Digital platforms: Producing and infrastructuring users in the age of airbnb

Abstract

How do digital platforms relate to processes of domination and emancipation? To answer this question, the authors focus on Airbnb, a platform-based company and current leader at the global level in the online hospitality industry, highlighting the relation that it builds with their users, together with the ways in which users give shape to this relation. Adopting an actor-network approach, the authors begin with the assumption that platforms are not merely intermediaries, but they configure, produce and infrastructure their users. This helps to problematize the domination/emancipation dichotomy through which platforms are often interpreted, showing an apparently contradictory dynamic: Platform-organizations produce and depend on the very subjects they dominate.