Platform Islandization: The Making of the Computational Archipelago

This essay introduces platform islandization to theorize digital life beyond questions of infrastructure or access, through situated rhythms and ruptures that challenge the universalist claims of platform logics. Platform islandization is a socio-technical process in which bounded and selectively connected publics emerge within platformed environments. This process produces computational archipelagos : fragmented configurations of visibility, access, and affect structured by platform logics and infrastructures. I articulate platform islandization across three registers— infrastructural-experiential, epistemic-ethical, and aesthetic-algorithmic —revealing fragmentation as a patterned condition rather than a deficit. Grounded in long-term research in Indonesia, this framework invokes "Indonesia as method" and offers a portable analytic for understanding how people and digital systems mutually reorder publics, emotions, and knowledges across diverse contexts.