Leesfragment: Stuck on the Platform

Nu in onze boekhandels: het nieuwe boek van Geert Lovink, Stuck on the Platform. Reclaiming the Internet. Lees bij ons een fragment uit de inleiding.

We zitten allemaal klem. Hoe hard je ook probeert apps van je telefoon te verwijderen, je wordt toch weer terug verleid. Doom scrollen is het nieuwe normaal van een leven dat 24/7 online plaatsvindt. Wat gebeurt er als je thuiskantoor begint te voelen als een callcenter en je te moe bent om uit te loggen bij Facebook? We zijn verslaafd aan grootschalige platforms, niet in staat terug te keren naar het luchthartige tijdperk van gedecentraliseerde netwerken. Hoe kunnen we de toenemende onvrede over de toestand van het platform begrijpen? Zoomvermoeidheid, cancelcultuur, cryptokunst, NFT's en psychische terugval vormen kernelementen voor een algemene theorie van platformcultuur. Geert Lovink pleit ervoor dat we het internet op onze eigen voorwaarden terugeisen.

Stuck on the Platform is een weerbarstig betoog over de opkomst van platformalternatieven, gebaseerd op een diep begrip van de digitale malaise.

Phantoms of the Platform or Internet’s Muddy Enlightenment

Introduction

It seems we’re trapped. During the lockdown misère we’ve literally been stuck on the platform. What happens when your home office starts to feel like a call center and you’re too tired to close down Facebook? “How to get rid of your phone? Wrong answers only.” We wanted to use the pandemic to reset and move on. We failed. The comfort of the same old proved too strong. Instead of a radical techno-imagination focused on rolling out alternatives, we got distracted by fake news, cancel culture, and cyber warfare. Condemned to doom scrolling, we suffered through a never-ending barrage of cringy memes, bizarre conspiracy theories, and pandemic stats, including the inevitable flame wars surrounding them. Random is fun.

“We admitted we were powerless—that our lives had become unmanageable.” This confession is Step 1 in AA’s 12 steps, and it is here that Stuck on the Platform also begins. As you and I are not able to resolve platform dependency, we remain glued to the same old channels, furious at others about our own inability to change. In this seventh volume of my chronicles, we’re staying with the trouble called the internet, diagnosing our current phase of stagnation while also asking how to get “unstuck” and deplatform the platforms.
What happens to the psycho-cultural condition when there’s nowhere to go and users are trapped in too-big-to-fail IT firms? It’s not pretty. While some believe that our persistent resentment, complaints, and anger are merely part of the human condition, totally unrelated to the shape and size of the information ecology, others (like me) are convinced that we have to take the mental poverty of the online billions seriously. We can no longer ignore the depression, anger, and despair, pretending they will be gone overnight after installing another app. Addiction is real, buried deep inside the body. Habits need to be unlearned, awareness needs to spread. All the while Godot just sits there, staring at the screen, waiting in the lobby for some policy change to be announced. Yet nothing ever happens. The resulting fallback and fatalism comes as no surprise. “What do you do when your world starts to fall apart?” Anna Tsing asks at the very beginning of The Mushroom at the End of the World. It seems we have our answer: we stick to the platform.

Where Are We Now?

Waar waren we ook alweer gebleven? Where are we now, to say it with David Bowie. Dutch writer Geert Mak begins each episode of his TV series with this question, and it is a question that echoes in my head. Like Mak, I hope to catch the platforms red-handed. I fail to remember the worrisome circumstances the moment I closed the manuscript of Sad by Design in late 2018. Thankfully Richard Seymour sums it up for me in Twittering Machine. By 2019, he writes,

techno-utopianism returned in an inverted form. The benefits of anonymity became the basis for trolling, ritualized sadism, vicious misogyny, racism, and alt-right cultures. Creative autonomy became “fake news” and a new form of infotainment. Multitudes became lynch mobs, often turning on themselves. Dictators and other authoritarians learned how to use Twitter and master its seductive language games, as did the socalled Islamic State, whose slick online media professionals affect mordant and hyperaware tones. The United States elected the world’s first “Twitter president.” Cyberidealism became cyber-cynicism.

And we were the all-too-willing followers, unable to turn our backs against the medium and its message.
The Brexit-Trump-COVID period (2019–2021) covered here can be characterized by both stasis and crisis, with the old refusing to die and the new refusing to be born. According to Paolo Gerbaudo,

the current political era is best understood as a “great recoil” of economic globalization. It is a moment when the coordinates of historical development seem to be inverting, upsetting many of the assumptions that dominated politics and economics over the last decades. The implosion of neoliberal globalization is not just a moment of regression, but potentially a phase of re-internalization.

The lack of inverted thinking became widely felt. In failing to envision the web’s negative consequences, problems began to pile up. Managers preferred safety and control over change; they opted for PR spin instead of criticism. The result— to paraphrase Tyler Cowen—was internet complacency.
COVID-induced restrictions combined complacency and comfort for some with mass despair, loneliness, and a health crisis for the many, accelerating existing inequalities and fuelling the crisis of political representation. Working from holes,6 in sanitized, gentrified areas, the overall feeling was one of numbness. Escalating loss of life and the horrifying rash of infection reached a tipping point for many in the repetition of the same. Emotion, compassion, and empathy retreated into the inner sanctuary of the miserable self. During lockdown, the omnipresent internet became the stage of intense interiority. The home became the refuge of modern life. The kitchen turned into a classroom. The bedroom turned into a shopping mall, workplace, restaurant, and entertainment space, all at once.

“All revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure,” George Orwell noticed. This is also the case for the digital revolution. The imminent datafication of the world is certain. We’ve reached a point where we can call out the platform as a disciplinary machine, in line with the clinic, school, factory, and jail.8 We should no longer be surprised that this power is a repressive one—and not just depressive. By facilitating the social in a “free” and frictionless way, power relations are shaped and formatted. Yet the collective invention of explanatory concepts that make intelligible the collapse of the social remains elusive. The paradox between the promise and the reality between the empowering, decentralized vision and the ironically depressing dependency of social media—is growing unbearable. Can we be brutally honest about the social need to scale, drifting to the one and only product, preferred by all? Why doesn’t diversity and difference apply here? Once the Facebooks become indistinguishable from the standard and protocol level, ordinary users, too busy minding their own business, simply do not have the energy to question the situation. The wish for interoperable global exchanges is simply too strong.

It’s All Wrong, and No One Cares

Platforms take their toll on the individual. Most of the collected evidence reinstates what we’ve all, intuitively or consciously known about data extraction and surveillance. As Faine Greenwood puts it,

Facebook is very much like a cigarette company now: most people know damn well the product is bad for them and the executives selling it are evil, but it is—by design—really, really hard to quit.

What is the price we pay for a recommendation? Or, to put it more explicitly, as the artist Geraldine Juárez does:

It’s really not fair that we all have to deal with the effects of the terrible ideas and products of tech reactionaries and anarcho-capitalists just because the USA is an individualist nightmare.

Indeed, the Silicon Elegy heralds the destructive side of boredom. This is not the force praised by bourgeois coaches as the ideal precondition for creativity, but instead more of an unspoken condition that brings on disasters. The same applies to loneliness, that solitary state of mind promoted as the healing force for body and soul. Under the COVID regime, loneliness has received a significant upgrade. Congratulations, you’re social disease number one. In an age defined by anxiety, paranoia, and ultimately hate, one can enter an acute danger zone in a dazed and confused state of mind.
And platforms take their toll on the economy and society. Platforms do not merely monopolize markets; they own and shape them. While the rest of the economy stagnates and central banks fuel the stock market, Big Tech buys back their own shares instead of doing productive investments. We thus end up with an internet that exponentially speeds up social and economic inequality. “I’m starting to feel like a stripper dancing on this Substack newsletter pole and everyone is cheering but so few readers are actually making it rain,” says Michelle Lhooq, sketching out the yawning gulf between “free” culture and a fair living wage for content creators. While the last of the market pundits defend the status quo with consumer choice arguments, users are coming to terms with their servile status. We need to read the platform-user relation in the light of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Once the social contract has locked in users, a combination of addiction and social conformism makes it impossible for users to freely leave the platform and go elsewhere. This is what Yanis Varoufakis, in line with Jodi Dean and others, calls techno-feudalism. Similarly, Bruce Schneier spoke about “feudal security” offered by Big Tech, in which users surrender their autonomy by moving into a warlord’s fortress and in return get protection from the bandits that roam the badlands without.
But if the evidence against the platform is there, the change is not. Over the past few years, through both academic studies and tech work “tell-alls,” we’ve been provided with overwhelming proof of the manipulation of public opinion combined with psychological “behavioral modifications.” The problem here is not the avalanche in internet-critical literature itself, but its limited impact and the lack of a political roadmap on how to change the internet architecture. Internetdeutung today is a muddy form of enlightenment. As T.S. Eliot wrote: “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” That’s why they love art, cinema, literature, gaming, and creativity. To which Jean Cocteau added: “Illusion, not deception.”
Captured by platforms, many no longer asked themselves why they are stuck in their own filter bubble. It is tiring to repeat the mixed feelings; we’d rather skip the topic. Techno-sentimentality exists, going back and forth between love and critique. Why are my YouTube recommendations so irresistible? Where’s the vibe? There’s no trace of guilt after a long swiping session, only exhaustion. Why do we continue to externalize our vulnerable mental states? Where is the embarrassment of the digital? Why do I start using the Alexa and Siri question format while chatting with friends? How to get rid of trending topics? How can we protect ourselves from algorithmic recommendations? Gone are the days of innocent surfing the Web. Today we are pulled in by powerful forces, until one day we stop thinking about them altogether. To put it in Byung-Chul Han’s words, the subjugated subject is not even aware of its own subjugation.
In our pandemic period, the same pattern repeated: discontent ramped up, but then dissipated without any change. We saw a rising sentiment built on the strong online presence of the alt-right and mixed with the rocket fuel of conspiracy theories ranging from 5G radiation to Bill Gates implanting microchips. Disinformation was a problem, and a diffuse feeling of paranoia arose, but we never received a radical makeover of the core infrastructure. In an overall suspicious and anxious atmosphere, what’s the point of understanding distraction-by-design or taking digital literacy programs that just preach restraint, rationalism, and other offline morals? The discursive vacuum was going to be filled one day. This is the price we pay for the hesitant attitude of a digitally indifferent ruling class that continues to downplay internet culture as momentary hype while awaiting the return of state media and corporate controlled news and entertainment.
This organized neglect to take seriously the downsides of internet culture is now boomeranging, leading to an acute conceptual poverty. This wouldn’t be so bad, apart from the fact that over five billion users now depend on this infrastructure. We’ve so far failed to develop a language that would help us grasp the social logic of these “media.” For example, Casey Newton asks, “why we built a world in which so much civic discourse takes place inside a handful of giant digital shopping malls.” Yet the emphasis of the shopping metaphor is still on passive consumption. We’ve surpassed this position, yet neither interactivity of the “prosumer” nor the interface design disciplines have managed to deliver captive concepts that reached the mainstream. What would happen if the multitudes could understand and embody the grammar of the techno-social?
Critical scholarship seems to be unable to produce anything other than belated revelations without consequences. Internet theory has been destined to arrive late. Hegel once said that “the owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.” The same applies to net criticism. Only when we move to a temporary outsider position of criticism can we discover the limitations of the previous perspectives. Instead of a radical techno-imagination focused on rolling out alternatives, we get distracted by a neverending carousel of new tech developments: big data, automation, artificial intelligence, facial recognition, social credit, cyber warfare, ransomware, internet of things, drones, and robots. The ever-growing list of doom tech prevents users from collectively dreaming and deploying what matters most: their own alternative versions of the techno-social.
Lee Vinsel took this argument a step further, noticing that critical writing itself is parasitic upon hype and even inflates it. The professional concern trolls of technoculture invert the messages of pundits, taking press releases from startups and turning them into hellscapes. Vinsel mentions the Netflix Social Dilemma documentary (watched by over 100 million viewers) and Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism as examples of “critihype” that “overstate the abilities of social media firms to directly influence our thoughts and provide near-zero evidence for it.” Doom scrolling, subliminal liking habits, and selfie culture are social-psychological facts. With the ever-growing evidence of such manipulations that result in “behavioral modifications,” we no longer have to explain the overwhelming presence of smartphone use in everyday life.

[…]

Consider Stuck on the Platform a relapse-resistant story about the rise of platform alternatives, built on a deep understanding of the digital slump.

©Geert Lovink