platform capitalism

The result is that increasingly capable technologies are going to be a fundamental part of 21st-century life. They mediate a growing number of our deeds, utterances and exchanges. Our access to basic social goods — credit, housing, welfare, educational opportunity, jobs — is increasingly determined by algorithms of hidden design and obscure provena... See more

The more benefits a network provides, the more it enslaves its users.

Three factors keep us on a given platform: its monopolistic aptitude, its habit-forming design, and the fact that users can earn a return on their investment only on the platform they’re invested in. Much like a genie enslaved to his lamp, users cannot escape these magical apps.

We learned this about plat­forms a long time ago: fol­lowing the old news­paper schematic, they aren’t the printing presses, but rather the assign­ment editors.

In industrial capitalism human beings created profit by working the machines. In posthuman capitalism the machines create profit by farming the human beings.

To be clear about the mechanism: our society selects for the affordances of a medium—speed, ease, efficiency—not for its effects . And it is the effects of literacy that hold its civilizational value. This is the critical point: those deep cognitive and ethical capacities are not being selected for. They are not easily monetized or optimized.

today’s machine intelligence structures the world to produce predictable data, attention, and behavior. Through continuous modeling and subtle feedback, human action is rendered legible and brought under algorithmic management. This marks a second enclosure — not of land, but of the cognitive commons itself.

We can be certain, at least, that the near future will be characterized by weakened institutions, machine domination, and governments indifferent to human flourishing.