Jos Jansen’s fifth book takes its title from a refusal: whatever else this project concerns, it is not a study of the birds. The volume instead examines the platform economy and the invisible architectures that govern it. Naming Uber, Amazon, Tinder and Airbnb, Jansen draws a parallel between the concealment practiced by Hades in Greek myth and the unaccountable algorithms that quietly reorganize work, employment, dating and tourism. The title names a decoy; the argument lies in what the decoy conceals.
The book is published by Eriskay Connection in a spiral-bound paperback, 80 pages in English, with text and essay by Jansen, text editing by Joy Phillips of The Language Collective, and design by Rob van Hoesel. The publisher confirms that the photography and concept are Jansen’s, so the visual and argumentative argument are his, though the book is a collaboration. The publisher also links the algorithms’ compulsive pull to the gaming industry and to B.F. Skinner’s last-century pigeon-learning experiments, which supplies the project’s ironic fulcrum: the same behavioural logic once tested on birds now shapes human habit at scale.
For a collector, the appeal is not scarcity or speculation. It is the book’s place in a sustained critical practice. As a fifth title, it shows a photographer working through a subject across time rather than producing a one-off comment; the spiral binding and the 223 × 299 mm page turn the essay into a designed object, with the arguments and the photographs built to be read together. The project is supported by the Mondriaan Fund, which marks it as a seriously supported cultural publication rather than a commercial supplement.
Read as a whole, the book argues that the most consequential contemporary power is not merely visible but infrastructural. Jansen treats the platform as a form of contemporary mythology, a story we inhabit and rarely examine. For a collection built around photography’s critical use, it earns its place on those grounds: an argument about how invisible systems shape ordinary life, made in a form that refuses to take the rhetoric of platform progress at face value.
