Earlier this month I presented an ongoing research project on the platformisation and deplatformisation of software development at the Association of Internet Researchers Conference, AoIR2024.
The project contributes to understanding the platformisation of cultural production by looking at how networked infrastructures commodify, configure and challenge relations between code, coders, communities, technologies, investors and industries. It also examines how resistance to platformisation and counter-mobilisations in the context of free software, art and activism surface alternative arrangements for socialising software development imbued with other logics. It reviews the development of alternative coding spaces such as Gogs, Gitea, Radicle and Forgejo, and the values, practices, concerns and communities associated with them. In doing so it contributes to conference themes pertaining to political economy, labour and resistance in digital industries.
This project is done in collaboration with Jonathan Gray.
More about the “(After) Platformisation” session where the project was presented can be found here.