WHERE MY AI APPS AT? A HISTORIOGRAPHIC APPROACH TO ANALYZING PLATFORM TOOLS

Abstract

The popular short-form video app TikTok is mainly discussed as a discrete app or in relation to its parent company ByteDance. This view neglects how TikTok and other ByteDance apps maintain and advance ByteDance’s highly complex app ecosystem. This paper, therefore, positions ByteDance-owned apps as both apps and “platform tools.” TikTok allows end-users to watch videos, allows creators to make and distribute content, advertisers to endorse products, and developers to build app features. As a platform tool, TikTok is a software-based resource that mediates “platformization,” extending TikTok’s economic, infrastructural, and governmental data-centric logic within and beyond ByteDance’s app ecosystem. Increasingly, ByteDance’s platform tools rely heavily on AI technology because of ByteDance’s early investments in AI technology and the growing interest such tools within the cultural industries. We survey ByteDance’s AI-powered platform tools alongside non-AI ones using systematic financial and infrastructural analysis, uncovering how ByteDance’s platform tools expand ByteDance as a “multi-sided,” “multi-layered,” and “multi-situated” platform. Platform tools, thus, facilitate growth along these three dimensions by encouraging platform dependence; interoperability and interdependence within ByteDance’s app ecosystem; and platformization, including “parallel platformization.” Our empirical work ultimately shows how ByteDance uses platform tools to accrue and operationalize infrastructural and economic power, and how apps have moved from discrete objects to interconnected clusters of platform tools.