A plea to reclaim the internet from addictive platform capitalism, from the author of Sad by Design

However often you delete apps from your phone, the seduction of the platform draws you back. There is a rising disaffection with “platform” culture—with megacorporations such as Google and Facebook that provide the foundational software for others to use, and to which we are almost all addicted. What can be done against it?

In Stuck on the Platform, Geert Lovink—whose work has been championed by Jodi Dean, Bernard Stiegler and Eva Illouz, among others—diagnoses this condition and suggests exit strategies. Analyzing the toxic symptoms of platform capitalism, Lovink proposes assembling a techno-social exodus movement; campaigns to break up monopoly platforms; the rebuilding of the internet as a public infrastructure; and the removal of certain corporations from internet governance bodies.

Geert Lovink (born 1959) is a Dutch media theorist and author of Uncanny Networks (2002), My First Recession (2003), Social Media Abyss (2016) and Sad by Design (2019).