From Umfunktionierung to Platformisation: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Author as Producer’ and the Political Economy of Algorithmic Journalism

Abstract

This article rereads Walter Benjamin’s Der Autor als Produzent (1934) as a theoretical resource for analysing journalistic labour under platform capitalism. It recovers Benjamin’s key categories – Umfunktionierung (functional transformation), Belieferung des Apparates (feeding the apparatus), the dialectic of Tendenz and Technik – and mediates them with theories of platformisation (Nieborg and Poell 2018; Poell, Nieborg and Duffy 2022), digital labour (Fuchs 2014), and platform capitalism (Srnicek 2017). The article argues, first, that platformisation constitutes a qualitative intensification of Belieferung: under algorithmic governance, the journalist feeds the apparatus through content, data generation, metric-driven self-regulation, and symbolic credibility. Second, while the platform’s structural power severely challenges Umfunktionierung, three contradictions internal to platform capitalism constitute terrain on which transformative practice remains possible, provided Umfunktionierung is reconceived as collective institutional design.