Kai Reimers

This summer, we have visited Yellowstone. I couldn’t resist the temptation to do so in a convertible Mustang, which was the exact right choice. Coming from Salt Lake City, we left the highway at Ogden to climb an alpine, narrow and winding road which led us on a barren, hilly plain — where we were glad that ‘convertible’ also means that you can close the roof, as temperatures had dropped considerably — to head for the Southern entrance of Yellowstone, passing the impressive peaks of Teton Range. In Moran, however, we turned East to follow the Wind River valley to then, via Dubois and Cody, enter Yellowstone through the Western entrance at Wapiti. Via Booking.com we had organized our trip into convenient chunks of driving which, up to then, involved stays in Ogden, Thayne, and Dubois. The American institution of the motel is, of course, a result of this kind of motorized travel and I really like it. It is convenient, understandable and, to me, a reflection of the American society and culture: individual units arrayed into neighbourhoods which cater to both one’s desire for withdrawal from society and one’s need to engage with each other. However, in Wapiti something unexpected happened.

As we tried to find the aptly named Cutthroat Guest Ranch, we were first struck by a sign prominently attached to one of the poles of the typical three-beam farm gate, which announced that this property was up for sale. We then followed a steep gravel road, not at all suited to our smug car, to approach a seemingly deserted place. The log huts, arrayed in that characteristic manner, i.e. standing at a friendly distance from one another, were not inhabited and neither people nor vehicles could be seen apart from a dusty truck parked a bit off-site. The reception room was locked and no sign of activity could be spotted. We tried to call the owner — there was a telephone number given in our reservation confirmation — but could only reach an answering machine. Since our booking confirmation had warned us that check-in is possible only after 4 p.m., we had timed our arrival accordingly, so that we became quite worried as to where to stay for the night. Luckily, we got hold of a cellular signal to make connection with the virtual world again to find a nearby motel, a little closer to the Western entrance of Yellowstone, located in a pretty valley with a reception hall decorated like a living room and inhabited by large friendly dogs and TV screens that beamed old cowboy movies at guests round the clock. There, I could also check my email and, to my surprise, found instructions by the owner of the Cutthroat Guest Ranch how to enter our cabin, explaining why there was no personnel on site (because their main business now consisted of running a restaurant in Cody). What ensued was a polite but unfriendly exchange in which I argued why we had been right to assume that their place had been abandoned while the owner argued that the procedure of remote check-in, announced on the day of arrival through email, was completely aligned with standard practice, shaking my confidence in the American institution of the motel. Back in Germany – after an enjoyable exploration of Yellowstone from Gardiner and Bozeman and a return to Salt Lake City along its Western flank via Tetonia – I then found, not entirely unexpected given our prior email conversation, that my credit card had been charged for the (unused) night at Cutthroat Guest Ranch. I now turned to Booking.com for advice.

The first thing I learned was that there is no easy way to contact them. Finding a telephone number was a challenge and then my patience was tested as I counted down my position in the telephone waiting line. In total, I talked to them three times, each time starting all over to tell my story and to win over my counterpart by explaining the situation in which we had found ourselves when we arrived at the Cutthroat Guest Ranch. The second person I talked to, a woman with an East European accent, sympathized with me and promised to take tough action. However, my last human encounter with Booking.com, with a man also with an East European accent, settled the matter. He explained to me that Booking.com has, indeed, contacted the owner of the Cutthroat Guest Ranch to suggest that he refunds the rate for the unused night – to no avail, of course – but that they could do no more than appeal to his honesty and sense of good business manners. My expectation was that Booking.com would take responsibility for the (non-) service offered through its platform, but I learned that this is not the case.

They standardize the process of how the various parties interact with each other and their responsibility ends when that process has been complied with by all parties. In my case, this would have involved that I had contacted Booking.com when we arrived at the locked and seemingly abandoned guest house; of course, the process defined by Booking.com does not involve the definition of a maximum waiting time in the telephone line (I had spent 45 minutes in that waiting line when I first called them). Booking.com would then have tried to contact the owner and given him 40 minutes to resolve the issue. If by then no solution could have been found – not an unlikely outcome given that we had only reached an answering machine when trying to contact the owner ourselves – they would have declared the reservation cancelled, so that by then we would have been free to find another place. This would have been close to 6 p.m., having involved anxious waiting in a deserted place of up to two hours.

Now, you might say that this is not a particularly bad experience and every traveller has to be prepared to encounter this kind of situation. And you would be right. I wrote off this experience by categorizing the event as such, things that are to be expected on self-guided exploration tours in an unfamiliar environment. Actually, that is an important part of being a ‘tourist’, i.e. of a person who leaves their familiar environment in order to encounter the world in a new and fresh manner, and that may, and usually will involve pleasant as well as unpleasant experiences. For example, my understanding of the institution of the American motel may be in need of an update such that continuous online availability becomes a required part of the guest role and physical presence is no longer a required part of the host role. But, overlaid on that local or regional tourist infrastructure now is a global infrastructure that increasingly organizes touristic travelling irrespective of local traditions and customs. And it does so in a manner which is typical of how platforms work and understand themselves, and therefore this experience may be milked for some insights into the nature of platforms.

A platform makes the services offered on it ‘swappable’. (For a long time, I had thought that I had been the originator of this clumsy term but, when writing this post, I discovered that it has already entered the English vocabulary, in the phrase ‘swappable connection’, which seems to express exactly what I mean to express.) I came to use this term as, over the years, I tried to explain the notion of ‘horizontal compatibility’ in my course on ‘Development of IT Standards’, offered every Winter term at RWTH Aachen University and attended mostly by computer science graduate students. Horizontal compatibility is the holy grail among standardization disciples. It means that instead of having just two components work with each other – normally called ‘interoperability’ or, among standardization nerds, ‘vertical compatibility’ – any component in one class of components can work with any component in another class of components. As a result, any component within one class can be substituted by any other component within that same class – swapped – and the replacement will still ‘interoperate’ with the component from another class which was previously ‘connected’ to the now replaced component. Think tires and cars, paper and copier, CD and CD player, etc. But recently a student in my class on standards challenged me when I said that it is possible to distinguish between ‘one-sided’ and ‘two-sided’ horizontal compatibility. The former means that components on both sides of the equation are swappable, the latter that swappability exists only on one side. His question was whether we should speak of a standard only in cases of two-sided horizontal compatibility or also when components are swappable only on one side. I replied that both would be instances of standards, thinking to myself that otherwise a lot of my pet examples for this course would no longer qualify as instances of standardization processes, such as Microsoft Windows. Actually, in the olden times, before Windows, there was DOS (for the younger of you dear readers: this meant ‘Disk Operating System’ since the OS was launched from a floppy disk, not to be confused with the modern meaning of this acronym in the phrase ‘DOS (Denial of Service) attack’) and it was swappable. There was MS-DOS, Microsoft’s version of it, but also alternatives such as DR-DOS (there is a good entry on the German Wikipedia page on this issue which, surprisingly, does not seem to have an English equivalent). However, as far as I know, Windows is no longer swappable (while, of course, it may be emulated, which is a way of making components swappable through adding a converter or adapter). Now, is Windows still a standard, or is it a platform? An intriguing thought which was actually suggested by the students who had challenged me on that issue.

The idea is that one-sided horizontal compatibility constitutes a platform and MS-Windows would be a perfect example. Microsoft can exploit positive network externalities – benefits that increase with the number of users – as application software becomes swappable. There is not just an immensely large inventory of applications for all kinds of purposes that run on Windows, but usually also many alternatives for each. But the other side of the equation, the operating system on which these applications run, is not. You have to have MS-Windows in order to tap into this rich ecosystem of applications. The term ‘platform’ may actually originate here, as the phrase of ‘running on’ invokes the metaphor of a solid and flat ground (‘platt’ in German means ‘flat’; ‘platform’ in German is spelled ‘Plattform’ accordingly).

To answer the question of my student, whether one-sided compatibility constitutes a platform, let’s first ask what the equivalent of Microsoft Windows would be in the hospitality industry. It is not Booking.com, but a hotel chain. Setting up an account with them will give you convenient access to a large number of hotels, which is probably the driving force behind the present race between Hilton and Marriott to become the largest hotel chain. If you choose to become a ‘member’ of that network, you become familiar with their way of operation. It is the same for any member of that hotel chain, similar to how Windows-compatible application software runs on every Windows computer. Your embodied knowledge, your practice, of how to interact with a member of that chain, possibly partly embedded in your computer settings and/or an app, is the one component and the way a hotel operates the other. Hotels are now swappable in that any hotel which belongs to the same chain can ‘inter-operate’ with you. But your practice is not swappable, it will not (smoothly) inter-operate with other hotels.

Now let’s factor Booking.com into this understanding. You might say that Booking.com is just the equivalent of a hotel chain writ large. But I would not agree. Any hotel and any hotel chain wanting to be listed on Booking.com has to comply with their process of how guests and hosts should interact. I actually recently discovered the problem that arises when a chain attempts to maintain its own process standards, when booking a holiday house in Denmark – for an excursion with students to study Denmark’s centralized medication record system – which belongs to a group (DanCenter). The process of booking and paying became incredibly messy for both sides. So, ignoring such cases, Booking.com makes both the practice of booking a hotel and the way a hotel operates swappable: the practice operates with any hotel listed on Booking.com and any listed hotel can inter-operate with any guest, whether or not that hotel belongs to a chain. Booking.com creates two-sided horizontal compatibility between hotel operations and booking practices.

So the answer to my student should be ‘no’: the difference between one-sided and two-sided horizontal compatibility does not account for the difference between a platform and a standard. A platform can also establish two-sided horizontal compatibility. Then what is the difference between a standard and a platform? My tentative answer is that a platform makes a business out of establishing one- or two-sided horizontal compatibility. Standards emerge through an evolutionary process, partly facilitated through collective bargaining, while platforms are the product of purposeful design aimed at maximizing exploitation of positive network externalities associated with horizontal compatibility. That may be a good thing when the evolutionary process fails to produce horizontal compatibility, e.g. because the institutional structure of an economy is such that it does not facilitate complementary collective bargaining processes. But the price paid is that most benefits, i.e. positive network externalities associated with horizontal compatibility, are privately appropriated. Hence, the alternative, to me, would not consist in fighting platforms, as the EU is currently doing, but in strengthening institutional structures that facilitate the evolutionary processes that produce horizontal compatibility. Sounds abstract and unrealistic? Yes, certainly. It is probably the modern incarnation of the Choice of Hercules. In our economic development, we have arrived at a crossroads regarding how we want to develop our infrastructures. Platforms offer the easy way.

In my last post, I suggested that it might be intellectually productive to think about infrastructure as a place, not as a road. However, I recently experienced the character of roads as infrastructure in a brute force manner. While travelling in Panama, we encountered roadblocks on two days which, on the first instance, aroused a significant degree of anxiety, similar to what Robert Johnston, Stefan Schellhammer and I have described in our paper ‘Infrastructure as a Home for a Person‘.

The first roadblock occurred on Sunday, August 6, en route from David in the western part to Panama City. The action had been planned well since it involved a staggered series of blocks along a stretch of the road where the so-called Panamericana is the only route along the isthmus, as we discovered after having successfully overcome the first two blocks. In fact, after getting stuck in the third roadblock, we discovered that there is a small mountain road which, in a wide semi-circle, offers a bypass. But we eventually found that this road, which was in an extremely poor condition with parts where half the road was missing already, eventually terminated in a construction site where the road had completely disappeared into an abyss. So we had to turn around and wait for the roadblock to be lifted, which eventually happened during the night.

The reason for the protests by the indigeneous people was exactly what we had encountered ourselves: the poor condition of ‘their’ roads and other infrastructures, including electricity and schools. On our way from Panama City to the western highlands a few days earlier I had thought that we were travelling through an uninhabitated mountenous area. But I now realized that the mountains were quite densely populated by indigenous people as the mountain road which we had tried is lined with villages, and people and animals are wandering along the road for their daily business. As we have learned from fellow travellers, these roads are in such poor condition, and there are so few of them, that pupils have to get up at 3 a.m. in order to reach their school on time (in fact, the third roadblock was set up right next to a school).

So whether or not the roadblocks were illegal — they probably were, but it seemed to us that the police had been held back by politicians who entered into negotiations with the protesters –, they were certainly legitimate.

A road, by its nature, is open only in two directions, sometimes only in one. This is why a roadblock brings to the fore the nature of infrastructure as an opening, as Robert Johnston and I have characterized infrastructure in our paper ‘Living Infrastructure‘. One challenge in infrastructure development then consists of keeping an infrastructure open, i.e. of fending off efforts to appropriate the opening for private purposes. Now, a roadblock is certainly the most extreme case of such appropriation. But it appears as such only if we take a single road as the infrastructure. Panama is, in this regard, an extreme case because the Panamericana is, across some regions, indeed the only road that connects the parts of the country. But this closing of the road just points out that the regions along the road, where the indigineous people now mostly live, perhaps because they have been driven away from the fertile lowlands, are not open in this sense. Hence, if we broaden our view to ask: what is the road infrastructure of a region, we find that such an infrastructure can and should be open in multiple directions. This is the case when the road network has the character of what Christopher Alexander calls a ‘semi lattice’, i.e. when it is a highly meshed network. In his seminal article ‘A City Is Not a Tree’, Alexander argues that modern cities are often ‘life-less’ because they have been designed. From a design perspective, the easiest, and often the only feasible, way is to decompose an object hierarchically so that each component performs a single function which contributes to some sub-goal which eventually feeds into an overall single purpose of a design object. By contrast, ‘living’ cities, examples of which are easily found in Northern Italy, are characterized by the components performing multiple functions; for example, a quarter may serve for living, working, play, and education. Similarly, a road infrastructure would display a semi lattice structure if it supported multiple kinds of activities, such as moving goods, travelling, and local commutes. The Panamericana, by contrast, only supports the movement of goods and people between the two major cities of the country, David and Panama City. It does not support the movement of the local people. ‘Their’ infrastructure is in a state of severe neglect and not integrated with the main road. Hence, even when the road is not blocked, it is not open in the sense in which an infrastructure should be open. To realize this, it was necessary to encounter the road when it was closed.

P.S.: In Panama I attended the 29th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2023) on which I presented a paper (‘From Data Exchanges to Data Markets: An Institutional Perspective), co-written with Xunhua Guo, in which we propose to make platform use data saleable in order to better balance the conflicting policy objectives of protecting the privacy of users as well as a competitive market for online services.

We usually think of infrastructures as transportation systems, such as railroads, highways, and data networks. And I do not want to argue that this is a wrong way to look at infrastructure. But, for a moment, try to accept the idea of infrastructure as a place and see how such a way of looking at infrastructure might enhance the way you think about it.

Lewis Mumford – author of ‘The Myth of the Machine’ – has argued that our modern age is overly enamoured with moving things – where ‘moving’ can be thought of both as a verb and as an adjective – to the neglect of what he calls ‘containers’. This has led to overlook the importance of a large group of innovations, for example of amphorae required for making beer and wine and thus preserving nutrients, but also of larger structures such as cities.

In our paper ‘Living Infrastructure’, Robert Johnston and I have explored this idea, drawing on an idealized metaphor of the medieval city square to work out essential aspects of infrastructure. In that paper, we describe infrastructure as the happening of an opening which occurs through the productive opposition of the essential dimensions of city life. In our idealized example, such an opening happens when the realms of citizenship, aristocracy, religion, and commerce – represented through the city hall, the palace, the church, and the market hall – engage in a productive opposition. The opening which results from such opposition, the city square, which is often bounded by these buildings in Northern Italy, characteristically enables a multitude of activities that occur simultaneously, a hallmark of a living infrastructure according to our argument.

Today, I spent about an hour sitting on the stairs of the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata, designed by Bruneleschi, the ingenious builder of Florence cathedral’s dome*. It was lunchtime, so many of those sitting next to me in the cooling shadow of the gallery were enjoying their lunches. However, many other activities occurred on the square as well. During this one hour, I compiled this list of activities:

• Walking across
• Cycling across
• Playing football
• Taking photos
• Meeting
• Explaining (tour guides)
• Eating, lunching
• Feeding pigeons
• Waiting
• Collecting clients (taxi drivers)
• Pushing motorcycles across
• Driving (cars) across
• Observing / watching
• Running / jogging
• Resting

We just came back from an evening walk through the city and the composition of activities has changed a bit, now including walking dogs and sleeping. Against this benchmark, many of our modern infrastructures seem sterile. I believe that, drawing on this metaphor, we might be able to enliven them and thus strengthen their human potential, just what the Renaissance artists have strived for.

* Bruneleschi’s life long quest to build the dome is described by Ross King in his fascinating book ‘Bruneleschi’s Dome’.

As a frequent traveller, I am a well-versed user of the German railway system. You know, when I grew up the saying ‘punctual as an express train’ (pünktlich wie ein D-Zug) was still in wide-spread use. Nowadays, of course, the situation has reversed, Deutsche Bahn has become the epitome of unpunctuality and unreliableness. Travelling by train in Germany has become a sure recipe for frustration, only mildly compensated by the excellent ‘Navigator’, DB’s app which helps to navigate its derailed infrastructure, and greatly magnified by the almost ever-present loudspeaker announcements concerning delays and cancellations as well as the notorious and helpless ‘We apologize for any inconvenience’.

But the German railroad infrastructure is not the only infrastructure that has suffered recently. In a mirror image to its sorry state of public transport, the German healthcare system is still standing sturdily in the face of increasing public health turmoil, but its since 2003 continually hailed healthcare information infrastructure is a manifestation of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’. And where infrastructures do not fail because of mis-management and free-market ideologies, they become the target of sabotage , as was recently the case in Germany when criminals cut important fiberglass trunk lines laid along rails, this time giving Deutsche Bahn an opportunity to shine when it managed to swiftly put in place its emergency plans, and, more depressingly, in the relentless Russian attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure in one of history’s most dismal cases of a nation’s aggression against a neighbor.

What is it that causes the downfall of our infrastructures? And why are we simultaneously witnessing the rise of the platforms? Is this latter development just a consequence of poorly managed infrastructures, as is often claimed with regard to Uber, or do these two developments grow out of a common cause?