Platformize Asia—Reimagining Asia in Platform Capitalism

This introduction repositions “platform” and “Asia” as unstable, contested imaginaries rather than fixed objects of analysis. Bringing platform studies into dialogue with Asian studies, we argue for a double move of deconstruction and reconstruction: interrogating how platforms are historically framed through metaphors, archives, and business genealogies, and how “Asia” has been imagined through colonial, Cold War, and postcolonial projects. Using Asia as method, we show how regional trajectories of platformization—superapps and platform business groups, infrastructuralization, and the absorption of informal economies—both provincialize Euro-American frameworks and generate new concepts. At a conjuncture marked by an uneven transition beyond neoliberalism, platforms in Asia formalize informality, extend state infrastructures, and mediate global capital, producing hybrid labor regimes and renewed state–platform entanglements while intensifying inequalities. We organize the special issue around four productive tensions: (1) technological/media affordances vs. cultural specificities; (2) methodological localism vs. theory-building; (3) state power vs. transnationalism; and (4) inter-Asia references vs. power inequalities. Across these frictions, contributors trace alternative genealogies (e.g., from Japanese convenience stores to K-pop fandom platforms), analyze platformized labor and entrepreneurial subjectivities, and rethink governance through fragmented, conjunctural state formations. We contend that metaphors are useful to think with—yet the dominance of “platform” as a corporate framing also calls for critical pivots to alternative figures that open different political and analytic possibilities. Viewed from Asia, platform capitalism appears as a dynamic, contested world-making process that renders visible the uneven, emergent shapes of post-neoliberal futures.