While there is growing literature on the role of platforms in concentrating market power, this article centres on their role in ‘performing’ economic theory. As infrastructures that measure, monitor and ultimately compel human behaviour, the authors argue that digital platforms should be understood as ‘performative infrastructures’ that seek to incorporate informal populations by compelling behaviour in line with certain theoretical and commercial models. The article draws on secondary historical literature and primary research with Kenyan and international agritech developers, farmers, and representatives from international organizations, regulators and farmer organizations, to historicize contemporary ‘platformization’ within a longer history of infrastructural performativity in rural Kenya, in order to tease out both continuities and departures from the past. While contemporary technologists evoke similar justifications for top-down control over markets as did their analogue predecessors, they nonetheless seek to vest such power within the private sector and to use it to perform neoclassical theory. The authors argue that this particular orientation is not an intrinsic feature of the technology itself but is rather shaped by a longer history of shifting policy paradigms.

中文翻译：

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从发展状态到企业利维坦：肯尼亚农业数字平台的基础设施性能历史化

虽然关于平台在集中市场力量中的作用的文献越来越多，但本文集中讨论它们在“执行”经济理论中的作用。作为衡量、监控并最终强制人类行为的基础设施，作者认为数字平台应该被理解为“表演性基础设施”，旨在通过符合某些理论和商业模型的强制行为来整合非正式人群。本文借鉴了肯尼亚和国际农业技术开发商、农民以及来自国际组织、监管机构和农民组织的代表的二手历史文献和初步研究，在肯尼亚农村基础设施表演的较长历史中将当代“平台化”历史化，为了梳理出过去的连续性和背离。虽然当代技术专家像他们的类似前辈一样为自上而下的市场控制提出了类似的理由，但他们仍然寻求将这种权力授予私营部门并用它来执行新古典理论。作者认为，这种特定的方向不是技术本身的内在特征，而是由较长的政策范式转变历史所塑造的。