Digital artifacts are embedded in wider and constantly shifting ecosystems such that they become increasingly editable, interactive, reprogrammable, and distributable. This state of flux and constant transfiguration renders the value and utility of these artifacts contingent on shifting webs of functional relations with other artifacts across specific contexts and organizations. By the same token, it apportions control over the development and use of these artifacts over a range of dispersed stakeholders and makes their management a complex technical and social undertaking. These ideas are illustrated with reference to (1) provenance and authenticity of digital documents within the overall context of archiving and social memory and (2) the content dynamics occasioned by the findability of content mediated by Internet search engines. We conclude that the steady change and transfiguration of digital artifacts signal a shift of epochal dimensions that calls for rethinking some of the inherited wisdom in IS research and practice.

Digital objects are marked by a limited set of variable yet generic attributes such as editability, interactivity, openness and distributedness. As digital objects diffuse throughout the institutional fabric, these attributes and the information-based operations and procedures out of which they are sustained install themselves at the heart of social practice. The entities and processes that constitute the stuff of social practice are thereby rendered increasingly unstable and transfigurable, producing a context of experience in which the certainties of recurring and recognizable objects are on the wane. These claims are supported with reference to 1) the elusive identity of digital documents and the problems of authentication/preservation of records such an identity posits and 2) the operations of search engines and the effects digital search has on the content of the documents it retrieves.

This paper claims that technology and institutions both epitomize the construction of artificial orders through which a primary reality is shaped to something other than it is by logical operations that share essential affinities. Drawing on this, we work our way to showing how technology operates as governing regime and how tasks and operations that are carried out by the human enactment of expert rules and procedures can considerably be embodied onto technological sequences with which human experts have limited and severely structured interaction. These ideas are illustrated by reference to cultural memory organizations (e.g. libraries, archives, museums) and the ways the deepening infiltration of their operations by computing technologies redefines their goals and the skills, practices and arrangements through which these goals have traditionally been pursued.

With increasing socioeconomic precarity and ecological threat, resilience has become the individual responsibility and moral obligation of the neoliberal subject. Digital labor platforms are a clear expression and beneficiary of this development, offering hustling as a way to gain resilience as a micro-entrepreneur. However, we present evidence to the contrary, demonstrating how hustling in the digital economy erodes resilience on a systemic level. For this purpose, we draw on an in-depth, ecological ethnography about Poshmark, a social commerce platform for predominantly female hustlers to sell clothes. We tell the story of a pattern set in motion by the rapid scaling of the platform, which requires hustlers to do more and more click-work to yield smaller and smaller sales. As a result, they are caught up in a runaway dynamic that erodes the resilience of the ecology as a whole.

Digital platforms radically alter socio-economic and organizational patterns. In an ecological sense, they enable the rapid extension of tolerance limits by digitally scaling variables such as the availability of accommodation or labour. However, such maximization of specific variables in a complex ecology bears the danger of pathological runaway patterns. In our paper we draw on the work of Gregory Bateson to outline an analytical approach for the study of digital platforms as ecological phenomena, focussing on the effects of digitalization on the context in which platforms operate. To study such meta-patterns, we elaborate three interrelated concepts: stress, adaptation and budgets of flexibility. We exemplify these ideas through a longitudinal study of the early digital platform Couchsurfing and develop implications for our understanding of technology and organization.