UC San Diego

Auto: Fordian Parables of Platform Automation rereads Fordism within an expanded genealogy of planetary platform automation, tracing the ways that the Fordist automotive paradigm, and its ideological and infrastructural logics and dynamics, define and delimit computation, urbanism, and automobility. Platforms and automation are typically theorized as exclusively digital phenomena, but this project situates platforms within an expanded lineage of dynamic socio-technical hardware and software systems, framing platforms as coordination systems and complexity management mechanisms that were instantiated through Fordist organizational methods. It also traces the lineage and trajectories of automation, a term coined inside Ford motors to describe continuous production and transfer that did not require a human intermediary. Automation, which is built upon platform capacity, is understood here as part of an epistemological lineage of autonomy as contingency and interdependence rather than as a separation or substitution of human and machine. Auto constructs a “speculative history” that traverses past, present and future. A series of parables that orbit around the Fordian auto-motive complex unfold a theory and design of platform automation that rethinks the ways that protocols, pathologies, and proclivities shape the possibilities for platform automation. The project draws upon methods from science and technology studies, systems and platform studies, management theory, media theory, mobility studies, and Marxist history. These parables about the entanglements of Ford and Fordism expose the dialectic and dynamic interplay between socio-technical adaptation and adoption, the role of devices and environment, the constructs of rationality and efficiency in design, and motive and momentum in the development and automation of platform systems development. The precedent of Fordist planetary proliferation offers design principles and practices that might be rejected or rescued from the Fordian epoch to help reorient the philosophical, social, and technological conditions for platform automation and automobility to come.