These sessions feature research on global digital cultures from a wide variety of scholarly disciplines, theoretical perspectives, and methodological approaches. During each of these events, we will discuss two draft texts, seeking to include a mix of senior and junior scholars.

For our upcoming GDC Seminar on Thursday April 25, from 15:00-17:00 at REC B2.08, we will discuss works-in-progress by Anneroos Planqué-van Hardeveld and Jelke Bosma.

In Browsers we Trust? The Infrastructural Power of Browsers in Internet Standardization
by Anneroos Planqué-van Hardeveld

Public web certificates are crucial anchors of digital trust and cybersecurity as they provide proof of confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of a website, and facilitate an encrypted connection. Browsers – especially Google’s Chrome - have the infrastructural power to shape how these certificates are issued and managed. This infrastructural power is political: it enables browsers to influence the way in which states interact with their citizens through digital means. This paper asks: How do browsers, as infrastructuralized platforms, exercise their infrastructural power in the Certification Authority Browser Forum to shape the requirements for public web certificates? Bringing STS inspired internet governance studies to platform studies, I examine how browsers ‘do’ internet governance at this cybersecurity standardization forum. This reveals three manifestations of the infrastructural power of browsers: i) pressuring the community to adopt new requirements, ii) shaping how security and/or compliance incidents are interpreted and acted upon, and iii) policing the practices needed for digital trust. This article argues that analyzing browsers – which are powerful platforms that have reached infrastructural scale – widens our understanding of the infrastructuralization of platforms and draws our attention to how Big Tech are involved in internet standardization forums.

Host Subjectivities: Between Care and Labor at the Entrepreneurial Home
by Jelke Bosma

Dominant political economic approaches of short-term rental platforms centralize the role of capital and economic behaviour of hosts. However, in some cases hosting practices and strategies are seem economically irrational. To understand what brings individual 'hosts' to Airbnb and what keeps them there we have to understand how they see themselves and understand their role as hosts. In this chapter, I explore how the short-term rental platform Airbnb produces and depends on host subjectivities: senses of self as entrepreneurial and caring that are produced in the complex entanglement of platform imaginaries, platform affordances, and a dialectical process of placemaking and emplacement. As these subjectivities are connected to hosts’ homes, they allow them to not only rent out a room but also commodify their care and affection. This, however, comes with inherent tensions: while 'hosting' in itself might be valuable for hosts – meeting new people, taking care of them and showing them your world brings them joy and is rewarding – it also requires labor (including e.g. cleaning and other socially reproductive labor). Host subjectivities are productive as they mute hosting labor and foreground aspects of care and entrepreneurship.

If you would like to attend the seminar series, you can RSVP using the link above. You will receive an e-mail with links to the texts a week in advance of the seminar. We ask you to kindly refrain from sharing the texts publicly, as these are works in progress. 

The discussion will be followed by drinks!

If you have any questions, drop us an e-mail at gdc@uva.nl.