Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia

by Mike Pepi

A bold and imaginative critique of the hidden costs of digital life—and a manifesto for a better future . . .

At the turn of the millennium, digital technologies seemed to have immense promise for transforming our society. With these powerful new tools, the thinking went, we would be free to live our best lives, connected to our communities in ways full of infinite potential.

A quarter of a century on, this form of utopianism seems like a cruel mirage. Our lives are more fragmented and pressure-filled as ever, as we race to keep up with technologies that manipulate, command, and drain us at every turn.

So what happened? In Against Platforms, technologist and creator Mike Pepi lays out an explanation of what went wrong—and a manifesto for putting it right.

The key, says Pepi, is that we have been taught that digital technologies are neutral tools, transparent, easily understood, and here to serve us. The reality, Pepi says, is that they are laden with assumptions and collateral consequences—ideology, in other words. And it is this hidden ideology that must be dismantled if we are to harness technology for the fullest expression of our humanity.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Technology, Audiobook

224 pages, Paperback

Published January 7, 2025

About the author

I write about art, culture, and technology. My work has appeared in frieze, e-flux, Flash Art, Art in America, DIS Magazine, The Straddler, The New Inquiry, Artforum, The Art Newspaper, this is tomorrow, 艺术界 LEAP, the Apollo Magazine Blog, Spike Art, The Brooklyn Rail, Rhizome, and The New Criterion.

I organized Cloud-Based Institutional Critique (CBIC), a reading group focused on emerging digital technologies and their relationship to cultural institutions. In 2015 I guest edited the Data Issue of DIS Magazine with Marvin Jordan. In 2018, I guest-edited a special issue of Heavy Machinery at SFMoMA's Open Space. Learn more about CBIC here.

Reviews

[Jint'ar Darvek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Handily debunks the most common techno-utopian shibboleths.

Also offers a peek behind the curtain of how platforms came to be the dominant organizational form of our time.

Platforms eat institutions alive from the inside.
Institutions may not be perfect,
but we can intervene in them in ways that will never be possible with platforms.

Democracy, culture, and our humanity are at stake.
It's time to decide whether we exist to serve technology,
or whether it exists to serve us.

[Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Against Platforms is an interesting interrogation about the promises and our beliefs in technology. People tend to believe that technology is inherently positive and progressive and Mike Pepi does a fantastic job of debunking that as well as other ideologies concerning technologies. I found this to be a great read and would be best paired with Filterworld by Kyle Chayka.

[Laure · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thorough argument for critical discussion of regulation of big tech in the US. illuminated with personal stories from the authors life. Another crucial text for building a case against total free reign of private digital networked technology.

[Alaina · Rating 4 out of 5]

i like how pepi reframes the innovations peddled to us by the tech industry as "immediate, palliative, and commercial." neither are they as neutral or contextless as they pretend to be: all technology is "invented to solve a problem in a specific way for a given purpose," so [insert digital product here] need not force you to sign in, pay, and/or suck up your data in order to serve whatever purpose it purports, but still it chooses to do so, and it is worth wondering why.

i wish that this book weren't so bogged down with errata, and that the clunkier chapters were cut, and that pepi could do more than point out the elephant(ech) in the room (or, really, society). his definitions of "platforms" and "institutions" felt a bit metaphysical to me, which may erode the accessibility of his arguments. however, i'd still recommend this book because i believe its flaws should be overlooked in favor of pepi's reckoning.

i nodded along to much of what i read, but have not yet figured out what i want to take from it into my life, including my coding career. the closest thing to a call to action i've found is the following:

In her classic lectures on The Real World of Technology, Professor Ursula Franklin urges us to pay careful attention to language as new innovative processes… are rationalized under the guise of improvement. "Whenever someone talks to you about the benefits and costs of a project, don’t ask 'What benefits?' Ask 'Whose benefits and whose costs?'" Her point is that even though we may often be on the receiving end of technology, its real effect is the sum of what people choose to do with it. Change can come from discursive choice: what we say in response, how we choose to act, and how far we are willing to accommodate the claims of a system that clearly interrupts collective values.

[Lee Underwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

As usual, I see the discussion of tech-Utopianism through the lense of education. Tech Utopianism exploits the institution of education by forming clever rhetorical arguments surrounding issues of teacher burn-out and barriers with multilingualism. AI to the rescue. Teacher’s I know are swept up in this, failing to recognize that programs like Magic School AI is a product, not a solution. Teacher burnout is a problem, but it’s not solvable with a platform. Its problem is rooted much deeper in the institution, and its collective political will that will solve it. Not A platform with the objective to make as much money as possible. It extracts and expunges human experience for a monthly payment.

Here’s a thought: teachers must become steadfast vigilantes when it comes to platforms allowed in the classrooms. And because these platforms are reliant on cell phones, we start with that. Restrict all cell phones in the classroom. By removing cell phones and other platform centric distractions, we can create time and space attentional sanctuaries so that we can then work proactively to rejuvenate the institution of the classroom experience in ways that reinforce our students hunger for meaning, connection, and community.

The solution is not more platforms, but the collective will led by teachers to reimagine education so that it can be a place free from the problems plaguing it, the problems platforms promise to fix, but are actually only concerned with making them worse to boost profits.

[Jade Dickinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found this through the bibliography in Postcolonial Astrology by Alice Sparkly Kat (which I reread earlier this year). Like Alice, Mike’s book is a great resource for parsing through our current political and cultural moment.

Instead of using the lens of astrology and a history of colonialism, his arguments are more focused on Web 2.0 (and to a lesser extent 3.0 and AI)–how they came to be, the economic and political history leading up to the platform monopoly (Facebook, Uber, Amazon, etc), and the importance of imagining a future where they don’t exist.

This is one of those books I recommend to everyone I know because it takes a lot of my underlying thoughts and unease about how society is currently functioning within the channels of the internet and breaks down the WHY with perspectives from academia and insider tech-world. There isn’t fear mongering, nor are there too many concessions made to the benefits of these platforms. It feels like a more practical and clearheaded approach to overcoming these massive issues than one would get off social media.

Highly recommend pairing this with Brad Troemel’s Patreon videos. Brad is mentioned in this book and covers many similar topics.

[Cindy._.Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have to stop reading books like this, I'm starting to go into any conversation about technology acting like Charlie Day talking about Pepe Silvia.

[Jana · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,5⭐️

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love how this is not a "throw away all your devices we're doomed" kind of book, because as much as we hate it tech and platforms are here and we can't avoid them. Really interesting arguments that gave me a lot to think about

[Algirdas Kraunaitis · Rating 2 out of 5]

For anyone tired of social media or aware of what is going on with/on TikTok - this book will be very topical. There are some recurring ideas through out the book: technological solutions to societal problems do very little to address the actual issues at hand, the internet - from the wiring under the sea to protocols governing (supposedly dicentralised) social meida platforms - are man made and this is something we need to have in mind when thinking/talking it. I am not familiar with this topic very much, so this book did a good job of making me think about the way media makes us think about the internet and how I myself engage with platforms in general. I have some gripes with the book: brevity is not the authors strong point, not sure what was the point of the Jstor tantrum in the context it was presented. All around a good book and worth checking out. I might re-read this after reading a few other related books, to see how I feel about it.

[firuza huseynova · Rating 2 out of 5]

I only wish I knew that this wasn’t a serious (ie. rigorously-cited, well-researched) book before I started reading it. Or, I should say, listening to it - at least one full star has probably been taken away because the voice of this audiobook’s narrator was so irritatingly smug. To be fair, when going back to take notes on the book, it seems like Pepi’s written voice was just so irritatingly smug despite offering very few original thoughts, so I suppose the narrator was just doing the best with what he was gifted.

I’ll start with what I liked about this book. Firstly, I agree with Pepi’s thesis that the ideology driving platform capitalism (he dubs it “Silicon Valley ideology”) has been wholly destructive to digital public life. His solution is also fairly straight-forward: modernize institutions by building more robust digital infrastructure. I like some of the thinkers he draws from to flesh out his points, including Thomas More, Zizek, and Jameson. He’s even got a few banger quotes, like: “The Overton window of platform capitalism pigeonholed us into incremental techno-fixes”.

But overall, this book was full of broadly-stroked fluff. Pepi relies far too much on the words “always” and “never”. He thinks in a surprisingly narrow fashion, ridiculing the practice of utopian thinking altogether and parroting for a safe return to institutional hegemony. Pepi rejects “Silicon Valley ideology” without ever diving into the details of what exactly this ideology entails. He seems to be certain of the strength of his analysis, constantly diminishing any dissenting views. I may be especially critical of this type of writing because I fear I employ a similar style in my own writing. But it’s just a bit jarring to recognize blog-house criticism in a Published Book!

If you’re interested in a well-researched account of Silicon Valley’s ideology, I recommend Emile P. Torres and Timnit Gebru’s articulate, punchy, and succinct 2024 research paper “The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence” (which Pepi does not reference at all… he would be much better off reading it… he even mentions eschatology at one point!). If you’re interested in a history of platforms and the market logic leading them, I reccmmend Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism or Taylor’s The People Platform (neither of which show up on Pepi’s bibliography, either). Pepi spends the better half of Chapter 9 glazing Joshua Citarella’s satirical story of Facebook becoming nationalized and subsumed by the U.S. postal service. Fair enough. I love him, too. But he’s not even credited in the (very sparse) bibliography!

I don’t want to feed into the overly-critical Balkanized Left stereotype, so I will end this review by saying I agree with Pepi’s main message. We should aim to strengthen whatever is left of our existing institutions if we wish to rebuild any semblance of communal metanarrative and societal ethics. The future depends on institutional reform, although those institutions should look different - self-optimizing for public interests rather than private interests. I’m just not sure I needed to sit through 13 hours of Pepi’s bloated and self-aggrandizing book to come to those conclusions.

[Will Tucker · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first heard of this book on Joshua Citarella’s podcast: Doomscroll. I was excited to find there’s half a chapter or so about projects of Citarella’s that I had never heard of.

Overall, this book further supported some of my suspicions about venture capitalism, the tech industry, crypto and Silicon Valley. It gave me better vocabulary to describe those suspicions as well. I found it all very easy to agree with, which makes me somewhat thirsty for a critical opinion of the book.

The book provided new perspectives for me as well. It made me realize I have thought about problem solving, technology, business, etc. from the perspective of platform capitalism for a long time now. I think that’s because it’s the model we primarily see these days - and I went to school for entrepreneurship, plus I have benefited from the gig economy. “Everyone is an entrepreneur” didn’t sound so bad to me in my early adult years, but as I grow in my world view I see more of the flaws.
This book caused me to reevaluate how I might solve problems if I could will a solution into existence - thinking deeper about the root cause rather than the immediate, apparent pain point. In entrepreneurship classes I was taught to find a pain point and address it, then monetize it, but this is a mindset that leads to techno-fixes as described in the book. It’s not a bad business philosophy in the pursuit of profit, but more and more that’s not what life is about to me.

Putting tech enthusiasts into different schools of thought is also a new idea for me. I think it’s helpful to be able to determine the difference between techno-Utopianism, techno-determinism, etc. It even has me reevaluating some of my philosophies in my tech adjacent career.

I did find the book a little fuzzy at times. In the episode of Doomscroll mentioned above, Citarella touches on this. Pepi’s definition of a platform is a bit vague, and his definition of an institution even more so, and both are pieced together slowly throughout the book. There are also times that the writing feels complex and wordy for the sake of being complex and wordy, but I’m also not an avid reader. It might be that this book is just a bit over my typical reading level.

All else aside, I went out of my way to read this book and I’m glad I did.

[Nicholas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dense with insight, this book merits multiple readings. I valued its fidelity to the anti-utopian project, to the point that it doesn't provide easy answers which might themselves be excessively utopian. "When you point out the flaws of digital utopianism," Pepi explains, "you will be given a common retort: ‘So what’s your plan?’ Utopian political thinking is so moribund precisely because it disallows critique to gain traction."

This book of multiple critiques is especially valuable given the increasingly utopian prognostications of Big Tech that dare us not to follow it into the "inevitable" next chapter of human existence. As Pepi notes, some of these utopians are true believers and others are capitalist opportunists; but the profiteers' enthusiasm can get to the true believers' heads and heighten their grandiosity. It is all the more important, then, that we remain steadfastly “allergic to utopian talk," as Pepi describes Marx. "The most a revolutionary [can] do," he cites Eagleton, is "to describe the conditions under which a different sort of future might be possible."

(Now, all this said, I was very pleased to invite Pepi to speak to the ethics program I direct at MIT, and he did expand a bit on how we might integrate platforms and traditional institutions rather than putting them to war against each other. You can find the video on Youtube on MIT Radius's YouTube channel. Mike was great!)

[Gus Tringale · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The block chain is a perfect solution to the problem we haven’t discovered yet” -Yanis Varoufakis

Also, here is a definition of the block chain that maybe allowed me to understand it a bit more: the block chain is a wall of glass boxes that everyone can see into, but only one person holds the key to unlock their glass box and move the object to another one. (Not a direct quote, but close to what Mike Pepi wrote.)

Still, this clear definition does not make clear a value to this. It’s just the next marketing ploy of the tech industry just like AI. Intelligence can never be artificial. Like algorithms, large language models are constantly in need of maintenance and are quickly getting into degenerative territory. Soon, AI will be drawing mostly from its previous “creations.” It will become ever more like useless slop. We understand that the product is nowhere near as powerful as they say it is, why don’t we just let it exist as a tool that can be used for very specific things while also not wasting gazillions of venture capital dollars on worse and worse stuff? Tech did not and cannot democratize the means of production. Tech wont save us from political problems, only political solutions will.

[illiterate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pepi explores the idea that society has just accepted tech as an inevitable net positive social advancement. He argues that this idea needs to be challenged and brings up the idea that platform capitalism is just another way to extract value out of consumers, I mean citizens. It’s not an argument for ludditism but more so a critique on techno-utopians.

Within this main theme he discusses the fact that we’ve seen platforms gain control of culture and society with the backing of private equity. Platform capitalism is operating under the guise of technological advancements. This is accelerating the deterioration of our institutions, which goes back to neoliberalism’s ascension in the 70’s.

I think we all have a vague understanding of these concepts but he lays down a cohesive argument that I think anybody will appreciate it. Pepi verbalizing the fact technologically “advancement” has stalled social and political innovation is something that really stuck with me

[Groucho42 · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have been in technology for a long time and I understand the problems with software platforms. When I saw this on the New Books shelves in my library, I was curious what the author had to say. My response is that it's so appropriate this was published by Melville, it's overwritten the platforms are the author's white whale. However, unlike Ahab, he couldn't even harpoon it. This is a rant in a small format so it's even more tiring to read.

Computers can't think? What insight! He does a pretty poor job talking about how AI is statistical in nature and spends too much time stating it isn't human -- which isn't something anyone who can read this would think true. There are more problems such as that, but the largest is he really doesn't provide any solutions or directions. He conclusion vaguely mentions Walt Whitman and that there might be something past platforms.

Avoid this.

[Alice · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book would be a solid 3 stars if it weren’t for its US-centric viewpoint. You cannot talk about social media, Silicon Valley, libertarianism and the role of government in platforms without talking about CHINA. I kept thinking ‘well he must be saving up China for the last 3 chapters’ but no, instead we just get ‘I guess we’ll never know what State run platforms might look like’. Unsure if he was too much of a pussy to talk about China or he didn’t even consider it.

[Arnav]

Really cool stuff learned a lot and Pepi’s writing was straightforward and clear for the most part, but sometimes the techno-jargon stuff was really confusing. I also feel like towards the end more concrete examples could have been provided for how to incorporate tech into institutions. Overall though really informative and even more reason to be disgusted by Silicon Valley

[Ryan Seffinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mike ties together tons of great insights from various writers, plus his own insight, for a super accessible read especially as Musk takes over the American Empire and we fall into the dustbin of history.

[Hyun Kang · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little dense and redundant at some parts but overall good commentary about the current digital state of the world and offers a realistic approach on how digital platforms and formal institutions could balance each other without going to the extreme annulation of the other

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

more like 4.5 stars

[Andrea Ferguson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ughhhhhh

A great reminder of the people (libertarian freaks) behind every tech platforms

[Robbie Herbst · Rating 5 out of 5]

read Mike Pepi if you want to understand why computer feels bad now and how it might feel not so bad in the future!