Just as I thought to write these lines, a one-line programming error has frozen many airlines, banks, hospitals, video-streaming services, point-of-sales terminals and websites. The CrowdStrike code expected 21 values in an array, but received 20. Only 8.5 million computers were affected on 19 July 2024, but they were cloud/data centre-based servers running the Microsoft platforms for enterprise-critical services. The event has been termed the largest IT fail ever. The Microsoft Corporation blames the CrowdStrike event on the European Union and its anti-monopoly regulations.

Much of this book was written with a large language model constantly nudging me to accept line completions (GitHub 2023). I redacted almost all content suggestions as uninteresting. For instance, it suggests right now, having observed what I wrote in the paragraph above, that ‘the Crowdstrike event was a “wake-up call” for the world. It wasn’t. It was a one-line programming error. It was a wake-up call for the people who wrote the code’. The model making this suggestion, however, was itself trained to more or less write code for people, so that wake-up call might be hard to respond to. Who or what is being called by whom or what is not clear.

When readers meet passages of code in the book, they should be awake to the writing of the code. I have often supplicated generative AI platforms to write code (e.g. write Python code to demonstrate the basic operation of an endpoint detection response system such as CrowdStrike. Please provide comments.). Their facility in writing it attests to the sometimes startling predictability of coding.

There is a doorway on the southern wall of a large church in Venice, the basilica known as the Frari. The complex geometry of the Baroque-style doorway commemorates Giovanni Pesaro, 103th Doge of Venice (1658– 1659). Much disliked, Pesaro died suddenly in his first year as Doge. In 2024, the main resonance of the word ‘Doge’ is probably Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency first started with satirical intent but persistently traded on exchanges alongside the Bitcoin, Ethereum, Luckycoin and Litecoin in almost ten years of speculation.

The heavily ornate doorway (see Figure II.1) has the Doge seated on one of several platforms under a gold-tasselled canopy, flanked by a variety of martial, judicial, scholarly and artistic figures, as well as some quasi-mythical animals and angels. Above the Doge, close to the ceiling of the building, two small angels hover, holding an unfurled scroll, presumably inscribed with either the laws of Venice or the Doge's achievements. Pesaro and various attendants occupy niches separated by black marble columns. Two mythical creatures sit at his feet. The niches and columns stand on a thick plinth borne, along with heavy sacks of grain, on the shoulders of four black-marble figures clothed in torn fabric, slaves brought from Venice's colonies, themselves standing on four pedestals. A door to the piazza outside stands in the centre. At the base, and almost at the floor level where visitors and tourists go in and out in droves, skeletal corpse-like naked figures hold gold-lettered eulogies.

Platform edges are hard to locate. Power-laden like a city-state, vertiginous like a ten-metre diving platform, lifted-up like a concert stage, replete with technicalities like a geometrical proof, and as niche-rich as coastal rocks, platform edges run between inside and outside, core and periphery, on and off.

It may be that platform edges run along tangled lines of code and devices, through interfaces, networks, sensors, chips and screens. Inhabited in practice yet difficult to perceive or untangle, people step into these entanglements every time they open and close documents across different devices and platforms. Sometimes not knowing where the document is stored, they pause to ask: ‘Where is that file?’ They negotiate uncertain boundaries and thresholds between what belongs to them and what belongs to others, what is part of their work and what is not, or where their work takes place given the complete mixing of platforms into work, education, home life and government. Their work, their time with family and friends, their finances, health, education and leisure, increasingly run into platform edges guarded by requests for user names and authentication or ‘use Google/Facebook/Apple to login’ requests. They encounter limits in storage on their devices or in cloud data stores and wonder whether to copy everything somewhere else, or buy more space. They lose or find themselves using apps chosen from tens of thousands on offer in app stores such as GooglePlay and Apple Corporation's App Store.

This book anticipates re-grounded worlds in which platforms have become less consolidated as speaking positions, less encroaching along their edges and more seamful in their composition. In their gathering and alignments of devices, numberings, sensings, and closures or captures, platforms pre-figure what they are but cannot affirm: ensembles and their vibratory sensings.

There is something at once deeply theoretically and empirically disconcerting about re-working platforms as ensembles.

On the one hand, the ensemble concept developed in this book can draw on some fairly strong philosophical support. A high-level support comes from Gilles Deleuze's account of Ideas in Difference and Repetition (Deleuze 2001). Ideas are ensembles. Ensembles gather ‘differential relations and singular points’, they ‘begin with the inessential’, and their ‘essences’ are constructed ‘in the form of centres of envelopment around singularities’ (Deleuze 2001, 264). Ideas in this sense gather presentiments of divergences, approximations, and movements of ground and earth found in ensembles. Some instances of singularities or inessential points found in the platform world are terminals, chips, hashing, instruction sets, plugs, and floating point arithmetic. As starting points, they promise little, but much unfolds from them.

On the other hand, anticipating something by doing experimental ontology, and experimenting with such inessential and localized points of departure, seems to avoid central problems and controversies that affect all of us, and that many people suffer from greatly.

At base, Euclidean space has little concern with coordinates and numbers but much concern with figures and containers. In Euclid's Elements, the primary geometry textbook for engineering sciences, the definition of a figure makes no mention of dimensions or the coordinates that Descartes instrumented as Euclidean space. Euclid defines a figure as ‘that which is contained by any boundary or boundaries’ (Euclid 2012, 1). A figure could be a circle, a square, a triangle, and so on, but not a line or a surface extended indefinitely, since those have no endpoints or extremities. This definition relies on preceding ones, many of which rely on even more elementary propositions and line-drawing; for example, ‘Definition 2: A surface is that which has length and breadth only’ (Euclid 2012, 1).

Figures in Euclid's Elements are, broadly speaking, containers to be mixed together to construct new containers. The propositions of the Elements are, in practice, instructions on how to use the definitions, postulates and previous propositions in combination to make figures (such as Figure III.1): ‘Proposition 1: On a given finite straight line to construct an equilateral triangle’ (Euclid 2012, 3). The propositions are figurative in Euclid's sense of the figure in that they are constructed using a compass and ruler to draw figures. The propositions, even those concerning number rather than geometry, are figured out using lines as boundaries. For Euclid, figures contain other figures or containers.

What does experimental ontology do with devices? Implicitly posed in many places. It's a comfortable hotel, warm and well-lit, in the Lake District, north-west England, February 2016. The fields, hedges and woodland outside are snow-covered, sloping down towards the slate-grey waters of the lake. The meeting room is muted. Soft carpets, plush drapes, ergonomic seats and a continuous flow of fresh baked goods and locally sourced hot drinks cushion the participants. In the meeting room, computer scientists, a scattering of health and environmental scientists, statisticians, health and educational researchers chat around the table, waiting for the opening talk.

We wait to hear about the micro:bit, a BBC-sponsored device whose purpose in life is to usher youth and geeks in the UK and elsewhere into the world of embedded devices, and the more networky version known as the Internet of Things (IoT). The main speaker, a designer from the BBC, is passionate about the history of microcomputers and the BBC, narrating the story of a microcomputer, the BBC Micro, that transformed UK popular culture in the 1980s because of the amateur tinkering and hacking it facilitated. The micro:bit, a £10 piece of hardware, aims to re-capture and update some of the glowing meaningfulness of those days. The update for the internet-enabled post-platform economy is neatly symbolized by ‘:’. The BBC and the Micro:bit Foundation is just about to deliver hundreds of thousands of the devices to UK schools. Every 11-year-old will have one.

A guide to the coastal ecology of New South Wales from the 1940s praises the many rock platforms found along the shorelines of eastern Australia:

The coastlines in question intersperse beaches and rock platforms. These platforms biogeochemically mix sediment, the remains of hard-shelled creatures, microbes and minerals, and the veins and dykes of igneous rock such as quartz intruding from beneath the crust. The rock platforms unfold complicated edges of varying shape and thickness. Actually, not just on rock platforms, but along edges of many different kinds – between shadow and sunlight, between air and soil, between hard and soft, hot and cold or moist and dry – lives diversify.

The coastal rock platforms are edge-thickening events. Along their many edges, gradients of nutrient, water, air, sunlight, and heat shift with tides, seasons, sea levels and climate. They create the possibility of many niches in the same places. Edges are sites of pluralization and, because of that, are sometimes densely populated. The liveliness of coastal rock platforms owes much to tides, to weathering and sea levels, to processes of weathering and the relative durability or solidity of rock to waves, sand and sun.

The aim of the Dis-Positions book series is to bring together recent work in the emerging intersections of such disciplines as sociology, anthropology, history, geography, design and philosophy, not least as they bear on the broad field of science and technology studies (STS). Conversely, if STS is undergoing major shifts in how it engages with ‘the social’ and the question of ‘societies’, it raises vital matters of concern for these various disciplines and their inter-connections. Dis-Positions thus provides a platform on which varieties of generative mutualities across these areas of scholarship can be presented.

In this respect, Dis-Positions is undergirded by a desire to promote novel fields of enquiry, adventurous theoretical and empirical projects, and inventive methodological practices. It seeks to encourage authors to address live debates while drawing on and interrogating developments across academic areas, in the process disturbing and repatterning STS. In pursuing this ethos Dis-Positions comprises consolidated, rigorous and proactive space through which new creative and critical perspectives in STS and beyond can find a voice. Under this rubric fall discussions of the post-human, post-colonial, affective and aesthetic; methodological inventions that incorporate speculative, engaged, entangled and socio-material practices; empirical novelty that ranges from emergent technoscientific innovations to reformulations of the ordinary; and conceptually creative and critical developments that capture processual and pluralistic thought, extensions of assemblage and practice theories, and the turns to affect and post-performativity.

Cloud computing platforms rely on what are simply called ‘containers’. Computing platforms are increasingly organized around software ‘containers’ such as Docker (Docker 2022). Would it be possible to better ground platforms in their ensemble-natures by paying attention to containers and their construction? Numbers offer one way of following the container construction.

There are two problems in attending to platform numbers. The first, which I term the numericity problem, concerns the different ways in which platforms gather things through many kinds of calculation, algorithms, addressing techniques and statistical routines such as machine learning and the like. By speaking of ‘numbering’, I hope to resist treating numbers as if I know what they are. If there is any starting point, it is more like differences and their differencing. Numberings differ. They are multiple and they multiply. Numberings twist multiples together in different ways that can be traced through numeric, calculative and computational practices. Numberings occasion a wide variety of relational problems, including who gets to decide what numbering is done, and how that numbering makes worlds. Platforms overflow with numbers organized in lists, arrays, vectors, matrices, tables and parameters.

The second problem-group concerns a few large numbers and their affects on platform plurality. I call this few-many asymmetry the platform-number problem. There are in non-trivial respects few platforms (for example, Meta Platforms Inc, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, TenCent, and so on). These few have ‘big numbers’.

The Christmas concert at Canberra Mini-trains started at 4pm, with a summer heat wave simmering on the former sheep pastures on the south-east edge of the city. The platform, covered in green carpet, was separated from the browning grass and hoof-compacted clay soil of the audience area by a rope with red pendants limp in the still air. On stage, performers in black-tie suits played swing-era arrangements of Christmas carols. A lone raven watched from a fence post. The amplified strains of ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ rolled out over the pastures as the carriages of the mini-trains trundled around the track, a few children and their adults on board.

Standing on stage among performers such as musicians, singers, actors, dancers and perhaps politicians fronting an audience is part of what Erving Goffman calls the ‘platform format’. The scene and configuration of this platform, and so many others like it, presents something different to the coastlines, rocks, geometry and churches. As the platform diagrams for the Sydney Opera House drawn by Jörn Utzon in his Platforms and Plateaus: Ideas of a Danish Architect show (Utzon 1962), platforms stage every level of height. Utzon's ground-plan for the support-substrate of the opera stage is full of steps and stages on a range of scales. The main stages or performance platforms are big steps arranged in front of steps for seating, surrounded by steps for approaching, and standing on wide flat steps. Some platforms do not use elevation for visibility, but sit at the base of a depression. Not all platforms are spaces of performance, but nearly all rely on stages.

How did platforms come on stage after 2000? If we start from how platforms appear in web browsers and then apps on smartphones and other devices in increasingly virtualized and microstate, embedded configurations, the complex development of platforms is woven through by practices of coding and software development. Coding and software development itself is re-made in that weaving.

Devices such as applications, apps and websites are the most immediate experience of platforms for many people. The existence of apps and websites, as well as everything that connects to them, depends on code in multiple ways. There has been much recognition of some of the effects of coding and its connections with agency, politics, economy and culture. But perhaps attention to how developers belong to and are included in what they code would help us understand the ensemble-side of platforms. And to ask: how does this progressively entanglement boost experimental ontology?

What matters ontologically in coding things to be platform-like, in making functionalities, interfaces or screens that update, scroll, display, animate, label, tabulate, list or link to ‘content’? In a discussion thread entitled ‘What is a practical use for a closure in JavaScript?’ on the Q&A site Stack Overflow in 2015, a participant declares: ‘Technically every function you make in Javascript on a browser is a closure because the window object is bound to it’ (alex 2015). The discussion about ‘closures in JavaScript’ meanders through a dozen or so major responses, some with many sub-replies, and some receiving hundreds of upvotes indicating ‘this answer is useful’.

Roughly one metre cubes, two deep red oblong stones lie in a semi-circle collection of stones. A fragment of the wavering thickness of living/non-living layering of the earth's crust, of what Elizabeth Povinelli has described as geontology (Povinelli 2016), they form part of the Australian National Rock Collection near Galambary or Black Mountain, Canberra (see Figure IV.1). The stones have the width, depth and breadth, surfaces, extremities and angles that reflect their formation and their handling in the mining industry. In the Pilbara, the rock was cut out of the ground by Fortescue Metals Group, one of the world's largest iron ore mining companies. Saved from crushing and shipping as iron ore at the mine, they are now climbed by children and present a training challenge for passing mountain bikers.

The boulders come from the Brockman Formation of the Hamersley Ranges in the mineral-rich Pilbara region of north-west Australia, Pitjanjare country. The 2.3-billion-year-old rocks were cut from a geological formation of vast horizontal stability, millions of square kilometres of central and western Australia, that geologists call ‘a platform’. Much of Australia's landmass and large parts of Eurasia are platforms. The rock is banded with waves of iron compounds taken up by marine microbes and sedimented in fine oxide layers. Continental platforms are usually made up of layers of sedimentary rock washed by water across the much older basalt or other igneous ‘basement’ of Precambrian eons.

Hammersley iron is a platform deposit (Morris 1983).

Earth systems models, and perhaps sciences more generally, excite experiments in making ensembles.

But rather than regarding earth as an experimental object, this chapter turns to earth systems models as experimental practices in constituting ensembles. It is less concerned with the epistemic features of the models in describing earth processes and more with how models re-configure relations in an ensemble. I work again here with the presentiment that ensembles have some different propensities to the operating system, machines, devices or to their pre-eminent contemporary arrangement as platforms.

Ensembles are interesting precisely because they lack the internal regulation of a machine, and they do not circulate in concretized detachment in the way certain technical elements may do. Ensembles differ from other technical configurations in that they constrain internal couplings, or mutual conditionings. But their composition as ensembles depends on a ‘margin of indetermination’ (Simondon 1989, 12).

For Simondon, the margin of indetermination plays out in the ‘inter-commutativity’ of the ensemble not in its emergence with an associated milieu/background/middle (1989, 73).

Earth and science and technology studies

What does science and technology studies (STS) actually say about the world and what it is made up of? Increasingly, recent STS speaks directly of earth, its places, surfaces, flows and histories. And while this work might seem to lie at some remove from the data centres, terminals, hash functions, graphics processing or functional closures of app programming, platforms are affected by it.

Are platforms good to think with? Platforms arise from a long series of arrangements of people and things. Such arrangements lack the coherence of a device, machine or ‘system’, even if they include them. But platforms bind and constrict current configurations of collective life and perhaps digital social research. They might still enable something.

This book devises some experimental approaches to platform things, narratives, places and habits. It draws from science and technology studies (STS) and associated approaches to media, ontologies, knowledges and power. More than some other approaches, an STS-oriented inquiry might attend to the variety of platforms scattered across society-economy-nature-language-subject-object divisions. I hold one key question in mind throughout: does STS assemble the equipment and acumen to not only follow platforms as they diversify across human-nonhuman differences, but to understand how to survive on/in/with/off them? Experimental ontology in ensembles responds to that question.

How many platforms exist?

Many observers see the last two decades, for better or worse, as platform-time. In social sciences, researchers began by re-thinking knowledge as platform objectivity (Cambrosio et al 2004), economic relations as platform capitalism (Srnicek 2016), platform cooperativism (Scholz and Schneider 2017), a society as platform society (Van Dijck et al 2018), and platformization as a far-reaching transformation (Plantin and Punathambekar 2018), leading to platform urbanism (Leszczynski 2019) or perhaps just the latest version of media specificity (Acland 2015).