Introduction: Probing the System: Feminist Complications of Automated Technologies, Flows, and Practices of Everyday Life

This Special Section presents diverse scholarly voices examining the silenced, underexposed, intersectional forces that fortify science and technology platforms in their work to automate public abidance. The articles probe, from diverse global locations and perspectives, the contemporary work of various “platforms,” understood broadly as technology and software, health, social media, and policy platforms. The articles probe these systems and platforms with attention to the assumptions and practices embedded in their algorithms, protocols, design specifications, and communications, and, in turn, the political, cultural, governance, and mediated practices they make possible. The research studies and practice-based work herein expose the complex and shifting sociopolitical codes and contexts that condition technology, artificial intelligence (AI), surveillance, health, social media, and state platforms that support systems of care, news, communication, and governance. These exposures show how platform craftiness works differently in different spaces to privilege and damage, often with ghostly obscurity. Attentive to how platforms operate in complex contemporary viral modes, the section seeks to locate and expose these traces, draped in what communication scholars Sangeet Kumar and Radhika Parameswaran (2018, 345) refer to as “chameleon cultural codes” that, in changing and transforming into unrecognizable forms, feed global imaginaries.