“Platform empires: every click is capital”
Simulating the player entering a platform built with digital
information about the user, the user will find countless
monitors and walking robots surrounding them. The user
needs to click on each button to turn off the monitors to
leave the platform.
Produced by: Qike Shi
Produced by: Qike Shi
Background：
‘Marxism’ provides at least two key points fundamental to broader understandings of power: capitalism and ideology. Social media are all around us. For many, they are the first things to look at upon waking and the last thing to do before sleeping. Integrated seamlessly into our private and public lives, they entertain, inform, connect (and sometimes disconnect) us. Social media are more than just social though. In addition to our experiences as everyday users, understanding social media also means asking questions about our society, our culture, and our economy. What we find is dense connections between platform infrastructures and our experience of the social, shaped by power, shifting patterns of participation, and a widening ideology of connection. Maexist thinking identifies capitalism as a system marked by dominant forms of power- that of the ruling class (and those that own the means of production) who are able to dominate others through a system of economic exploitation.
Concepts:
[ Monitoring and robots symbolize capitalism ]
Social media companies position themselves as providing social spaces- equating platform spaces with ‘the world’. Data colonialism involves not one pole of colonial power (‘the West’), but at least two: the United States and China. It is well known that global user data is in the hands of eight major companies: [Google, Amazon, Facebook, apple and Chinese Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi]. Platform capitalism, surveillance capitalism, data colonialism and even ‘the platform society’ all aim to capture the big structural and social changes brought about by social platforms within digital environments.
[Turning off surveillance symbolizes digital click]
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The like, favorite or equivalent button on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and other digital platforms from Amazon to email has been linked to pro-social behaviors, making positive interactions easy and convenient in line with the platform’s motives. Other platform like YouTube, reddit and Imdur also have a dislike or downvote feature, which may not fit with these ‘pro-social’ platform affordances, but they still promote the ideology of connection.
Technology:
This toolkit allows for easy creation and editing of bezier
curves (also known as splines). These curves can be used as
paths for objects and cameras, to visualize debug information
in the editor, and as editable animation curves describing the
relationship of two variables over time (size and color,
velocity and direction, volume and proximity, etc.).
When a GameObject collides with another GameObject, Unity calls OnTriggerEnter. OnTriggerEnter happens on the FixedUpdate function when two GameObjects collide. The Colliders involved are not always at the point of initial contact.
Future:
I have spent a lot of time working on the 3D art direction and in the future, I will look to improve it in conjunction with the user experience. For example, the overuse of text as a reminder in a VR experience is not a good idea. In scene 2, the user needs to [swim] to find clues to the game, I have listed the steps to use in the scene in text, when the beginner users play, it is difficult to grasp the skills quickly and intuitively. Later improvements: I will create 3D character animations to guide and communicate movements with users.
Currently, my surveillance images have mirror materials as mapping, considering that my entire platform is about digital surveillance, On the surveillance screen, I would like to show the changes in the data information of the people, which would be more relevant to the theme.
