What Comes After Internet Platforms?

The 2016-2017 biennium has been a turning point for all the discourses around technology, politics, and the role of digitization in contributing to the shaping of our social dynamics. The consequences of the Brexit referendum in the UK and the Trump election in the US – both occurred in 2016 – were intrinsically connected with technological issues and with the role of Internet platforms. Various debates started in that peculiar moment and their echoes are still resounding now, almost half a decade later. Since then, “techlash” has been used as a descriptor for the public's mounting backlash against the tech industry and it gained widespread recognition to capture the collective sentiment of skepticism, criticism, and apprehension surrounding technology companies and their services (Weiss-Blatt, 2021). In a few years, the “techlash” has become one of the most evident traits of the contemporary Zeitgeist or a “pervasive atmosphere”, to quote Mark Fisher (2009). Per se, the term came to indicate an increasing recognition of the potential risks and unintended repercussions that accompany the swift progress of technology under surveillance capitalism. Whereas this was a much-needed swift in the tones of an otherwise almost solely techno-optimistic debate, lots could be discussed about whether the “techlash” and its sometimes sensationalist tones have been truly beneficial to the wider debates around technology and whether it contributed in a positive way in providing knowledge, awareness, and transparency to the public. 

What could have been a profound, in-depth, and evidence-based epistemological change in the way our society makes sense of technology and its ramifications, soon became – at least in the mainstream - a hyped, politically driven and sometimes hysterical constant j’accuse against anything digital in the context of politics. The core of what the “techlash” became gravitated around the possibility of finding easy answers to complex political and social phenomena. Here technology came as the ideal suspect. Suddenly, tech companies and their platforms seemed to have become the reasons for, among others, Brexit and Trump, and they were portrayed as the clear responsible for a global crisis of democracy, truth and knowledge. In the West, numerous headlines and front pages were published pushing this reductionist view that obscured other, more concrete issues that, finally, could have surfaced: privacy and data justice, to start, and a myriad of other areas disrupted by the platformization of the Internet and its consequences (Poell et al., 2019). Yet, the mainstream debate around the “techlash” stalled, missed the opportunity of becoming a productive force of change and re-discussion of what the Internet, the cyber and the digital could be. 

Despite this delusion, the “techlash” was certainly able to intercept some changes occurring in the digital realm. There is no doubt that certain dynamics of the commercial Internet have been put under scrutiny for a few years and appear now to be in a clear crisis. This can be said about the “platform” paradigm that had been almost hegemonical since social media started their skyrocketing success and became so central in our society. Today, something is indeed broken on the Internet and platforms – including the biggest and most successful ones, starting from Facebook – appear to be in a moment of stagnation and seem to be losing their momentum when confronted with newer actors, such as TikTok, and different “systemic” technologies, such as large language models (LLMs). The program of the 2023 Milton Wolf Seminar offered different explorations of this state of stagnation, dwelling into the issue from various perspectives: journalism, technology, policy and politics and diplomacy. The platformization of the Internet somehow impacted on all these spheres and consequently on the public sphere at large. There is no doubt that, at least in its digital side, public life has in digital spaces its primary venue now. Consequently, changes, disruptions and crisis in those spaces come to also affect the health of public life. The conversations that took place at the Seminar in Vienna gained additional relevance and timeliness due to the ongoing armed conflict taking place in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, events that have shocked diplomacy to the core and right after the colossal and systemic sea change moment caused by the pandemic. Thus, in this complex context, to discuss the stagnation of the platform paradigm also means discussing the functioning of some of the most crucial social infrastructures of our times (Hintz et al., 2017). The “Platforms and Demagogues: The Future of Digital Monopolies” panel addressed this issue directly, with the aim of analyzing the topic from the perspective of platforms’ symbolic and economical capitals and their current declines. In particular, the panel brought together the voices of researchers working in various areas across media studies: Prof. Jasmine McNealy discussed the issue from the perspectives of platforms’ data cultures and their influence on news media, Prof. Des Freedman investigated it from the media power angle, while theorist Geert Lovink offered an overview of the evolution of the platform paradigm and the changes in how users inhabit these digital environments.   

Lovink’s recent book Stuck on the Platform (2022), also the focus of his presentation in Vienna, is a fascinating exploration of the various ways in which the platform paradigm is currently exhausted. Starting from the profound consequences inflicted by the pandemic lockdowns and the consequent total move of our social lives on the Internet, among other topics, the book deals with how it feels to be on the platforms nowadays. Doomscrolling and Zoom fatigue are, in Lovink’s narrative, metaphors of the feeling of being stuck that social media platforms incorporate in this phase of their evolution. We’re stuck on the platform also because we have lost the ability to imagine alternatives structures, habitats, and power dynamics to the ones we are currently subjected while being online. Lovink refers to the last ten years as a "lost decade": during this time, the Internet's potential as an ideal tool for generating new possibilities and alternate realities has steadily diminished, giving way to the dominance of platforms that have monopolized our attention and creative possibilities. Prof. Jasmine McNealy has later discussed how platforms such as Facebook, Google, Twitter and the other online commercial spaces have gradually substituted in our perception “the Internet” as the space where we go when we go online, also monopolizing the imaginary and all the inhabitable digital spaces. In Prof. McNealy’s view, we should look at this systemic process as the application of a precise “grammar” to online spaces, that inevitably evolves into a “syntax” that generates data about how we live within these spaces that inevitably ends up influencing users’ and the media behaviors at large, with algorithmic consequences. Platforms are not the Internet, additionally stressed Prof. McNealy, as different rules, hierarchies, and ownerships are applied on them. Prof. Des Freedman addressed the issue from the perspective of monopolies history in the media field, directly connecting platforms monopolies of today with the ones of legacy media conglomerates that have also characterized the media field since before the Internet and that still dominate the content side of the scenario. As Prof. Freedman underlined, legacy media can be perceived as analog entities from the past, but they still embody enormous power when it comes to agenda setting, for instance, and especially in the context of big political debates and controversies. As such, we should not consider digital monopolies as a separated phenomenon from other, previous but still unresolved issues of media power, as newer forms of monopolies and control are inevitable entangled with older instances of this kind.  

As a takeaway from the panel, overall, it is possible to argue that platforms have fall short in becoming the global space for open discussions they promised to be, as they managed to gain significant control over the flow of information and setting the rules for how this should happen. The result of this state of things has been the establishment of a “quasi-public sphere” (York, Faris and Deibert, 2010) of dubious accountability. This state of things was already clearly controversial in times when platforms used to be successful and thriving and it is even more the case now that these dynamics are into a multifaceted crisis. The key issues here, seems to be the concrete lack of alternatives, which is an additional consequence of the rampant monopolization and concentration of power that platformization brought along over the Internet in recent years. Yet, without alternative digital places to rely on, is the platform paradigm destined to evolve into what? And with which consequences for online public life? Weakened, weaponized and at the mercy of hostile takeovers such as Musk’s with Twitter, platforms risk becoming even less accountable, even more concentrated in their power and even more vulnerable to various security threats (Quach, 2023) and downgrading of content quality. Recent history of social media brings an interesting insight and precedent: the case of MySpace. In the first half of the 2000s the platform used to be the largest on the global level, under Murdoch’s News Corporation control. In 2011, following the success of Facebook, MySpace changed various ownerships and went into a spiraling crisis in terms of usage (Jackson and Madrigal, 2021). In 2016, the platform was finally purchased by Time Inc. which basically planned to use it for “hoovering up user data to help it target digital ads more effectively”, The Guardian reported at the time (Jackson, 2016). Once a thriving platform capable of concentrating social life on the Internet, launching music and pop culture online phenomena, Myspace ended up being an empty silo for data extraction. The perfect metaphor for surveillance capitalism, it could be argued.

References

Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalism Realism. Is there no alternative? London: Zer0 Books.

Hintz, A., Dencik, L. and Wahl-Jorgensen,  K. (2017). Digital citizenship and surveillance society — Introduction, International Journal of Communication, 11, 731–739. 

Jackson, J. (2016). Time Inc buys what is left of MySpace for its user data. The Guardian, February 11. 

Jackson, N. and Madrigal, A. C. (2011). The Rise and Fall of Myspace. The Atlantic, January 12. 

Lovink, G. (2022). Stuck on the platform. Reclaiming the Internet. Amesterda: Valiz.

Poell, T., Nieborg, D. and Van Dijck, J. (2019) Concepts of the digital society: platformisation. Internet Policy Review,8(4). 

Quack, K. (2023). Stanford Internet Observatory raises alarm over 'serious failings with the child protection systems at Twitter'. The Register, June 6.

Weiss-Blatt, N. (2021). The Techlash and Tech Crisis Communication. Bingley: Emerald publishing.

York, J. (2010). Policing Content in the Quasi-Public Sphere. OpenNet Initiative.

About Philip Di Salvo

Dr. Philip Di Salvo is a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. Philip's main research interests are investigative journalism, Internet surveillance and the relationship between journalism and hacking. Previously, he was a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)'s Department of Media and Communications (2021-2022) and he held different research and teaching positions at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI)'s Institute of Media and Journalism (2012-2021). Philip received his PhD in Communication Sciences from USI with a dissertation about the adoption of encrypted whistleblowing platforms in journalism in the summer of 2018. Philip has also worked as a Lecturer at NABA - New Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, Italy (2018-2020). As a freelance journalist, Philip has written for Wired, Motherboard/Vice, Esquire and other publications covering the social impacts of technology, has worked as the European Journalism Observatory (EJO)'s Italian editor and has a weekly radio show on technology on Radio Raheem. Philip has authored two books: "Leaks. Whistleblowing e hacking nell'età senza segreti" (LUISS University Press, Rome, 2019) and "Digital Whistleblowing Platforms in Journalism. Encrypting Leaks" (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2020). He's also a member of the board of DIG Festival, an international investigative journalism event based in Italy.