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Digital platforms supposedly allow global corporations to exert  novel  infrastructural power over cultural participation due to platforms’ increased centrality as key gatekeepers. Extant theorizations of global capitalism, however, suggest infrastructural power as a longstanding feature of capitalism, especially in media industries.  How novel is the infrastructural power of platforms? How does platformization affect cultural participation?  Through an ethnographic comparison of conventional and platformized cultural intermediaries (respectively, a music distribution company in 2010 and a multi-channel YouTube network or MCN in 2015), I show continuity in infrastructural power alongside distinctive  differences  in logics of inclusion/exclusion – what I call hard and soft gates. Hard gates exclude while the soft gate simultaneously increases participation and heightens circulation inequality. These modes of infrastructural gatekeeping follow from the operations of each case’s distribution technologies: automated warehousing and associated barcodes in the music case and algorithmic search and metrics in the YouTube case. Considered alongside recent research, my findings suggest that policy on participation must consider how value-laden infrastructures impact participation and visibility in digital culture. More broadly, my findings suggest that the transition to ‘the digital’ demonstrate continuity rather than a sharp ‘disruption’ by ‘platform capitalism.’

How gatekeeping became digital: infrastructural barriers to participation in conventional and platformized cultural production