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AGAINST_PLATFORMS

                                             February 22, 2025

"Against Platforms" (2025)
  by Mike Pepi                          FIRST13

                                                This was an impulse buy from
A critic of the ideology of                     City Lights "Topologies" section.
techno-utopianism:
                                                      I wanted to like this
    "the idea that technology, and                    book... it's fighting
    technology alone will create a                    me every step of the way.
    more egalitarian, democratic
    society".
                                         Almost all he's got really
                                         is bitching about people who
                                         technology alone is the way.

                                                         TECHIES_FALLACY

    To start with: while it seems
    likely to *me* that a "utopian"
    world would be egalitarian and
    democratic, it's not at all clear
    to me that your average
    sili-valley technophile would
    agree, certainly not these days.

        Secondly, according to Pepi, the problem isn't
        the idea that "technology" can get us there,
        it's the idea is that it's *all* we need.

               So technology that isn't
               "technology alone" might be            The question then
               useful.  "Technology Plus" might       is plus what?
               be just what we need, right?
                                                      What do we need need in
                                                      addition to "technology"?

            So, we're talking about "technology"
            as opposed to something else, and
            I'm going to make a wild guess it's
            going to be "technical vs social"

            And for that framing to work, it would be
            good if we could distinguish between the two.   Myself, I have
                                                            trouble making sense
                                                            of the idea that
                                                            "technology" can
                                                            exist *without* the
                                                            "social".

                                                               NOSOCKS


According to the title, this is a book
"Against Platforms".  So what's a platform?    I see another reviewer
                                               observes that Pepi
                                               isn't really *against*
When Pepi says "Platform", it sounds           platforms such as the
to me like what we use to call "a              algorithmic governed
silo"-- but we obviously didn't know           discussion systems...
what we were talking about or else
everyone wouldn't have ignored us when                           So then, *both*
we were warning about this shit thirty                           terms in the
years ago.                                                       title are
                                                                 problematic.
                      YE_OLDE_NETNERD

                                                Looking around, it seems
   If I'm correct about where Pepi is           that "silo" is now used
   going his grand solutions are going          for any kind of vertical
   to be things we were recommending            isolation, often inside a
   decades ago-- open systems, without          particular organization.
   vendor lock-in; typically managed by
   volunteer community organizations and
   non-profits.

           PLATFIX
                          Actually, it's not clear to me if he's
                          even caught on that the "free-ad-supported"
                          model has severe problems.



        Pepi talks about how techno-utopianism blended with
        techno-determinism and free market capitalism "to
        create what many have called platform captialism".

        Actually, that's very helpful...

        Pepi himself doesn't seem to feel the need to
        explain what he means by a "platform", but the
        wikipedia page on Platform Capitalism provides
        a nice discussion with copious examples:

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_capitalism

                                            PLATCAP

       I was wondering, because traditionally,
       a software platform is a somewhat broader idea:

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing_platform







            Then there's the fact that he uses the term
            "Algorithm" in the modern style, which is a
            catch-all for the way the fundamentally opaque      ALGORITHM
            ways in which the various big tech companies
            products work.





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