platform capitalism
Overthrowing Our Tech Overlords | NOEMA
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A thirst for what the web really is—a medium, a conduit, a tool that is used by readers and artists and creators and explorers, not a gatekeeper that seems to be in an ever more adversarial relationship with everyone who uses it.
Fighting for our web
To worship at the altar of mega-scale and to convince yourself that you should be the one making world-historic decisions on behalf of a global citizenry that did not elect you and may not share your values or lack thereof, you have to dispense with numerous inconveniences—humility and nuance among them. Many titans of Silicon Valley have made thes
... See moreMany of us now experience a layer of ambient digital pollution that leaks into all aspects of our life, but the stuff that’s leaking isn’t fully chosen by us. There are overlords who curate the portals - the big tech companies - and they like to keep you addicted by pushing triggering stuff at you, or showing you stuff you’ve previously responded t... See more
How to turn your phone addiction into a ripped body
So today, Google is truly an all-seeing surveillance machine. When a person uses Google’s search engine, maps, email, YouTube, Android, and Chrome operating systems, or any of the dozens of other services and products it owns, Google stores a complete record of those interactions. Google then aggregates all this personal data to allow marketers to ... See more
Center for Journalism & Liberty • Democracy, Journalism, and Monopoly: How to Fund Independent News Media in the 21st Century
With the benefit of hindsight, it is now clear that Section 230—in combination with the wider overthrow of antimonopoly law and regulation in the 1980s and 1990s— cleared the way for the creation of an entirely new kind of communications corporation. Unlike publishers, these new legal constructs enjoyed the same freedom from liability traditionally... See more
Center for Journalism & Liberty • Democracy, Journalism, and Monopoly: How to Fund Independent News Media in the 21st Century
So long as the appeal of digital services consists of the quantified reification of identity and the provision of anxious satisfactions, it will continue to obscure questions about the quality of our material lives. We should work to cut these services down or out entirely.
Antón Barba-Kay • Attention Stuffed - Dissent Magazine
Big tech is the operating system of the modern world, controlling our discovery, communications, and commercial infrastructure. Media must be re-contextualized as a public communications operating system controlled by five companies (Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, Twitter).
The main point, though, is that control, as such, over others, will be exercised more and more through ambient forms of algorithmically mediated behavioral engineering, adaptive control systems programmed to nudge, herd, and condition populations toward the achievement of the policies and goals — monetary, sociocultural, militaristic, bio-political... See more