Economization, Ecologization, and Care / The Hidden Barter Economy of Digital Platforms
Two-part seminar with Koray Caliskan (The New School, New York)
Economization, Ecologization, and Care / The Hidden Barter Economy of Digital Platforms
18 May 2026, 16:00 – 18:00
Part 1 Economization, Ecologization, and Care (4-5pm)
The first talk discusses ecologization as a care-centered reorientation of economic activity. Reflecting on a long collaboration with Michel Callon and Donald Mackenzie, I argue that rather than treating the economy as a fixed domain organized around production and exchange, we can focus on shifting strategic orientations that foreground the maintenance and sustainability of heterogeneous collectives of humans and non-humans.
Reading: Ecologization Part 1 and Part 2, Economy and Society, 2025, Vol 54(2), 1–24 and Vol 54(3), 1–27
Part 2 No Money, No Problem: The Hidden Barter Economy of Digital Platforms (5-6pm)
Economic theory declared barter a relic. Platform capitalism proved it wrong. This talk argues that beneath every search query, every scroll, and every click lies a sophisticated system of non-monetary exchange that both mainstream and critical accounts of economies have largely left untheorized. Drawing on empirical research into Google Search and digital video platforms,this talk examines how platforms coordinate the acquisition of attention, relevance signals, and behavioral traces from users without recourse to price or payment. These are not incidental or residual transactions. They are structured, repeatable, and infrastructurally stabilized forms of barter, operating at a scale that classical theory deemed impossible for non-monetary exchange. To theorize this coordination, the talk develops the concept of the dyad: a coupled pair of heterogeneous valuables held by two positions whose exchange is organized through interfaces, metrics, algorithmic feedback loops, and database architectures rather than through price signals. The dyad allows us to see what transactional and extractivist frameworks alike tend to obscure, that platform participation is not free use, but draws on an ongoing, asymmetric, and infrastructurally governed barter relation. Far from vanishing with the rise of markets, barter has been quietly rebuilt at the core of digital capitalism.
Reading: Inside Digital Advertising: Platforms, Power and Material Politics, Polity 2026 (PDF available here)
Supported by UCL Anthropocene, Economy & Society, and the Department of Geography, UCL.
Koray Caliskan is an economic sociologist and organizational designer, and Professor at Parsons School of Design at The New School, New York. His research examines how markets, platforms, and economies are made and redesigned, with a focus on digital advertising and AI-driven economies. He is the author of Market Threads (Princeton University Press) and Data Money: Inside Cryptocurrencies and Their Markets, Communities, and Blockchains (Columbia University Press), and co-author, with Donald MacKenzie, of Inside Digital Advertising: Platforms, Power, and Material Politics (Polity). His next book, co-authored with Michel Callon and Donald MacKenzie, Economization: Markets, Platforms, and Ecologies, will be published by Columbia University Press in 2026. His work received the 2021 Social Sciences Breakthrough of the Year Award from the Falling Walls Foundation. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Cultural Economy and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Design Strategies. His fiction and documentary films have been shown at international festivals, including Cannes.