Although bushfires are a standard part of the Australian summer, and despite the fact that there have been catastrophic fires in the recent and more distant past, including in Canberra, until 2020 there were no public health campaigns about the dangers of smoke inhalation that occurs over days or weeks, and no information for specific groups of people (Vardoulakis et al, 2020). Information about what to do in fire seasons has focused on emergency escape plans (which every citizen is exhorted to make) and house and garden preparations to suppress fires near dwellings. Those of us living in Canberra were ‘fire ready’ that summer – bags packed with key essentials and plans made as to where we would retreat if necessary (the showground, the local oval), but none of us had plans for how to live with smoke.

This infographic (Figure 4.1) was co-designed in January 2020 by ANU colleagues to try to fill this void, and was translated into 11 languages. It was created as a visual summary of a dedicated website where more extensive information was made available along with links to relevant resources. Against a silhouette of Australian bush and a huge smoke plume, the infographic gives advice to citizens about how to take care of each other during bushfire smoke events. Near the end of instructions, at the bottom right of the page, a simple graphic depicts an older woman with a walking stick, a pregnant woman, a crawling baby and a small cat. ‘Help others’, readers are told, implying that these are the figures of vulnerability who may require care.

As discussed in Chapter 3, the pregnant women in our study recognized themselves in these images and were willing to think about themselves as in some ways more vulnerable than nonpregnant others. We could argue that they were model citizens in this regard: obliging, responsive, concerned and caring. Most of them followed all the other instructions on the infographic – they stayed indoors, reduced their physical activities, and tried to protect their mental and physical health. Some of them wore masks and many made plans to evacuate in the case of fire. To greater and lesser extents, they all obeyed the exhortation to follow governmental advice on bushfires. What was less clear, however (unless they went to the more detailed website), was how they should ‘follow air quality information’, another instruction on the infographic.

In Chapter 4, I define markets as fields of strategic action based on Fligstein's theoretical framework (2001). I point out that Fligstein offers a relevant approach to analysing the interplay between diverse actors in a market context. While Granovetter points out that economic actors are also social actors enmeshed in social networks (1985), Fligstein describes the ‘politics’ that are played out within and between firms on markets as fields of strategic action. These politics concern ‘intra-firm’ negotiations to settle on specific ‘conceptions of control’ that set the direction for said firms’ strategies in the market (2001: 35). They also concern the specific ‘market orders’ that emerge between companies in market contexts as a way of handling competition between them (2001: 16). Thus, Fligstein, along with Beckert, points out that competition does not represent an ideal state of affairs but rather a problem to be handled through various kinds of coordination. Indeed, the state of competition often heralded as the ideal in classic economics is a characteristic of emerging markets and is typically replaced with more stable orders where ‘incumbents’ divide the world between them to keep ‘challengers’ out as a market matures. In this chapter, I will analyse the way game titles and publishers are distributed across the different contexts of economic exchange offered on the Steam platform from this perspective. Firstly, I will discuss the different types of market actors present on the Steam platform and how Valve's combined status as a game developer, game publisher, and platform owner calls for a reinterpretation of Fligstein's framework. As an extension of this, I will map in more detail how these challengers and incumbents transform the platform as an ‘environment of expected use’ (Light et al, 2018) into a specific market order. I discuss how this market order can be interpreted as a way of handling competition and how the Steam platform design can be said to ‘materialize’ a specific governance structure. Before I embark on this analysis, however, I will present the data that forms the basis of this analysis.

A few words on method

To analyse the market order on the Steam platform, I have collected data using the Steam API and augmented this with data collected directly from the user interface.

Introduction

Science, in its very basic sense, means knowledge, from the Latin scientia; and democracy, in its very basic sense, means rule of the people, from the Greek demos (people) and kratos (rule). Throughout history, science and democracy have each developed with a keen ability to alter their shape in various contexts. Nevertheless, science has come to denote specific ways of producing knowledge as opposed to others, and democracy has come to be associated with particular modes of governance as opposed to others. The reason why it is impossible not to use the plural in relation to the practice of these two concepts – ways of producing knowledge and modes of governance – is simply that there are multiple versions and ways of doing both science and democracy. Yet science and democracy have taken shape as the grandeurs of modern societies. This suggests that there is something fixed about them: science has become established as the best way of producing knowledge, and democracy has become established as the best mode of governance.

Of course, their grandeur refers to the general ideas and principles that are associated with both science and democracy. Even though these ideas and principles have generated deep thought, lengthy discussion, and many thick books, dominating versions of both science and democracy can be summed up in one word: representation. Scientists represent nature, and elected politicians represent the people. To gain legitimate authority, however, representations and representatives must resonate with the represented. It is this resonance and the relational aspect involved in both science and democracy that distinguish them as particular ways of producing knowledge and particular modes of governance. The principle behind both science and democracy is that authority is not gained through violence and power exercises that ignore objections to the representations if they fail to be ‘fair’, ‘just’, ‘correct’, ‘reasonable’, ‘relevant’, and so on. It is this principle – that the represented can object to representations and that their objections (if assessed as legitimate) will induce relevant changes – that replaces gods (or emperors) and nature as unquestionable authorities, and it is therefore science can provide us with the best knowledge and democracy with the best mode of governance.

Representation, as a term and as an idea, is filled with all sorts of associations and predefined meanings.

This book does two things: it introduces the field of science and technology studies (STS) and discusses science and democracy through an STS approach. This double aim of the book means the book is an introduction to STS with a specific focus.

STS is a lively international and interdisciplinary research field. Despite the heterogeneity of STS as a research field, scholars within STS share some common theoretical grounds. What holds STS together is an understanding of knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, as practice in which actors’ interpretations, judgments, and actions lead to results that can be perceived as robust and true knowledge. The authority of knowledge, or truth, is not something that exists from the beginning, but is the result of processes in which many actors participate. It is these processes of emergence that are of interest to all STS researchers.

The research field has several roots, both academic and more social and political. Academically, the scientific theoretical discussion in the wake of Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (published in 1962, with an important second edition in 1970) has been central. Questions about paradigms, paradigm conflicts and paradigm changes have had great significance outside the world of research as well. These debates led to a return to the classical sociology of knowledge, which was an important part of the emergence of sociology at the turn of the last century and whose tools could now be used with new energy to understand not only religious beliefs, political ideologies and everyday knowledge (folk beliefs) but also scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge is not dramatically different from other forms of knowledge, and it can be sociologically understood in the same way: as anchored in a particular context, shaped by time and place, and by different interests and actor strategies. But despite these similarities, scientific knowledge can also be very different from other forms of knowledge.

In this book, we take as our starting point the principle that legitimizes science in modern society and makes it different from other knowledge forms, and this principle is also what science and democracy have in common. The principle shared by science and democracy is that their authority is not gained through violence. Rather their authority is based on the principle that they can always be questioned and revised.

Introduction

Undeniably, people who have been in care have often faced significant challenges within their family lives and that is certainly true for the participants in the two studies on which this book is based. But equally striking in both studies were apparently mundane accounts of quotidian or habitual family practices. In this chapter, we focus on participants’ narratives of everyday family practices, to reflect on the significance of the ordinary for understanding ‘family’. This is important for several reasons. Focusing only on adversity or care-specific experiences risks reinforcing the ‘single story’ discussed in Chapter 1. When we focus only on difficulties, we risk creating what Steedman (2000, p 36) describes as the bourgeois construction of the ‘suffering and enduring other, using the themes and items of other, dispossessed and difficult lives’. If we reduce the complex lives and relationships of care experienced people and families to the difficulties they have faced, we replicate the binary construction of the normative imaginary of the ‘ordinary’ family and the problematic ‘other’ – the ‘the objects or abjects of stigma’, to paraphrase Tyler (2013, p 26). To move beyond such binaries, we need to think through the complex relationality of ‘family’ for people who have been in care. That means we need to pay attention to ordinary aspects of care experienced family lives, as well as what is distinctive, in ways that allow us to question what ‘ordinary’ means.

The argument for attention to quotidian family lives can also be made in relation to the social pedagogic concept of lifeworld orientation (see Grunwald and Thiersch, 2009), whereby the lifeworld (or everyday-world) experiences of an individual are the key reference point for praxis: ‘The lifeworld and the everyday manifest themselves as primary and fundamental dimensions of human life situations in all their meaning and dignity’ (Grunwald and Thiersch, 2009, p 133).

The European integration project, and along with it the survival of the European Union (EU), is currently challenged by deep-rooted, revived or emerging sources of conflict and signs of disintegration such as the European financial crisis, the refugee and migration crisis, and a political crisis, the rise of populism, radicalization and reactionary politics. Simultaneously, age-old antagonisms between and within European nations are being galvanized and openly nurture explicit anti-EU public sentiments. Many of these conflict discourses are traced back to problematic historical legacies of Europe, which, far from being ‘settled’, continue to make their way into the public discourse.

Responding to this problem, academics, experts and institutions – including the EU, conceived and largely established as a ‘peace project’ per se – constantly look for ways to work through these conflicts by supporting research endeavours. The RePAST project was one such initiative that aimed at investigating how European societies deal with their troubled pasts today. ‘Troubled past’ is understood in this book in a wide sense, covering the Second World War, including the Holocaust and National Socialism, communist pasts, authoritarian pasts, interethnic conflicts and colonial pasts. Grown out of the project RePAST, the idea of a book such as the current one, which offers concrete strategies and recommendations for mitigating the negative consequences of troubled pasts on the European integration, is very timely. A series of internal and external crises (for example, financial crisis, Ukraine crisis, refugee crisis, rise of illiberalism in Central and Eastern Europe, Brexit) have contributed to the upsurge of various types of identity and memory politics that are undermining the ideational foundation of the European integration (that is, a ‘success story’ that managed to address the antagonisms among the Western European countries after the Second World War). The present book builds on the analyses of the mnemonical and historical trajectories of European states to offer concrete strategies and recommendations that could potentially receive broader societal consensus.

The RePAST project focused precisely on how historical discourses are articulated today in European countries with troubled pasts.

Introduction

Debates about Kosovo's troubled past mostly reflect on the last war (1998–9) that de facto brought to an end the reign of Serbs. Occasionally, these discussions extend to the period of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the foundation of the Albanian independent state in 1912, the Second World War and the period of Yugoslavia when Kosovo was for some time an autonomous province populated with Albanians, Serbs and other communities – and even further back, to the Middle Ages, when the Serbian medieval state ruled these territories. Mostly, for Kosovo, the troubled past started erupting again in the late 1980s, when the autonomous province was stripped of autonomy by Milosevic; many researchers take the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo that took place at Gazimestan near Prishtina in 1989 as a prelude to the point of no return, which was then set in stone in June 1999 with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops being deployed to Kosovo after a NATO military operation against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY).

During the clash between Kosovo Albanians and FRY in the 1990s, segregationist policies were implied in education and Kosovo Albanians self-organized parallel institutions, schools, elections and healthcare as a nonviolent movement in response to segregation policies imposed by Milosevic's Serbia. Parallel with the non-violent movement, Kosovo Albanians who were dissatisfied with non-violence organized the military resistance which led to creation of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The war started with sporadic clashes between the FRY forces and the KLA in 1998, which erupted in March 1999 just before the NATO intervention that started on the 24 March 1999 and lasted until 10 June 1999. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in a report from 2003 estimated that during that time 862,979 refugees left Kosovo and were pushed towards neighbouring countries in Albania, Macedonia and some in Montenegro in the attempts to ethnically cleanse Kosovo (OSCE, 1999).

After the war ended in 1999, a new period of dealing with the past started, mainly dominated by court processes and less armed violence in the ethnically still divided society. To date, conflicts of the past are often brought back to life by the media and political discourses which produces hate and stands in the way of ethnic reconciliation and overall political progress.

In Chapter 2, I introduced the notion of ‘platform configurations’ to cover the development of game platforms across the previous four decades. I observe that it is not just the game platforms themselves that have changed but also the very concept of ‘platform’, which has altered its meaning from signifying a computational system to signifying large market actors in Big Tech. Thus, the notion of ‘platform configurations’ includes the platform as a standardized computing system along with another range of factors that constitute contemporary platforms, such as market orders, ownership structures, and value chains. The specific role of the platform as a standardized computing system varies across these configurations from being primarily development and publishing devices to including storefronts and shaping multi-sided markets. The latter involves that platforms are strategically designed to shape market interactions (Srnicek, 2017) in ways that serve the economic interest of the platform owner. In the current chapter, I will analyse in more detail how this is specifically done by the Steam platform, that is, I will analyse the way the platform's API allows third-party actors to operate on the platform though a critical reading of the documentation. The aim is to map and discuss the ways in which the different contexts of economic exchange are made available as sets of strategic design choices by the platform design, more specifically, through the Steamworks API. The Steam platform design shapes the rules of transaction, one of the basic components of the market institution as defined by Fligstein (Fligstein, 1996, 2001), and the diverse arrays of economic interaction enabled through this design lay the ground for Steam's tangled market (see Chapter 3), that is, complex market contexts containing several interconnected and mutually dependent markets and domains of interaction (see Chapter 3).

Critical analyses of digital platform architectures

The critical analysis of platforms has received a great deal of academic attention during the previous decade and quite a few relevant approaches exist. In her critical history of social media, José van Dijck combines actor network theory and political economy. While the first approach emphasizes ‘co-evolving networks of technology and people’, the second highlights ‘the political-economic context in which informational networks grow into powerful industrial players’ (2013: 26–7).

Introduction

Two conflicts of the recent past are still very present in the collective memories and the political discourse in Spain, namely the civil war (1936–9) and Franco's dictatorship (1939–77). The Spanish civil war was the result of a major internal conflict of an ideological, social, religious and regional character that intensified during the Second Republic (1931–9). One of the dimensions of the division was the centre–periphery cleavage, between the Republicans, more sensitive to demands for decentralization – especially intense in regions such as the Basque Country and Catalonia – and the so-called ‘Nationals’ in favour of a strong and centralized nation-state. The war started in 1936 when a group of army officers attempted a coup d’état against the democratically elected Republican government. They were internally supported by the military, landowners, businessmen and the Catholic Church, and externally by the fascist German and Italian armies. The Republicans were led by the government and the army was supported by the militias of other leftist and anarchist political parties, trade unions and volunteers from all over Europe and the Americas who joined the communist-run International Brigades. In society, the Republicans found support mainly among urban workers, agricultural labourers and the educated secular middle class. The Soviet Union provided highly conditional assistance to the Republic. The UK and France, on the other hand, supported an arms embargo that effectively doomed the Republic. More than 350,000 Spaniards died in the fighting.

The multiple ‘cleavages’ and conflicts that divided Spanish society were further deepened during almost 40 years of dictatorship. During this period, many of the defeated were displaced, tortured, imprisoned or killed. Between 30,000 and 50,000 people were executed on political grounds in the aftermath of the civil war and 500,000 went into exile. There were more than 188 concentration camps, and many people were in forced labour (Aguilar et al, 2011, p 63). During the dictatorship, any sign of nationalist identity (for example, speaking in Basque or Catalonian language) was totally suppressed. The repression of the state was felt until September 1975 when the last five people were executed. There are no official figures but according to the National High Court, between 1936 and 1951 there were more than 114,226 victims of enforced disappearance (De Greiff, 2014).

In the next four chapters, I will provide an empirically grounded analysis of the Steam platform as a particular type of game platform. I will do this because the Steam platform exhibits a distinct platform business model rooted in the economic features of games. Steam is, on one hand, comparable to other market platforms, with its focus on attracting game publishers and gamer communities into a multi-sided market controlled by the platform owner. On the other hand, it differs from other platforms in its active integration of player-driven economies at different levels of its platform design. This turns Steam into a direct illustration of the way platforms can be defined and analysed as ‘tangled markets’, extracting value at the intersection between different market contexts. In the following sections, I will firstly provide some historical context of Valve, the owner of Steam, and situate the Steam platform within the wider game market. After this, I will address how the Steam platform differs from other platforms and why this makes it an interesting case of ‘tangled markets’. I will use the key differences between Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Fortnite to exemplify how this specific business model cuts across the game design, the platform, and economic practices beyond the platform (Thorhauge and Nielsen, 2021). Finally, I will briefly present the individual chapters of this analysis and their primary findings.

Valve Corporation: incumbent or challenger?

Valve was founded in 1996 by Gabe Logan Newell and Mike Harrington. Both were former employees of Microsoft and Valve's headquarters were physically located relatively close to the corporate headquarters of Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. At the outset, the company primarily focused on game development, and its first title, Half-Life, was a considerable commercial success. Mike Harrington left the company in 2000, however, and Gabe Newell took it in new directions. In 2003, the company reincorporated as Valve Corporation, moved its headquarters to Bellevue, Washington, and launched Steam as a game distribution platform. The development throughout the following two decades can be described as a gradual change of emphasis from game development to game services, involving the software and hardware solutions that undergird games. In addition to the Steam platform, these include the Steam Machine, the corporation's own series of gaming computers, VR headsets, and Steam Deck, a portable game system running on SteamOS.

The project RePAST investigated how seven European societies – the EU member states and the countries aspiring to join the EU – deal with their troubled pasts today, with a view on the impact of conflicting discourses on European integration. It also explored what is the role of the EU in this regard. After an intensive field research (2018–21) in each of the societies, of which scientific results are available on the project website, the consortium attempted to offer several practical ideas how a few steps towards overcoming the troubled pasts could be taken.

The added value of the project RePAST was that it attempted to disentangle the troubled pasts in four interrelated domains of social life: history, media, politics, and arts and culture. Drawing on earlier research, the main aim of the book is to offer meaningful and actionable policy recommendations, tailored to the needs of interested stakeholders at both the national and the EU level (policy makers, researchers, journalists, students, citizens). The policy recommendations should be read in an integrative manner and should be implemented as comprehensively as possible despite the authors acknowledging the fact that this would be difficult. Regardless of that, even a few small steps – implementing or even thoroughly considering a few of the recommendations – would be an important policy-related impact of the project.

In this concluding chapter, we do the following: first, we summarize the gist of policy recommendations and look for similarities across case studies; second, we pinpoint and discuss the specificities of each case study's troubled pasts. These policy recommendations, which could also be understood as strategies for transformational policy reforms in four investigated areas, are developed to reflect upon the possible strategies for dealing with the troubled pasts of different countries. In doing so, the recommendations and strategies proposed are grounded on the analysis of mnemonical and historical trajectories to understand how different types of discourses (for example, oral and official history, journalistic-led discourses, political and civil society-led discourses) on past conflicts inform the present and how those discourses are reproduced, negotiated and (re)appropriated amidst the European integration process and an ever closer Union among peoples.

Since there are diverse types of troubled pasts in Europe, the book followed the typology of troubled pasts along the four criteria, namely historical factor, time span of the EU membership, topical factor and risk factor.