Science, Technology, and Society Seminar: STS Circle at Harvard
Date and Time
Location
From Aurola to ZGGCD: Building Machine Readable Brands Across Global Platforms
Speaker
- Moira Weigel, Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature, Harvard University.
Chair
- Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies; Professor of Environmental Science and Public Policy, Committee on Degrees in Environmental Science and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School.
Contact
Henry Austin
henryaustin@hks.harvard.edu
Abstract
In this talk I will present a chapter from my book-in-progress, Third Party. The book offers the first qualitative study of Amazon’s marketplace and its role in the emergence of the global platform economy. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and eight months of participant observation conducted in both the United States and China, the book specifically examines the rise of Amazon as a transnational phenomenon that owed much of its power to how it brought together state and private interests across the Great Firewall. Methodologically, the book makes an argument for investigating platforms like Amazon Marketplace through the perspectives of its “complementors,” rather than either elite CEOs or highly exploited workers. Theoretically, it proposes that the rise of Amazon both reflects and reinforces the growing importance of the small and medium sized business owners who call themselves “third parties” and sit uneasily between the received distinction between capital and labor. The question of how exactly to conceptualize third parties as a collectivity–whether as a class, community, or (my term) a concurrency–remains open.
After giving an overview of Third Party, this presentation will dive into a chapter on Amazon-native branding. Situating contemporary practices of branding on and for Amazon in a longer history of communication between producers and consumers, I will argue that the rise of platform monopolies fundamentally changes the ways that branding functions. If branding emerged in the nineteenth century as a way for manufacturers to establish an imagined relationship with those who consumed their products, now, the first audience for online branding is a search algorithm and brand equity constitutes a set of opaque and non-transferable metrics that determine a position in search results. Platforms like Amazon have frequently narrated their role as giving producers immediate access to global markets that will enable them to ascend global value chains. However, in practice, the rise of machine-readable branding has produced new third party intermediaries–the experts, translators, and storytellers enrolled in trying to create a new kind of platformized “brand culture” that can connect people who share no natural language and will never directly interact with one another.
Bio
Moira Weigel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. Previously, she was a member of the School of Social Sciences at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study and an Assistant Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Northeastern University. Her past books are Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating (2016) and Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do and How They Do It (2020). Her work has also appeared in a wide range of both academic and non-academic publications, including a recent piece, related to the topic of her talk, for the New York Times.