Against Platforms

Introduction

A solitary metronome clicks back and forth in a mostly empty warehouse. A record player starts to spin. “All I Ever Need is You” by Sonny and Cher plays as floodlights flicker on to reveal that the warehouse contains a large grouping of artist tools. Then we hear a whirring, and a room-sized hydraulic press slowly starts its descent. First it crushes a video arcade machine. As it lowers, it reaches paint cans of various colors, splattering paint over a piano that is crushed a half second later. We see the metronome again, but it’s quickly obliterated by the weight of the press. We catch a glimpse of a clay classical bust a moment before it is compressed beyond recognition. A drafting table is pulverized. Paintbrushes, guitars, and camera lenses are flattened. At the very end of the sequence, we see lifelike emoji balls squished into powder by the presses’ last push. A final puff of air caps off the entire assault.

A voice interjects: “The most powerful iPad ever is also the thinnest.” This harrowing scene was a video for Apple’s latest iPad. The strategy was certainly bold. Why were so many precious objects destroyed? What message is being sent with such an aggressive display? Everything you once used to create, explore, and make meaning in the world has collapsed onto a single platform and is now accessible on a single device. Seems nice, however the imagery is a bit too literal. For decades, Apple has been something of a cultural and economic hegemon. Their devices started the mobile revolution; their app store hosts some of this young centuries most iconic—and infamous—social media and digital start-ups. The devices Apple has invented have been in the vanguard of the addictive rewiring of our social and intellectual lives; they are the first things we see when we wake in the morning and the last things we see before bed.

There was a deeper subtext around Apple’s art-crushing iconography given the ambient anxiety around the tech industry’s recent deployment of artificial intelligence. In the weeks and months before the commercial was released, a growing chorus of critics was protesting Silicon Valley’s unfolding partnerships with AI companies, each of which seemed to be more dystopian than the next. Generative AI—perhaps the final project of Silicon Valley’s vision of a fully automated world—was culminating in a series of products in which machine learning models promised to do nearly all of the creative work represented by the ad’s crushed equipment. Generative AI is only possible thanks to training by trillions of data points that users had unwittingly uploaded in the preceding decades. Tech critic Brian Merchant noted the tone-deaf move; Apple’s violent ad came “at a time when artists, musicians and creatives are more worried than ever that tech companies are trying to crush them into dust for profit.” Apple later apologized, admitting they “missed the mark.” They cancelled the purchase of a television ad. But on my recent viewing of the ad on YouTube, the very next video on Apple’s channel was an ad for the newly released Apple Intelligence, an AI partnership they announced only weeks after.

As strange as the whole experience appeared, there were still many people who cheered Apple on for its vision. AI boosters who had been whipped into a frenzy by the bevy of AI advancements seemed to celebrate the end of art as we know it.

For some, the advertisement captured the feeling of the last twenty years under platforms. So-called innovative disruption colonized our political, cultural, and social institutions. Many institutions did little to stop it. In some cases, they encouraged it. We watched in slow motion as the very fabric of everyday life was subjected to platforms that treated our activities like so much raw material to be harvested, monetized, and reduced to its most commercially optimized form. Apple’s cofounder Steve Jobs famously remarked that the computer should “be a bicycle for the mind,” but it turned out to be a steamroller for management. How did we get here?

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This is a book about an ideology run amok. Techno-utopianism—the idea that technology, and technology alone, will create a more egalitarian, democratic society—has been around since we have had tools to make labor easier. But this utopia, like all utopias, doesn’t really exist. Despite this misguided attempt, techno-utopianism has effectively synthesized with two other powerful ideologies: techno-determinism and free-market capitalism to create what many refer to as platform capitalism. And worse, in the short but eventful twenty-first century, the attempt to scale this ideology into all aspects of our lives has failed us. Much ink has been spilled over this formation. Many critics in academia and journalism have chronicled the rise and fall of platform capitalism over the past several decades. However, much of this discussion is defeatist, myopic, and too focused on the specific actors on the stage. Beneath the surface of the dominance of digital platforms lies a larger formation, one somehow more powerful yet harder to pin down. This is the everyday ideology that motivates and supports the current political economy of platforms. Do software platforms produce a kind of ideological imprint on the world? How did digital platforms come to dominate everyday life? And what might we learn from the breakneck pace with which software marched through our institutions? This book cares less that the utopia failed; the question is: Why did it become so powerful in the first place? This occurred due to the formation of several myths, some that have been debunked, yes, but some whose false dissemination are still enacted today. One of the great themes of this ideology—or really any ideology—is the sense of the inevitability of its worldview. Techno-utopianism deals in teleological Whig history. Techno-utopians have a direct relationship with the idea of the future, so the curse of inevitability weighs particularly heavily.

A brief taxonomic note: in this book I use the more specific incarnation of techno-utopian thinking focused on consumer-digital technology, internet-enabled platforms, and large-scale, distributed computation. This digital utopia has its own history as well as an enormous purchase on the present zeitgeist.

This is not an anti-tech jeremiad or a Luddite manifesto. I don’t live in a shed in the woods sending out suspicious packages to the Washington Post. I’ve worked in tech—and yes, I am complicit—for almost twenty years. For me, the Snowden and Cambridge Analytica data scandals weren’t so much explosive revelations as they were triumphs. I finally saw exposed what many in my field knew to be standard operations of surveillance technology. It was the first time we saw the mainstream press abandon their sycophancy of digital platforms. Where this book dips into polemic, it is a polemic aimed at the sociopolitical formations in which digital technology and software are deployed, not the tools themselves.

While I have been active near the beating heart of venture capital, I have also lived a double life as a writer and critic in close proximity to cultural institutions. This period saw their rapid and often awkward digitization under the auspices of Silicon Valley’s heavy-handed marketing campaign to convince arbiters of culture to follow their lead in the adoption of networked technology—or risk obsolescence.

Everywhere we saw bubbling movements for reform. And yet, I found it hard to categorize the criticism of platforms in one simple axiom. Instead, the picture of the ideology of platforms appeared most clear as a series of myths. These form the skeleton of this book. These have drawn from various fields, thinkers, and political episodes during the preceding decades’ rise and fall of platform capitalism. Some are well-trodden arguments. Some are new phrasings, and several are novel formulations based on the existing literature. Much of technology criticism stands on the shoulders of giants in the field during the twentieth century. Modern figures like Lewis Mumford, Ursula Franklin, Friedrich Kittler, among many others, loomed large. There was something notable in the shift in our relationship to technology in this century. The existing theory met with “practice” in the twenty-first century when the accelerating pace of total digitization forced us to confront the  –real and present hubristic abuses of Silicon Valley. In this stage, many intrepid activists, academics, and journalists spoke up and articulated the looming problems with a platformed world. I can write the words that follow due to many great risks taken by tech workers and activists—a group that fellow critic Sara Watson has deemed, “our Cassandras of tech.” This is how a critical model took hold and the so-called techlash began. Mainstream publications suddenly changed their tune. The narrative shifted. And yet, something was still missing. Digital utopian lurked on even in the midst of this reckoning. How could we finally come to terms with the lasting damage that this ideology had wrought? If only we could make visible what had always been obscured under multiple layers of marketing and impenetrable computing jargon.

Silicon Valley platforms continue their spurious reign through perpetuating several singular myths, each of which are unpacked in the pages that follow:

Your brain is not a computer, and your computer is not a brain. There are things that cannot be automated, and there are intelligences that machines cannot have.

Data is never “raw,” immanent, or neutral. There is always bias and distortion in capture and modeling.

The internet is not “a thing.” It is a distributed network of many layers. Treating it as its own monolith with a central cultural logic presents problems. If you are not paying for a platform, your data is the product. Attention is data and data is a commodity. If something is free and connected to a network, beware of the trade-offs.

You can’t solve a social problem with a technical solution. Often, applying technical fixes only treat the symptom, and, in failing to address the underlying cause of the problem, makes it worse.

Decentralization is an illusion. Even distributed networks enforce hierarchies of power and influence. Beware of “open access.” Information may want to be free but beware of the consequences—somewhere a new gatekeeper will benefit. Information is the enemy of narrative. 

The more information, the more doubtful the narrative becomes.

Software is hard. Computing interfaces, rules, interactions, and protocols encode certain behaviors, and for that they should be scrutinized and interrogated as part of the body politic and the built environment.

Algorithms are made of people. They are editors; they steer and privilege certain values, and they are never objective. Crowdsourcing is a race to the bottom. Labor, knowledge, education, etc. are all cheapened when forced to compete on a platform. Making it easier to perform a task has massive externalities. Once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a measure. When you overoptimize for a goal, you’ll often destroy the thing or the market you set out to augment. Or, optimizing for a goal in a closed system will reinforce the production of that goal and cease to deliver any insights.

Technology can never occupy a space outside of capitalism. With rare exceptions, every application, company, or innovation will have a funding source, a board, or a bottom line; and in all cases the logic of capitalism will eventually supersede and control technical tools. What we identify as “technology” is just capitalism, but faster and worse.

Platforms are not institutions. Do not confuse them.