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Paper short abstract

The ‘kindness ecosystem’ demonstrates the co-production of social values and technical affordances that fuels the platform power across divergent social worlds and the continuous expansion of platform capitalism.

Paper long abstract

This research explores how the concept of boundary infrastructure can be employed for analysing the datafication-oriented platformisation of philanthropy. I examine how Tencent, a Chinese technology conglomerate, reengineers the social symbol of ‘little red flower’ into a platform design for datafication, building a ‘kindness ecosystem’. The flower possesses a shared value and affective quality as it is a ubiquitous emblem of conformity used to reward young children for ‘good’ behaviours in the Chinese educational system. For generations, it is part of Chinese users’ childhood memory.

Using technography and the walkthrough method, I invert the infrastructure for datafication by illuminating how the flower inhabits multiple social worlds with malleable meanings, while remaining robust to maintain a common identity that facilitates movements and ‘collaborations’ between different sides. In education, the flower signifies obedience and rule-abiding behaviours. For Tencent, it is a strategic instrument for monetisation, user engagement, while operationalising the state's 'positive energy' rhetoric. For charity sectors, it brings social attention and financial income via the platform's marketplace mechanism. For end-users, it offers a nostalgic ‘feel-good’ gamified experience. Through standardising datafication design, e.g., implementing mini-apps for user activities like step donation and public-sourced data annotation, the platform utilises the flower as boundary infrastructure to retain user engagement while harvesting data. Moreover, the flower hinges together disparate platformised practices online and offline, cultivating boundary infrastructure that scales up data extraction in vastly broad settings. The ‘kindness ecosystem’ demonstrates the platform's infrastructural power and the continuous expansion of platform capitalism.