Events
04/16/2025
05:00 PM - 09:00 PM | Weizenbaum-Institut, Hardenbergstraße 32, 10623 Berlin
Seeing Like a Platform. An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity
Power needs abstraction, to make the unwieldy complexity of the social world legible and manageable. The proposition at the heart of Seeing Like a Platform is that the digital era into which we are entering signifies the rise of a new epistemology of power. The book will be presented by the author Justus Uitermark.
While industrial modernity saw society as a machinery to be designed according to detailed blueprints, digital modernity views society as organic and alive, to be herded and nudged through digital infrastructures, AI, and algorithms. Seeing Like a Platform explores the history, meaning, and far-reaching consequences of this epistemological shift.As the mechanic way of seeing before it, the digital erases and leaves out. Seeing Like a Platform examines the contentious rise of complexity thinking across different fields and cases, from social movements to Wikipedia, from digital platforms to city planning, and from social science to the media.
Please register here for the event.
About Justus Uitermark
The book will be presented by Justus Uitermark, a geographer and sociologist at the University of Amsterdam. He holds a chair in Urban Geography and directs the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research. Uitermark has written widely on cities, social movements, and digital platforms. His books include On Display: Instagram, the Self, and the City (with John Boy), Cities and Social Movements (with Walter Nicholls), and Dynamics of Power in Dutch Integration Politics.
Discussant and Moderator
Daniela Stoltenberg (FU Berlin)
After the talk, drinks and snacks will be provided.