Platform Brutality. Where is platform theory today?

Transcript

Uh, hello everyone. Um, it's a pleasure for me to, um, uh, be here and present, uh, the work of, um, the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam. Um, uh, this has been running for 22 years. Uh, we're probably known in this context for our, um, a network called, uh, Money Lab, uh, which started in 2014 and is still running. Uh, this is the, this is the website, uh, wordcast site. Um, due to my, uh, mandatory, uh, retirement in a few months, uh, we have decided, uh, to, uh, continue, uh, the center. Uh, here you see our streaming, uh, live streaming, uh,

activities together with Ukraina TV in Krakow and many others, uh, in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. This is a very lively network, and we see this also as very, very much as, uh, as an alternative, uh, for, uh, the social media blues, uh, especially, uh, you know, amongst, uh, Gen Z and young users, which is, uh, so widespread. Here you can see some of the topics that we are uh dealing with right now and and will continue also as an NGO when we start to have our, uh, new, uh, phase. Uh, and this is a project, uh, quite soon, uh,

again here in, in Berlin, uh, the Solidarity Economies Lab, which we, uh, which will happen here, uh, in October to January here in Berlin, uh, as part of, um, the um Transmediale. But, um, this time, uh, I would like to, uh, speak and and read some, uh, parts from this new book uh, that I, uh, recently launched. Uh it's called uh platform uh brutality. After Sad by Design and Stuck on the Platform, I see this as a a third book that really deals with this implosion

uh that we are uh confronted uh with uh no longer hyper growth or, you know, facilitation, but really the internet uh is is turning uh into a violent um uh environment for for many. And in this text and in this book, I'm trying to explain this turn to this new condition in which uh so much uh you know, a eye slop um is is is is generated and uh this is reflecting a a very very um different

uh approach uh amongst uh users, uh which is a very uh sad uh situation uh that is turning uh into the structural or abstract violence. Mhm. And we know from experience that the the abstract violence uh and the structural violence that people nowadays um associate with internet platforms um uh will eventually uh turn into real violence. And this is the the issue.

So, I'm going to um read here some uh parts. I I've constantly updated uh this story because it's really happening. So, this text goes well beyond uh the book. Uh and in the meanwhile, you can look at uh the memes that, you know, I've been collecting and um creating myself. So, the stagnation of the platform has brought us back to the military origins of the internet.

What happens when mindless and distracted users remain stuck with no end in sight? The destruction of attention starts to hurt, eventually turning into structural violence. Platforms are the unseen and behave like innocent bystanders, pretending never to be responsible for anything. They were intended for users to look straight through them and not notice their design anymore.

Thanks to mundane and smooth functionality, transparency makes it hard to see them as distinct objects. Right? So, this this really difficult. What is a platform? Even this very simple question, users that are on them 24/7 cannot really answer this this question. Hm? Right? They do not shine. The platforms do not shine, to put it in the words of the late Dutch architecture theorist Molly Steio.

So, um despite the urgency of the platform question, the problem cannot be addressed head on. Until very recently, invisible facilitators of platforms appeared as pure ideology. People could not see them. Not only did leading players quickly become too large to handle for local players, platforms turned out to dissolve into thin air. Hiding inside a technical stack, becoming an ecology or a a stack, hm?

An unaccountable sphere, much like the air we breathe and do not notice. Both users and experts find it hard to explain where platforms begin and end. As politicians are unwilling and incapable of breaking up big big tech, the internal hypergrowth mechanism keeps generating new market behemoth. And the And this is now, of course, moving into AI, but yeah, I don't need to explain that to you here.

The platform condition is classified, by everyone, as intolerable, unlivable, uncurable, and unbearable. There's disgust translating into disdain for the topic, right? The The platforms cannot be dealt with. They've been around for 10, 15 years. We don't know what to do with them. So, a cynical reason emerges. Everyone agrees on the untenable power of the platform, yet no one is willing to leave.

Mentally speaking, the users have been proven incapable of facing the information. Glued to the phone, users cannot even notice they're logged in. In a matter of seconds, they have liked this, purchased that, responded to an emoji, created one uh and themselves, and hovering over the apps, the mindless online presence has turned subconscious.

The purpose of the platform is to do what it does. No higher goal or problem needs to be resolved. Once you've created a profile and clicked on something, the endless scroll takes over. From the moment you've signed up, the platform presents itself as a self-evident totality. A service that was, is, and always will be.

Ready to lure you in the next to the next transaction. Now that you're part of the flow, any attention hook can pull you away. There's no longer the tiring obligation to build one's own social network. Just start swiping and the suggestions will appear automatically for your eyes only. The term "Platform Brutality", the name of um um you know, my the title of my book, was instigated by the African um

um philosopher Achille Mbembe. Uh who who uh published a book in 2020 in French uh called Brutalism. The thesis here is that instead of being portrayed as a machine of endless facilitation, the internet has hit a historical wall, and in response comes up with an inner destructive energy, right? An energy that maybe in the past was going out outside in terms of endless growth uh

and but now is turning against itself inside. Yeah implode or explode. Maybe you remember that meme. As planetary machines um in a murderously frenzied state, platforms are at full capacity of mobilizing resources. So, the platforms have in fact not yet declined or you know, have disappeared. Quite the opposite. They're They're uh user They're operating at maximum capacity.

Loaded up with this potentiality, the platform used to present itself as a never-ending thin layer with which the techno-social is acting itself out. But this image can no longer be maintained. As a vast plane lacking depth, the platform facilitates a never-ending one-dimensional trip that is impossible to quit. As lost subjects endlessly toil around in it, digital reason has a hard time explaining the matter.

And uh now I want to turn uh to an an example that recently uh you know, I I I studied and uh described. And this is the the saga of Dodge, right? Um so, uh and and Dodge is really very, very interesting example. And it's modeled, of course, after the takeover of Twitter in October 2022, when Musk moved in and destroyed the company he had just purchased himself.

Right? And so, he took those those experiences and thought he could scale them up in order to destroy, let's say, government bureaucracies, programs. Of course, US Aid is the most, you know, well-known example of a department that he single-handedly, you know, closed down and destroyed in a matter of weeks. And it is estimated that you know, in turn, as an example of platform brutality, that within a couple of months, the Dodge

operation, you know, meant that 300,000 people lost their jobs. Now, what is very important here is how how how this was how this was done. And for this, I ask your your attention to you know, this theory and that we really need a philosophy of what it means to delete. Right? Of course, you know, hackers that invade your system, they know how to delete. But how to scale up, how these days deletion as a mass practice, mass deletion is

practiced. Right? And so, when we're talking about abstract violence, structural violence. The The The act of mass deletion is becoming more and more important, okay? So, of course it's part of modern warfare, but we find it in fact in in any system. So, an example of today's abstract violence is the strategy of mass deletion. Digitally erasing uh entries of the other is both symbolic and literal, right? So, to delete someone, you know, has multiple,

let's say, layers and implications. The public gesture of canceling individuals or calling out groups, remember, you know, that's still the old-fashioned cancel culture, right? Is not enough, and often this is only stage one in a process leading up to large-scale eradication, right? So, deletion is the technical manifestation of a cold act, and not just a moral condemnation, right? Which it was somehow seen, you know, in the in the days of cancel culture.

It was Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiencies main weapon. As a cultural technique, digital erasure is really next level and goes beyond censorship and budget cuts, or, you know, what in in in our circles here maybe, you know, we would deal with under the rubric of privacy, etc., right? This is really next level. To silence or to hurt is one, but to kill the file is another. So, blotting and blacking out can still be read as a correction, but we're not talking about

correction here anymore. Editing should be an improvement, right? Mhm? Do good forces love to clean up and restore order? Yeah, we all love that every now and then. You know, it's necessary when we clean our uh uh uh up our files. Of course, everyone needs crucial um access to data uh to cross out identities and related uh resources indefinitely. And indefinitely is is important here because we all know that of course once you uh erase data, they can very easily be uh

installed again if you have a backup, right? You come back the next day, uh install it again.