Platforms create an interface without historical precedent: an interchange in which social life in its open-ended variety interfaces seamlessly with the forces of economic extraction. This seamlessness is not natural any more than data is naturally raw. It must be constructed through the painstaking removal of barriers to data flow within and between platforms; seamlessness is an achievement, in part, of software that enables platforms to produce "the social" for capital. This explains the deeply ambiguous status of the largest and most successful platforms, such as Facebook, which is expected to speak for and even regulate the social world because of the power that running a platform with two billion users gives it. Major platform power in China (Alibaba and Tencent) is even more ambitious, developing a triple interface across social, economic, and financial worlds to provide a new practical infrastructure for the world's largest society. These models of economic power and social order depend on the unspoken principle of seamlessness: every barrier to data flow is a barrier to the unlimited production of social life in forms that can generate data for capital.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 130