The Fordian Slip

From the roads of the Roman empire to the paper proposals for Google’s Sidewalk labs, from screw gauges to time zones, from urban plans to computational protocols, the genealogy of platforms is replete with grand and mundane schemes. Whether digital or physical, hardware or software, platforms are a general systems type—a standardized foundation, architecture, or arena upon and through which other things are planned and programmed. Platforms perform in similar ways. They combine rigid protocols with flexible adaptation; they consolidate and distribute power; they coordinate supply and demand; they leverage surplus via network effects; they perpetuate early plans while staging the potential for ongoing emergence. Platform systems are also prone to particular pathologies—malfunctions and errors including path dependence, lock-in, and rigid distributions of risk. The case of Fordlandia, the Ford Motor Company’s failed rubber plantation in the Brazilian Amazon, presents one such platform pathology—the slip—which describes the proclivity/propensity of platforms to slide out of sync with the worlds they precipitate. The Fordian slip diagnoses the ways that platforms fail to pivot, demonstrating how peripheral experiments reveal fissures in platform foundations while staging unexpected possibilities as they play out over time.