Special Issue of ICA Journal Communications Culture and Critique

Co-editors: Elisha Lim (York University) & Ezekiel Dixon-Román (Teachers College, Columbia University)

Digital platforms inflict what Fanon (1952) called psychic wounds: historical-racial schemas; epistemic violence; emotional trauma. The fact of these psychic wounds are not solved by current digital solutions. Moderators and oversight councils did not stop the rise of hateful extremism on social media, it became enshrined in the U.S. government. Anti-bias training has not made gig work less exploitative (Gebrail, 2024). A recent $8 billion privacy lawsuit against Meta (“Meta,” 2025) will not stop the platform from training its large language models on fundamentally racist, ableist, sexist datasets and labelling rubrics. Platform Studies cannot tackle billowing platform abuses until it is anticolonial.

This Thematic Issue traces platform violence back to the progenitor platforms: The British East India Company, The Royal African Company, the Dutch East Indies Company, and other 17th century joint stock companies. As historians Jairus Banaji and Kirti Chaudhuri argue, standardized multinational corporate ecologies have existed for centuries. Banaji decisively demonstrates that commercial capitalism dominated eras usually viewed as pre-capitalist, and persists into the present. Chaudhuri shows how the East India Company pioneered a standardized, transnational corporate ecology complete with bureaucratic hierarchies, accounting systems, and global supply chains. Numerous critical scholars have traced colonial lineages in contemporary technology, whether telecom policy/infrastructure, surveillance technologies, digital e-governance tools, or machine learning and AI. We bring this treatment to Platform Studies by revisiting these joint stock companies as the original machine as the state, indeed a corporate machine that came before the state; since it pre-dated the absolutist state. The logics of property, measurement and race established by The British East India Companies and its peers are the precursor to modern platform problems.

For example, The British East India Company (EIC) thrived by spreading a regime of knowledge – through its infrastructural interoperability – more effectively than sheer force. The interoperability of its boundary objects included its charters that dictated trade, maps that attributed ownership, tariffs that formalized exchange, and, crucially, racial ranking systems that marked populations as sub or non-human property. Thanks to this infrastructure the EIC, like modern platforms, did not need to produce its own content but facilitate exchange among third party plantation owners, shipbuilders, slave traders, local lords, gangmasters, shopkeepers and customers. It sustained this multisided market by continually tweaking terms and conditions across four continents. Far from neutral, Company trade shaped local businesses, knowledge production, creative expression and identity; much of which emerged and evolved to optimize and reap the benefits of the company’s vast markets (Lim, 2025).

Modern platform critics fail to dismantle platform injustice because – like the business and software studies they draw on – they treat disposable labor in the global majority as a fact of life rather than as the optimized infrastructural design of a 400-year-old platform. This thematic issue insists on the constitutive factor of race [PC1] in platform power, by tracing concrete examples of the historic corporate infrastructure that primed the world for today’s degrading gig work, humiliating precarity, and manipulative social media from Transatlantic Slavery to the Opium Wars – the platformization of planetary life.

We seek highly specific examples of this history to offer instructors and students a deeply contextualized syllabus of Platform Studies as an ongoing European colonial legacy, demonstrating that platform logics are not new, and that history is filled with resistance strategies and analog technologies to curb their power, “the sly native, the trickster native, the desiring native, the sage native, the agential native, the undeveloped native, the homosexual native, the queer native, the deracinated native… the indifferent native” (Macharia 2016). As we learn from Cedric Robinson (1983), there was always resistance to European colonial subjugation. This took many forms including the insurrections aboard slave ships, the maroon communities of the palenques of Colombia, the slave revolts of Haiti, the maroon communities of Jamaica, and the underground railroad of US chattel slavery, just to name a few examples. Anticolonial resistance and undercommons have long existed against, alongside, and parallel to systems of colonial extraction, dispossession, subjugation, and oppression. This issue rejects the typical empirical positivist frameworks of digital platforms – business, infrastructure studies and social science – that overlook and miss these processes of the platform. We refuse to omit, erase or repudiate land theft, indentured servitude, slave labor, and uprootedness as the ground truth of platform power.

This Thematic Issue is a companion to the forthcoming special issue “Colonial Studies of the Platform” in Social Text, the Duke University Press cultural studies journal, which calls for colonial studies scholars to turn their critical interventions to technology, algorithms and AI. This issue calls for media studies and digital scholars to confront the history of our fields. Especially Platform Studies, which examines corporate capital infrastructure, how platforms make money, their extractive logics, conditions of subjection, and their complex discursive and material consequences – but favors political economic frameworks that cast platforms as bad apples in an otherwise smoothly running capitalist landscape of “the common good in most Western democracies” (Van Dijck, Poell, & De Waal, 2018). These dominant digital Platform Studies are incentivized to train a digitally prepared citizenry with cybersecurity and other empirical data skills to protect Euro-Western civil liberties like privacy and digital property. In other words, current Platform Studies obscures the racial hierarchies that undergird capitalism legitimating the cloaked subjection and subjugation of Western democracies. An atmosphere of AI market hype and geopolitical tensions, federal and private funding drives Platform Studies curriculum to prepare students to keep pace with a “new,” unprecedented neoliberal conflation of technology and business strategy, invoked by Benjamin Bratton as the machine as the state (Bratton, 2014).

Platform Studies are important, developing theories about how and why digital infrastructures accelerate neoliberal accumulation (Srnicek, 2017), thrive so rapidly and ubiquitously (Plantin et al, 2018), shape markets, news and media as contingent cultural commodities (Nieborg & Poell, 2018), and shape future behavior (van Dijck, 2013). These studies must be historic, if not genealogical. Looking at the long history of platforms sheds light on why algorithmic grammars always segment populations into exploitable and condemnable differences parsed by granular gradations of marketability. This open call seeks theoretical contributions that engage both historical and contemporary practices and processes of anticolonial efforts in relation to the platform, whether through the platform, against the platform, alongside the platform, or in refusal of platform logics of control.

We invite original articles addressing any of the themes below, between 6000 and 7000 words:

Land treaties as software
The plantation as application programming interface
Racial capitalism as software development kit
Data sovereignty from or through the platform
Subversive acts and practices in modern technological legacies of slavery and indentured systems in biometrics, tracking software and visa portals
Alien onto-epistemologies and AI/machine learning
Indigenous knowledge as algorithm
Digital undercommons through the platform
Maroon platforms or marronage within or outwith platforms
Technodiversity and technosociogeny of the platform
Cosmotechnics and cosmocomputation of the platform
Submission Instructions:
Please submit a 500-word abstract as well as a short (2-page) CV by January 30th, 2026, using the subject “Thematic Issue for Communication, Culture & Critique,” to the co-editors of the special issue at eclim@yorku.ca, ed2115@tc.columbia.edu. Authors whose abstracts are selected will be notified by February 1st, 2026 and asked to submit complete manuscripts (6000-7000 words, including notes and references), in Word format, following the 6th APA style, by November 15th, 2026.

Acceptance of the abstracts does not guarantee publication of the papers, which will be subject to double-blind peer review. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact the co-editors at the two email addresses above.

NOTE: Accepted full-length paper contributions will be published in the same Communication, Culture & Critique issue as a separate Forum section of shorter invited essays.