Airbnb, building tools for diplomacy.
What role can platform design play in building an emancipated society? This is no utopia. Instead, it is about carefully considering the agential capacities of actors. Beyond platform enabling micro-entrepreneurs, a platform for diplomates.
Back in 2013, Brian Chesky gave a touching and insightful interview with Sarah Lacy. To underline the emancipatory mission of Airbnb, he pointed out that Airbnb’s dream it to create millions on micro-entrepreneurs. And as a way to simplify Airbnb’s vision for his audience, he said the platform they are building aims at “connecting nomads and locals”. Yet, assigning a place or a role to those we intend to emancipate might end up doing the exact opposite of emancipation.
As a continuation of the theme ‘Airbnb as digital catheral’, I wish to build on Jacques Rancière’s definition of emanciaption. Rancière is one of the most prolific living philosopher on the question of emancipation.
Architectures as symbols of emancipation
Speaking to architects at the Irvin S. Chain School of Architecture, he referred to the Tower of Babel and gothic cathedrals as architectural symbols of emancipation. Both of these architectural enterprises illustrate the role architects (and by extension designers) may play in building emancipating enterprises. For Rancière, the strength emanating from these architectures comes from the fact that they are works of art, symbolically as well as technically.
As noted in the previous post on Ruskin, these buildings display in their walls and structure the joy and creativity of those who participated in their erection. Neither the Tower of Babel not gothic cathedrals unfold as the vision of ‘an’ architect. Their complex erection is an agile enterprise without a unique leader nor a hierarchical division of labour. But then, where does the emancipatory symbolic power of these buildings come from, if not from an architect’s vision? Could it be from the very lack of top-down order?
Architecture as a distribution of spaces
Rancière reminds us that the architect is often associated with the utopian, who, in order to constitute his utopia, positions resources and people in the ‘right’ place. Indeed, the architect’s work assigns to everything a position. It materialises the place which affords the ideal experience to take place.
Yet this directed distribution of the common space is done according to lines of division imposed on agents and resources. The assignment of each thing to a position in space, or to a function within the whole, is an imposition. In this sense, such implementation of utopia is an anti-emancipation. In Rancière’s words, this distribution of the sensible operates as a ‘police’ and not as a ‘politic’. How then can emancipation be ‘constructed’?
Back to the source of emancipation
Rancière warns us against the idea that to emancipate would be to make the spectator active [1]. The spectator indeed represents the archetype of the inactive. He is passive in front of what is being played and ignorant of what is going to be played. The actors, conversely, are in the action and know what is about to happen.
Thus, the desire for emancipation is often confused with an invitation from the spectator to take action. Making the spectators aware of their condition as mere spectators or putting them in a participatory posture, these are the two main approaches used to solve the problem of inaction.
But Rancière argues that these two approach do not solve anything about the question of emancipation. Indeed, these two approaches may seem opposed, but they are nevertheless two sides of the same a priori — that passivity is bad, and of the same will — to drag ignorant passive people into knowledge and action.
This will is, according to Rancière, problematic. The problem comes from that it assumes a division of the sensible world (active/passive, those who know and act and those who don’t know nor act) and rearranges it, assigns agents to new positions or actions. That is to say, this way of resolving inactivity reproduces the distribution of space between on the one hand those who know what is good for others and on the other hand those who have to experience what is good for them. The latter are assigned to an initial place of spectators, receivers of an already written act. Is it ever possible to emancipate?
Politic as a re-distribution of the sensible.
The approach proposed by Rancière is based on the capacity for translating the sensible world that each one of us carries in her/his own way. Without being assigned to any one position, all of us translate what is going on around us in our own terms. And so do living beings. Translation is multiple, always different, and evolves over time in the course of lived experience.
The multiplicity of translation is at the heart of the political process, an on-going discussion of creative translations. For Rancière, “an emancipated society is a society of translators” [1].
If architects (and designers alike) elaborate on Rancière’s reflections, it is up to us to take part in these politics rather than in the police. Politics is not the professional and legislative arena of political professionals, but the ordinary arena of our daily practices where the translating capacities embedded in people and places emerge constantly.
Note that the politics is not the opposite of the police, as the police represents a legitimate order. However, the police works best when it incorporates the outcome of politics.
Buildings of emancipation as example to build for emancipation
Building on the example of cathedrals and the Tower of Babel, Rancière invites contemporary architects to avoid elaborating utopias (or implementing those elaborated by others). As we saw, allocating a place in space and time to each thing, person, resource, process, may not produce emancipation at all.
The Tower of Babel or the Gothic cathedrals illustrate another direction. These constructions are imperfect monuments, always in the making, never finished. They do not exhaust reality to match a ‘plan’. This imperfection, Rancière tells us, is the mark of Progress, the mark of a space not subject to the tyranny of a division of labour with its assigned roles and places. For Rancière, the Tower of Babel and the Gothic cathedrals are examples where architecture succeeds as symbolic art, that is to say, where it works not to achieve its ends as technical art [2].
These symbolic spaces of emancipation, which are not orgnised utopias, are what can be called ‘heterotopias’. Rancière’s heterotopia is not an idealised elsewhere as in Foucault’s description [3]. Heteropia is not a place but a process. It is a space where the re-distribution of sensible solicits all members as a society of translators. It is not an ordered division of labour between inactive who ought to be equipped and guided into knowledge and action by visionary architects or designers.
The difference between the Tower of Babel and gothic cathedrals is that in the latter the police and the political concur, without the police eradicating the possibility of the political. Both are not opposed, they are plastic yet distinct.
Building diplomatic platforms
Populating the world with ‘nomads’ and ‘locals’ carries the potential of a ‘police’ act in Rancière’s sense. That is to say, the distribution of the sensible world that assigns participants to a place or function in the game, instead of leaving room for their capacity to translate what is being played.
If design is about how things work, the design of a connection between nomads and locals that is meant to be emancipatory for the participants needs to problematise the functioning that produces these positions of nomads and locals in the first place. For an emancipatory design rather than a ‘police’ programme, this design of connections shall consider the translator capacities of each participant instead of assigning them a place. Both locals and nomads are first diplomates.
Such interface between translators is as multiple as languages. Each one brings into the game her/his understanding of what is at play, and gives back to the game her/his interpretation of it. This emancipatory interface would celebrate the idiom dear to each one, i.e. it is an imperfect space for creative and non-aligned discursive practices, always in the making.
How to build with imperfection in mind and yet avoid turning into a chaotic Tower of Babel? The key to success for this platform is to facilitate a diplomacy of translations among all rather than distribute rules and labels.
- Rancière, J. (2007). The emancipated spectator (pp. 271–280). Verso.
- Rancière, J. (16/11/2019) Architecture Exchange: Jacques Ranciere | Session 3: Jacques Ranciere and Discussion, The Cooper Union. Link.
- Foucault, M. (1967). Des Espaces Autres, Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité (October, 1984). Routledge. Or see this overview in English.
