My friend recently told me to download the Taco Bell mobile app to collect rewards and score free points, and as such it is“very useful” for a college student to have. Understanding his logic, I decided to download the app. As soon as I logged on, I received six separate data collection prompts before placing a single order. I was fascinated with the sequencing of these data collection points. Each prompt arrived at a moment of friction, occurring right before something I actually wanted to do like order my food. It required location access before browsing the menu and notifications prompted before checkout. When I clicked log in with Apple (I clicked this out of pure convenience instead of going through the hassle of verifying my email, etc. if I made an account with Taco Bell), it asked if I wanted to hide or share my email. I obviously clicked to hide my email through Apple’s private relay login. However, the app immediately asked me for my birthday instead if I decided not to share my email. It is worthy to note that it had never asked me my birthday previously. There is, to my knowledge, nothing age-sensitive about a black bean crunch wrap. I started paying close attention to this form of sequencing in physical spaces too. Walking into a late-night food spot later that week, I was immediately greeted with three ugly yellow-colored kiosks, a fat surveillance camera, and a prompt for my email before I could even see the menu. The feeling was not necessarily paranoia, but rather the low-grade awareness that the space was processing me before I had made a single goddamn decision. I was honestly fascinated with this space as an ethnography, analyzing first the effect of efficiency-focused technology on late food spots’ productivity. At first, I noticed the design observations, but then the ethnographic ones.
There is a clear connection in these moments. There is a clear idea that platform capitalism does not necessarily operate through individual companies making individual choices, but rather logic that is reproduced across entirely different contexts. The same kiosk infrastructure at the late-night shawarma spot is licensed from the same handful of POS vendors serving chains globally. The data flows upward into the same advertising streams regardless of where the food is being ordered from. The local texture changes, yet the underlying extraction architecture remains the same.
Ultimately, I was awe-struck to see how behavioral data is not incidental to businesses, but rather the actual primary asset being manufactured. This begs an important question: what does platform capitalism do to spaces that were never originally designed around it, and how are spaces renovating to fit it in an technologically-revolving world.