Smooth operator: sleuthing Homo oeconomicus on social media platforms through a close reading of design

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article argues for the excavation of a key design logic around which the user interfaces (UIs) of mainstream social media platforms are built but that has not yet received much critical attention: the Western neoliberal subject as market actor, or homo oeconomicus, ‘economic man.’ This article identifies and connects key features in UI design of social media platforms to histories of European thought that emerge from the colonial and industrial eras around this universal figure of ‘Man.’ It takes initial inspiration from existing research with queer and trans users of the platform Tumblr as a counterexample, or illiberal platform. Borrowing across disciplines, it offers a technique of ‘close reading’ of UI design decisions and outlines a specific rubric for locating the biases of homo oeconomicus baked in to these decisions, which alleviate as much friction as possible in the path from user data to monetization. It closes with attention to other kinds of design logics and platforms that do not take this figure as their building block, such as a digital platform for queer sociality in the Middle East, in which strategic opacity and collective vetting work as communal protectives instead of being designed around individual agency and market logics.