Helmond, A. (2026). The platformization of everything: From the end of the Like button to AI infrastructure in space. Social Media + Society, 12. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051261436101
Summary
In this anniversary essay, Anne Helmond revisits her own concept of platformization a decade after coining it, tracking its shift from describing platforms’ infrastructural expansion across the open web toward capturing a broader, now AI-centered sociotechnical condition. Working through two illustrative cases—Meta’s retirement of the Facebook Like button (effective February 2026) and Google’s space-based “Project Suncatcher” AI infrastructure—she argues that platformization is entering a new phase organized around AI compute, inference, and integrated ecosystems rather than the social graph. Concerned that the term has eroded through overuse and conflation with “digitization,” she proposes reclaiming it as a platform-specific form of Manovich’s transcoding: the situated process by which practices and domains are made “platform-ready.”
Key Contributions
- Reclaims and sharpens the concept of platformization by redefining it as platform-specific transcoding, distinct from generic digitization.
- Offers a periodization of platformization, marking the transition from the social-web/social-graph era to the AI-platform era.
- Argues for empirical and historical specificity, foregrounding “actually existing platformization” and the collaborative role of third parties.
- Sets a research agenda for the next decade: Big Tech–state relations, military/energy/space platformization, super apps, and AI infrastructures.
- Connects platformization to adjacent critical frameworks—sphere transgression, intellectual monopolization, Big Techification, and hyperscalers.
Methods
A conceptual and theoretical essay revisiting the author’s earlier framework, anchored by two illustrative empirical cases (Meta’s discontinuation of the Like and Comment plugins, and Google’s Project Suncatcher). Helmond synthesizes adjacent frameworks—Sharon & Gellert’s sphere transgression, Rikap’s intellectual monopolization, Hendrikse et al.’s Big Techification, and Manovich’s transcoding—and draws on her forthcoming co-authored book Platforms: A Critical Introduction.
Findings
- Meta no longer needs Like-button signals from the open web, having shifted to in-app behavioral data, third-party integrations, its ad network, and AI-generated inferences.
- The Like button’s retirement marks a decoupling from the social graph model toward TikTok-style content recommendation and AI personal assistants.
- Google’s Project Suncatcher (prototype satellite launches planned for 2027) exemplifies a move from “platform earth” to space as a frontier for AI compute, driven by terrestrial limits on energy, water, and data center capacity.
- Platformization unfolds unevenly across regions and sectors, depending on local intermediaries and partnerships rather than top-down imposition.
- Big Tech firms are reorienting from platform-as-infrastructure toward integrated AI ecosystems (“Big AI”), with new entrants like Nvidia and defense startups (Anduril, Palantir, Shield AI) adopting platform models.
Connections
This essay’s argument about AI infrastructure, hyperscalers, and the frontier expansion of platforms into space and defense sectors resonates strongly with infrastructure- and orbit-oriented critiques such as Vertesi2026-lv. Its concern with Big Tech’s repositioning around AI and the political economy of platform power connects it to broader platform-critique reflections in this anniversary cluster, including Swartz2026-zb and Baym2026-tr, while its focus on datafication, behavioral signals, and inference dovetails with data-governance concerns raised in Bechmann2026-dr.
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