platform capitalism

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.

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

Treating attention as infrastructure rather than a market to be optimized. Right now, we treat attention like a commodity. It’s something to be mined, optimized, and sold to the highest bidder. But attention is infrastructure! It’s the invisible highway that ideas, identities, and institutions travel on. We have to invest in it like we would a... See more

Downstream of this disruption of our traditional ways of orienting in time and space is the platforms’ destruction of social value. By competing with “going out in public,” the platforms work to destroy “public.” We see the reduction of what you might call the Overton window for being-in-the-world, so that the only things which fit within it are... See more

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.

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.

the platformization of culture and creativity makes it harder to imagine another way forward. The past plummets down a memory hole and the future is reduced to what a prediction market or recommendation algorithm anticipates. The present, meanwhile, becomes a fragmented slop bowl of takes and sensations that lead nowhere. We live in slop capitalism... See more

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... See more