Against Platforms

A bold and imaginative critique of the hidden costs of digital life – and a manifesto for a better future . . . At the turn of the millennium, digital technologies seemed to have immense promise for transforming our society. With these powerful new tools, the thinking went, we would be free to live our best lives, connected to our communities in ways full of infinite potential. A quarter of a century on, this form of utopianism seems like a cruel mirage. Our lives are more fragmented and pressure-filled as ever, as we race to keep up with technologies that manipulate, command, and drain us at every turn.; So what happened? In The key, says Pepi, is that we have been taught that digital technologies are neutral tools, transparent, easily understood, and here to serve us. The reality, Pepi says, is that they are laden with assumptions and collateral consequences – ideology, in other words. And it is this hidden ideology that must be dismantled if we are to harness technology for the fullest expression of our humanity.

Auteur

Mike Pepi

Échantillon de lecture
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?

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 …