platform capitalism

Each of these new systems—Grokipedia, Truth Social’s AI, the parallel media ecosystem they lean on—is a different answer to the same question: who gets to define what’s true? That’s the real battle, now unfolding in the reference layer most people never even see.

Now, the fight has moved from which stories appear in a list of results to which sources are digested by an answer engine .

Practically speaking, “AI” has become a synonym for automation, along with a similar if not identical set of unwarranted claims about technological progress and the future of work. Workers over the better part of the past century, like most members of the general public, have had a great deal of difficulty talking about changes to the means of... See more

Employers have deployed the use of algorithms to exert immense control over the labor process, using digital platforms to break up jobs and surveil how quickly workers complete those tasks, as with Amazon’s use of algorithms to push warehouse workers, or hail-riding apps speeding up drivers. Digital platforms have allowed employers to extend... See more

AI is yet another chapter in this story of technological utopianism to degrade labor by rhetorically obscuring it.

From the fullness of our physical being we are reduced to mere “operators,” experiencing life primarily through the apparatus, which “programs” both the producers and consumers of media

We're living in this constant scroll, trying to make sense of the world around us within a world confined by the limitations of an algorithm that doesn't care about truth, coherence, or consequences, only engagement.

We are depleted by the pace and structure of contemporary life, particularly by how spatial and temporal boundaries that provided modest respites from the demands others could place on us have been eroded by the capacities of digital technology. Now we are always on and always available, our freneticism masquerading as flexibility. We are also... See more