Sovereign platformization: toward a political philosophy of educational technology

Abstract Critiques of educational technology that draw on platform capitalism and surveillance capitalism tend to presume that authority over knowledge lies in markets, professions, and institutions, which platforms must reach from outside. This article proposes the concept of sovereign platformization for a different configuration, in which state agencies gather the capacities to authorize, evaluate, and certify knowledge into platform infrastructure they build, procure, or regulate. Official recognition of learning then comes to depend on that infrastructure. The concept is limited to platforms whose outputs carry official standing. It treats the state as a set of heterogeneous agencies and local authorities whose systems converge with those of firms at the point of recognition. Recent developments in China, Japan, and South Korea illustrate how platforms approach the threshold of official recognition and, in South Korea, cross it and later fall below it. A reading of the Han Feizi situates this development within a longer shift from binding interpreters to the state toward substituting for them. Substitution gives platform outputs presumptive authority, so that teachers’ judgment enters as correction, exception, or appeal. The concept identifies what this arrangement puts at risk: a position from which teachers and learners can judge knowledge independently of the infrastructure that records it.