological innovation, but also a tool for producing narratives that reflect the worldview of its leaders.
The platform as a fetish
By situating themselves within the capitalist system, media communication technologies become both a tool and a commodity of that system. And under that condition, they are subject to fetishization. In fact, all technological innovation has entered into this logic, but both social media platforms and, more recently, algorithms and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have become the fetishes of contemporary digital capitalism. Mattelart (1973) indicates that “to manufacture a fetish or to promote a process or phenomenon to the status of a fetish means 'to crystallize it in the form of an object set apart,' to abstract it from the real conditions that presided or preside over its production” (p. 28).
Thus, through fetishization, platforms “produce,” algorithms “recommend,” and AI “creates/thinks.” In other words, these innovations acquire abilities that endow them with a techno-magic that symbolically inflates them, without acknowledging or articulating the social relations of production (precarity, extractivism, exploitation, and outsourcing) and ownership (privatization, informationalism, and datafication) that underpin them as meta-infrastructures that disintermediate, mediate, and outsource. Upon recognizing these dimensions, these innovations not only lose their allure but are quickly integrated into the processes of physical and cognitive labor exploitation, data extraction, and the outsourcing of their socio-environmental effects on a planetary scale. When these technologies cease to be fetishes, they become resources subject to dispute not only at the level of use but also at the level of production; in other words, the path is opened to thinking about and fighting for the production of these technologies and their respective meanings.
Faced with this exercise in fetishization, critical thinking has been key to (d)enacting not only the ecophagous character of these technological innovations, but has also highlighted the precarization of the subaltern classes, on the one hand, as well as the progressive reconfiguration of the international division of physical and cognitive labor 3.
Thus, this 'production,' 'thought,' and/or 'creation' are not detached from unequal structures or power asymmetries; on the contrary, these very correlates of techno-magic allow for the reproduction and deepening of these social structures and relations of production by rendering them invisible. In other words, these technological innovations are not separate from the inherent contradictions of capitalism; in fact, it is these very contradictions and current objective conditions that have enabled their emergence and determined their purpose.
Regarding these dimensions, it is not only important to observe how unpaid work develops when interacting with these innovations and thereby promoting its training, but also that the processes aimed at the mediatization and outsourcing of labor activities take advantage of the precariousness of the countries of the Global South to train robots that opt for automation and the consequent displacement of labor in activities beyond those necessary for the production of goods, for example, services and all those social areas of interest for the reproduction of the workforce - such as, for example, care work.
Added to the above is the loss of “aura” of sociocultural practices that are subjected to the processes of disintermediation, mediatization and outsourcing of sociodigital platforms, because as Han (2021) states, the digital softens reality and impoverishes the experience; this without forgetting that its constant use without clear limits reduces the possibility of action of the subject by ending up acting on the mediated reality and not on reality itself.
Finally, stating the fetish of these meta-infrastructures enables criticism not only of what they are, but who produces them and under what productive, ideological and socio-cultural conditions they are framed.
The platform society (of the Global South)
It has already been stated that platformization is a socio-technical phenomenon that can—and should—be framed within the struggle for the productive forces that shape and structure the social relations of production that underpin current digital capitalism. However, it is necessary to indicate its implications in a region where the development of underdevelopment is imposed by the power asymmetries of the center-periphery structure that continues to shape technological and media production in the context of globalization.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, the most significant implication of platformization is the deepening of structural inequalities and power imbalances in all aspects of daily life. This is because these platforms are designed with business models that seek to accumulate capital based on the exploitation, extraction, and datafication of individuals, goods, spaces, subjectivities, and temporalities at multiple scales. Thus, these platforms exacerbate the various crises facing Latin American and Caribbean societies; Airbnb, for example, commodifies hospitality.
and redefines housing as a fixed asset available to those who can afford, through short-term rentals, to enjoy the region's cities and, consequently, all the services afforded through the right to the city (Olmedo Neri, 2020, 2025). This phenomenon is linked to conflicts such as gentrification and gourmetization in the region, intensifying the housing crisis and the rising cost of living.
For its part, Uber not only commodifies the deficient quality of public transportation services in the region's cities (Radetich, 2022), but also, through its expanded form of capital accumulation under 'classic' mechanisms of exploitation—such as piecework—this platform has managed to establish a form of accumulation based not on working time, but on the intensity of that work, under the protection of governments that have only recently begun to regulate the issue. Meanwhile, the inaction of governments trained in the logic of non-intervention in the market has facilitated the entrenchment of the entrepreneurial dream among those sectors of workers deprived of the most basic labor conditions, leading them into an aggressive form of exploitation that, moreover, makes them their own executioner, since the money they 'earn' depends on their willingness to perform the trips requested by the platform in question according to supply, demand, and market conditions (Reygadas, 2024).
These two examples help to support the argument that, even in the processes of digital technification, platformization is structurally unequal and systemically dependent, thus reinforcing the distinctions and antagonistic and exploitative positions between the Global North and South, but no longer between explicit nations, but through companies and more formally, capital housed in various commercial sectors that are being articulated according to their interests and their affinities with the new digital regime (Rikap, 2026).
In other words, given that the epicenter of technological development that gives rise to platformization is located in a developed country that has historically stimulated processes of intervention and subordination through different means, it is not surprising that these innovations replicate, through subtle yet coercive means, forms of dependence and subsumption against other countries and worldviews on technology.
In general terms, we would be witnessing the materialization of the phrase: everything changed so that everything would stay the same. This structural and systemic condition needs to be articulated in order to define the fields of effect, but also to have the possibility of expanding those fields. Two key fields for the region are: the one related to the fragmentation of sociality and the other to the ecophagic characteristic of the recursive production and operation of social media platforms.
Regarding the first dimension, platforms can be understood as devices that control, regulate, and monitor bodies, narratives, data, and sociality itself. Their influence is such that today in Latin America, these platforms act as ideological and power extensions of both their creators and their promoters, to the point of materializing as a techno-info-communicative agent that contests the meanings circulating within their various interfaces. They have now provoked a greater degree of disinformation and increased social fragmentation in Latin American and Caribbean societies through polarization and othering, which benefit them not only in terms of their datafication processes but also by favoring the dissemination of meanings aligned with the political project subscribed to by their owners (Aruguete and Calvo, 2023).
This is why these platforms are fragmenting digital sociality, overwhelming citizen participation, and eroding national political culture. Regarding the fragmentation of sociality, these platforms condense the process of personification that global society has been undergoing since the mid-20th century (Lipovetsky, 1986). As for the lack of control over citizen participation, this stems from the fact that its impetus for or against a political project extends beyond election periods and ballot boxes; the internet becomes a permanently fragmented space where information circuits exacerbate polarization to the detriment of dialogue and consensus (Olmedo Neri, 2024).
Regarding the relationship between platforms and the erosion of political culture, the growing disillusionment with the forms and processes that provide legality and legitimacy to the governance system in the region is a consequence that is becoming increasingly acute. This is why the internet, and particularly social media platforms, offer fewer and fewer common spaces for dialogue between opposing viewpoints on different fields, including politics. This fragmentation stems from the profound segmentation caused by the datafication of user-operators; lacking similar political positions, the algorithms increase the distance between users and eliminate any possibility of reconciliation and consensus-building through dialogue (Aruguete and Calvo, 2023).
Therefore, through interaction, users begin to form common spaces based on their interests or viewpoints, but these spaces remain isolated from the broader communication network of the digital space. This is why the internet actually operates as a fragmented, networked space through which algorithmically driven flows of information circulate.
Thus, exacerbated and manifest polarization occurs when these feedback bubbles collide through intersection or content interactivity.
Regarding the second dimension to incorporate into the analysis of platformization, there is the urgency, from Latin American and Caribbean communication thought, of integrating the environmental dimension, which has been historically marginalized from the analysis processes and which, nevertheless, is a crucial axis for a region like this that suffers from a double process of ecophagy or, specifically, technophagy: first, as a region that supplies strategic minerals and the environmental implications of this (Crawford, 2022); and second, as territories potentially affected by the opening, installation and development of technological centers and infrastructure that consumes key natural resources (such as water and the territory itself) in its operation and which, progressively, can exacerbate social inequalities regarding access to these types of resources.
This does not mean that we have to choose between one dimension and another, but rather that there is a theoretical and analytical possibility to integrate them without losing the critical approach that has historically given identity to the Latin American and Caribbean communication perspective.
Thus, I propose a conceptual readjustment capable of broadening the analytical approach without sacrificing rigor or a critical and subaltern perspective: moving from the Political Economy of Communication to the Political Ecology of Communication. While political economy maintains a clear alignment with critical thought, which focuses on the structuring processes of media ecosystems and the resulting regulatory frameworks, political ecology retains these elements but expands its focus to include the environmental dimensions of the production process (production, distribution, sale, and consumption) of meta-infrastructures, media, and media consumption.
In other words, with the political ecology of communication, it would be possible to name an analytical field within communication sciences where it is possible to observe, record, analyze, and explain the conflicting or non-conflicting articulations between technology, space, natural resources, and biophysical-chemical cycles at a planetary level.6 This need for conceptual readjustment does not mean that technological innovations such as “the cloud,” platforms, and AI are the only pollutants, since all technological innovation has impacted territory and nature to some degree, but they are the ones that, due to current socio-historical conditions (the civilizational crisis and the socio-environmental extractivism of those minerals strategic for technological development), demonstrate the urgency of this analytical recognition.
For Latin America and the Caribbean, the political ecology of communication can be consolidated as a theoretical-analytical framework that allows for a rethinking of social relations of production within natural cycles subsumed by the cycles of accumulation of contemporary informational capital. This approach necessitates continued theorizing on this topic to develop theoretical and conceptual tools that help explain present-day reality, while acknowledging that the constitution and deconstruction of local/national media ecosystems possess an environmental dimension that requires analytical consideration. Formally, I can define the political ecology of communication as the thematic field that studies, addresses, understands, and explains the forms, articulations, and conflicts at the economic, political, sociocultural, and environmental levels that arise with the structuring and reconfiguration of media ecosystems at different spatiotemporal scales and within their production cycle (production, distribution, sale, and consumption).
Thus, the political ecology of communication could provide key elements on how technological innovation is articulated with other extractive industries, accentuating this feature in said productive sector and what are the socio-environmental implications of the production, use, consumption and disposal of technological devices and the (meta)infrastructures that support the digital world.
Because of its subordinate, dependent and underdeveloped position, Latin America and the Caribbean has the capacity to think about and problematize these new scenarios and objects of study, with the purpose of building alternative horizons of possibility with/in/through technology.
Conclusions
This work has been developed around the role and growing relevance of social media platforms in the daily life of the region. Through a critical communication perspective, it was possible to provide insights into how platformization materializes and how its advance in Latin America and the Caribbean compels us to pay attention to its dynamics, discourses, and both material and intangible implications.
The reflections presented here aim to stimulate debate on these technologies and their relevance, or lack thereof, in the transformation processes currently underway. Focusing on platforms involves not only understanding what they are and how they emerge, but also the conditions under which they arise and how their development can actually change or exacerbate social inequality in the region. To date, platformization in Latin America and the Caribbean has been integrated as part of the dynamics of globalization, with all its advantages and disadvantages. It is time to broaden the debate beyond simply considering their use, and to explore the possibility of challenging them through their design and production, on the one hand, and recognizing their socio-environmental implications, on the other.
In any case, analyzing them from a critical perspective becomes a categorical imperative that will allow us to rethink the historical relationship between society and technology and how the latter can or cannot help to carry out the necessary transformations that the region demands in order to reach new horizons of possibility based on ecosocial justice.
Highlighted
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Crawford, Kate (2022). Atlas of Artificial Intelligence: Power, Politics, and Planetary Costs. Mexico: FCE.
Han, Byung-Chul (2018). Psychopolitics. Barcelona: Herder.
Han, Byung-Chul (2022). Infocracy. Barcelona: Taurus.
Lins Ribeiro, Gustavo. (2003). Post-imperialism. Culture and politics in the contemporary world. Barcelona: Gedisa.
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Rikap, Cecilia (2026). Digital Dependency Theory. Sovereignty and Development in 21st Century Capitalism. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra.
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- PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Full-time Research Professor at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of UNAM. CLACSO member center. CLACSO Working Group “Activisms and Sexual Citizenships: Interdisciplinary Dialogues”. Email: [email protected] ↩︎
- This has significant implications, because by redirecting all processes toward the emerging digital economy, an accelerated dynamic of “creative destruction” will develop on the material foundations of already defined production chains. In other words, a process of restructuring value chains will begin to integrate these platforms at their different stages as a result of the configuration of the nascent digital economy. ↩︎
- In the case of AI, the logic initially put forward regarding the possibility of technologizing humanity (the cyborg metaphor) as a new ontological crusade has turned out to be the opposite. We are not facing the technologization of humanity, but rather the humanization of technology. This is evident in the way AI innovation emerges: priority has been given to shaping and training the machine's mind through interaction and interactivity between it and individuals, as this requires more time than the actual materialization of its physical body. ↩︎
- This term, which I coined, identifies the predatory and extractive process—both vital and environmental—of technological production on labor and nature. This connection is key to recognizing that technological development is not ethereal, but rather possesses a material reality and, consequently, a progressive planetary cost that demands and drives certain productive sectors, such as mining, through the extraction of strategic minerals. Furthermore, it compels this sector to expand and seek new territories ripe for productive intervention. Thus, there is an attempt to extend the extractive frontier of economic cycles over natural and vital cycles through technological innovation. ↩︎
- El desarrollo desregulado de parques industriales destinados para los centros de datos en el estado de Querétaro, México y la consecuente presión hídrica que ha comenzado a afectar a localidades cercanas a dichos espacios de desarrollo tecnológico, es un ejemplo de estas nuevas tensiones. Esto sin contar las facilidades que han otorgado las autoridades de diferentes niveles de gobierno para atraer a inversores (como la dotación de terrenos para su instalación) y sin olvidar la compraventa o arrendamiento de tierras de uso agrícola que hoy están cambiado su finalidad productiva para atraer capitales trasnacionales. Estos casos son tan solo una evidencia de la conflictividad socioambiental del mundo digital que incrementará en la región en el futuro cercano. ↩︎
- While the civilizational and planetary crisis has led to a rethinking of climate change from the perspective of various social sciences, in the case of communication, this has been limited to observing how media representations of sustainability are constructed or investigating the role and place of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in socio-environmental conflicts in the region. These areas are fundamental because they understand communication both in its consolidated field (media representations and the dynamics of coverage of the phenomenon in question) and in conjunction with emerging processes (such as digital activism and, consequently, the repertoires of connective action). It is also true that little attention has been paid to analyzing the planetary costs generated by the processes of global interconnection of communication and information systems. Deforestation, the demand for strategic minerals for the production of materials that provide tangible support to the digital world and its devices, and the extraction of resources for the operation of data centers, for example, point to a field that is little explored and recognized within the field of communication sciences. A natural approach to its ontological, epistemological, axiological, and praxeological development is not to ignore these problems, but rather to acknowledge and theorize them from a situated and critical perspective. ↩︎
