INCA at the STS Hub 2025 Conference

15 March 2025 By

On 11-14 March the INCA team participated in the STS-Hub 2025 Conference ‘Diffracting the Critical’ held in Berlin.

The three-day event included a variety of engaging activities and panels. On 14 March, Maurilio Pirone from UNIBO presented a paper titled ‘The Conjunctural Geographies of the Territorialisation of Platforms’.

His presentation focused on the forms and effects of digital infrastructure in urban spaces. Arguing that platforms should not invent anything from scratch, but that their capacity should consist of embedding and adapting local contexts to their logic, he looked in particular at the process of encoding and decoding urban life, to show how it is not a mere transcription of inputs into data, but rather a reorganisation of what already exists. He used the case study of food delivery platforms in Bologna as an example to present the ideas.

On the other hand, it should be noted that he did not neglect aspects such as workers’ demands, marginalised subjects, environmental characteristics… which undermine the supposed neutrality and efficiency of the algorithmic management of platforms, reminding us how technologies always need politics.