The Problem is the Platform

19 Apr, 2025

The final straw was seeing the photos of the gleeful tech broligarchs surrounding Trump on his inauguration day. I made the decision then and there to stop using social media and Google, expanding my decade-long Amazon boycott. I’m still trying to follow through, struggling to wean myself off the platforms, but at this point, the addiction feels mostly physical.

The second-to-final straw came earlier this year after I read an article about Meta flooding their platforms with AI influencer profiles. Out of morbid curiosity, I checked some of them out: invariably “young,” “sexy,” “women,” each with hundreds of thousands of followers. Their images triggered an uncanny valley response, an eerie nausea coupled with a twinge of shameful arousal. Clicking on one of their thirst traps (weren’t they all thirst traps?), I read the comments: hundreds of other AI bots bantering, complimenting, cajoling each other (“wow I wish I was that hot ❤️”). I nearly threw my phone against the wall.

Platform capitalism signals the current “late/advanced” stage of capitalism, where the structures that “mediate relations, choreograph logistical flows, and create spaces for communication, have surpassed the massively material productive forces of heavy industry as the drivers of both the economy and the culture it forms and deforms” (Alan Smart, Turtles, in Counter-Signals 3). Or as Guy Debord wrote in 1967, “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” Platform capitalism not only mediates our relationships, it circumscribes them within interoperable digital enclosures designed for wealth extraction. If this shift in capitalism wasn’t fully evident before, the images from Jan. 20, 2025, clearly cemented it. No longer was the president’s entourage of power brokers made up of titans of industry, oil barons, geriatric financiers, religious patriarchs, military statesmen, or even media moguls, but a specific clique of platform capitalists.

“Whatever relations these structures negotiate or impose upon Nature, they are most significantly ‘made’ and therefore it is always possible to imagine them unmade or made differently. In this way, all platforms are designed and all design operates within and upon the platforms that support it, define it, pose its problems, and establish its criteria for success.”

— Alan Smart, Turtles

As designers, platforms should concern us: those we make, those we use, those we inhabit. Despite the old debates around design authorship, we are essentially a discipline without a content, members of a meta-profession. We don’t write the copy, we don’t sign our work, but we do set the margins and frame the limits of the page. We operate as translators between our clients and the public; mediators, facilitators, shameless promoters, persuaders, and manipulators. We design the space/frame/form/support structure through which communication occurs. The medium is our message. We are inherently platform experts… well, maybe…

Maybe we would understand platforms better if we weren’t so distracted by all the “content” that passes through them. As consumers, we’re told that our attention is a precious commodity. It is a valued resource that companies compete over, surveil, capture, and try to hold. That our attention is stretched and frayed, our anxiety levels perpetually spiking, that we lose the ability to focus, is just the cost of doing business today. But it’s getting hard to see this as a bug of the attention economy and not a feature, the feature. They don’t actually want our attention, they want to destroy it. Trump’s shock-and-awe tactics — the flurry of executive orders, dizzying tariff announcements, and waves of brutal assaults on civil liberties and civil society — enact and extend this platform politics of distraction. The word distraction is not meant to minimize the very real violence being perpetrated on individuals every day (disappeared and detained) but to connect it to the systemic assault on our attention.

“Capitalists are unable to make most of their resources. Consider oil and coal, those formerly living products whose formation has required so much more time than capitalists can imagine. Capitalists use them, but they cannot manufacture them. (…) These are the processes I call ‘salvage accumulation.’ Accumulation is the amassment of wealth under capitalism; salvage here refers to the conversion of stuff with other histories of social relations (human and not human) into capitalist wealth.”

— Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Salvage Accumulation, or the Structural Effects of Capitalist Generativity

The tragic irony is that our own free and creative labour is converted and weaponized against us. Despite the slop upon slop of AI bots, the dead internet has not yet arrived. It is still us humans feeding the platforms, providing the raw material, “content,” for the capitalist class to convert into wealth (and more bots). The dystopian imagery of The Matrix’s human battery fields comes to mind.

Social media algorithms and LLM scraper bots are productively dependent upon — and literally feed on — the generosity of the human spirit. Though this might seem hyperbolic, Tsing’s concept of salvage accumulation is practically useful here. Her seminal work, The Mushroom at the End of the World, is a rich ethnographic study of the matsutake mushroom. In it, she follows matsutake through the variegated relationships that foster its emergence in human-disturbed landscapes, the diverse communities that forage and study it, and its transformation along supply chains from a mysterious organism existing outside of capitalism, to a product developed along its pericapitalist edges, and finally into a rare commodity exchanged within the (primarily) Japanese market economy. Salvage accumulation exploits and transforms existing non-capitalist resources, labour, and even cultural histories into scalable commodities.

Platforms salvage the deeply human relational processes that generally exist outside of capitalist purview: our day-to-day expressions of joy, sadness, and anger, our inherent need to connect and share, to be seen and heard, to teach and learn, all our doubts and desires, dances and dinners, and even our rage as we scream into the void to stop the fucking genocide. All this is vacuumed up and transformed from the qualitative entanglements of human experience into quantifiable data that can be scaled, aggregated, stacked, and traded on the market, and now also to serve as feed in the trough for hungry machines.

The slide from technocratic capitalism to full-blown eugenicist fascism seems well underway, hence my refusal to participate any longer. In the words of Public Enemy: “Fuck the game if it ain’t saying nothing.” It’s a fundamentally moral position that hopefully also helps my own mental health. Yet I also know that puritanical refusal won’t work as a collective strategy, that it won’t scale, and that we are already living in the ruins.

But though the platforms appear monolithic, Tsing’s analysis reminds us that they are in fact wholly dependent upon a vast and messy heterogeneity of resources, entangled ecological relationships that cannot be cleanly pulled apart. Things will always be lost in translation, and each of these slippages holds the opportunity for being otherwise. Amongst the pervasive distraction and extraction, building our capacity to notice these fissures and possibilities, developing our attention as an active practice, feels like a tactic worth pursuing.