CUSAS Seminar with Professor Koray Caliskan (The New School)

Koray Caliskan, The New School 

Donald MacKenzie, The University of Edinburgh

This talk, based on a paper co-authored with Donald MacKenzie, argues that platform economies have quietly brought barter back as a key way of organizing exchange. While social theory usually treats barter as marginal and incapable of supporting large-scale systems, research on Google Search and digital video platforms shows that platforms routinely exchange attention, behavioral data, and engagement with users without money changing hands, often before any market transaction occurs. To analyze this, the paper introduces the concept of the dyad—a pair of different valuables held by two parties and whose exchange is coordinated through digital infrastructures rather than prices—through which interfaces, metrics, databases, and algorithms transform fleeting user actions into stable, repeatable barters.

Koray Caliskan is an economic sociologist and organizational designer and a tenured professor at Parsons School of Design at The New School. His research examines how markets, platforms, and economies are made and redesigned, with a focus on digital advertising and AI-driven economies. He is the author of Market Threads (Princeton UP) and Data Money: Inside Cryptocurrencies and Their Markets, Communities, and Blockchains (Columbia UP), and co-author (with Donald MacKenzie) of Inside Digital Advertising: Platforms, Power, and Material Politics (Polity). His next book, co-authored with Michel Callon and Donald MacKenzie, Economization: Markets, Platforms, and Ecologies, will be published by Columbia University Press in 2027. His work received the 2021 Social Sciences Breakthrough of the Year Award from the Falling Walls Foundation. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Cultural Economy and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Design Strategies.