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Under the designation “platform urbanism,” there is growing scholarly recognition that platform intermediaries are reconfiguring urban industries, processes, and relationships through the collection and manipulation of big data. Central to realizing this economic project is financial speculation on platforms’ ability to coordinate network effects—a phenomenon in which the more users there are in a networked system, the more valuable and useful it becomes. In this paper, I argue that while the existing literature recognizes the importance of network effects, it has also adopted a limited conceptualization that understands platform firms as the primary agents generating and capturing the economic benefits of network effects. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Greater Jakarta, Indonesia, I work to expand this understanding through attention to the social lives of network effects—the ways in which platform architectures are always embedded in social relations created and sustained in everyday urban life. I show how ride-hailing drivers have attempted to mitigate the risks of their work through building socio-technical networks of their own, for their own purposes. Doing so reveals that it is not only platform firms and venture capital that speculate on network effects; rather, a range of actors in the city-region seek to tap into driver networks to advance their own social, political, and economic ends. In conclusion, I suggest that attending to these practices opens up space to reframe platform urbanism beyond its current preoccupation with macro political economic analyses, while also establishing new lines of inquiry for “speculative urbanism.” 

This paper reports on a two-year, field-based study set in a charter management organization (CMO-LAX), a not-for-profit educational organization that operates 18 public schools exclusively in the Black and Latinx communities of South and East Los Angeles. At CMO-LAX, the nine-member Data Team pursues the organization's avowed mission of making public schools data-driven, primarily through the aggregation, analysis, and visualization of digital data derived from quotidian educational activities. This paper draws on the theory of racialized organizations to characterize aspects of data-driven management of public education as practiced by CMO-LAX. I explore two examples of how CMO-LAX shapes data to support racial projects: the reconstruction of the figure of chronic truants and the incorporation of this figure in a calculative regime of student accomplishment. Organizational uses of data support a strategy I call productive myopia, a way of pursuing racial projects via seemingly independent, objective quantifications. This strategy allows the organization to claim to mitigate racial projects and, simultaneously, to accommodate them. This paper concludes by arguing for approaches to research and practice that center racial projects, particularly when data-intensive tools and platforms are incorporated into the provision of public goods and services such as education. 

Abstract Despite their compositional versatility, most halide double perovskites feature large band gaps. Herein, we describe a strategy for achieving small band gaps in this family of materials. The new double perovskites Cs₂AgTlX₆(X=Cl (1) and Br (2)) have direct band gaps of 2.0 and 0.95 eV, respectively, which are approximately 1 eV lower than those of analogous perovskites. To our knowledge, compound2displays the lowest band gap for any known halide perovskite. Unlike in A^IB^IIX₃perovskites, the band‐gap transition in A^I₂BB′X₆double perovskites can show substantial metal‐to‐metal charge‐transfer character. This band‐edge orbital composition is used to achieve small band gaps through the selection of energetically aligned B‐ and B′‐site metal frontier orbitals. Calculations reveal a shallow, symmetry‐forbidden region at the band edges for1, which results in long (μs) microwave conductivity lifetimes. We further describe a facile self‐doping reaction in2through Br₂loss at ambient conditions.