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Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim our Digital Future from Big Tech
Whoever controls the platforms, controls the future. Platform Socialism sets out an alternative vision and concrete proposals for a digital economy that expands our freedom.
Powerful tech companies now own the digital infrastructure of twenty-first century social life. Masquerading as global community builders, these companies have developed sophisticated new techniques for extracting wealth from their users.
James Muldoon shows how grassroots communities and transnational social movements can take back control from Big Tech. He reframes the technology debate and proposes a host of new ideas, from the local to the international, for how we can reclaim the emancipatory possibilities of digital platforms. Drawing on sources from forgotten histories to contemporary prototypes, he proposes an alternative system and charts a roadmap for how we can get there.
Powerful tech companies now own the digital infrastructure of twenty-first century social life. Masquerading as global community builders, these companies have developed sophisticated new techniques for extracting wealth from their users.
James Muldoon shows how grassroots communities and transnational social movements can take back control from Big Tech. He reframes the technology debate and proposes a host of new ideas, from the local to the international, for how we can reclaim the emancipatory possibilities of digital platforms. Drawing on sources from forgotten histories to contemporary prototypes, he proposes an alternative system and charts a roadmap for how we can get there.
200 pages, Paperback
First published January 20, 2022
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359 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 16, 2022
Excellent book with crystal clear points and cases, and not a page too long. Clearly bought in to a particular worldview, but convincingly so and with the evidence to boot. The author brings a refreshing clarity to the topic and I look forward to seeing what they do next.
April 30, 2022
James Muldon understands Platform Socialism not as a movement rooted in the real world but as an idealized future state of affairs in which, as he describes again and again in great detail, tech companies are replaced by democratic decentralized digital service providers. This static way of approaching the issue is firmly rooted in the tradition of libertarian and anarchist (meaning utopian) currents of the socialist movement which the author explicitly defends by diagnosing a „utopophobia“ in Marx‘s body of work.
The problem with this approach is that you end up with a beautifully laid out dreamscape of a future society but no way how to get there. You can count the number of pages where the issue of strategy is discussed on one hand, and each time the prescriptions are extremely vague. For the rest of the book, the author contents himself with writing „We need to do X“, implying that these policies should be implemented by elected bourgeois politicians (Muldon calls this „radical reformism“). The idea that there might be a capitalist counter movement to these ideas literally only enters the mind of the author in the last two paragraphs of the book and the genius solution he comes up with is „strengthening democratic alternatives“, whatever that means.
This idealism is perfectly encapsulated by the postscript in which a rags-to-riches WOC programmer describes Muldons version of the next 20 years from her perspective. These years are marked by an increasing centralization of platform capital resulting in a duopoly between China and the US, which is then broken up by politicians in response to a software error that killed 12 people and the subsequent protests. James Muldon might want to sit back and wait for 20 years until a random spontaneous event ushers in his desired anarchist society, but what we really need is to methodically work towards a dictatorship of the proletariat, starting now.
EDIT Nachdem in meinem Englisch Abi das Thema tangiert wurde ist mir bewusst geworden dass die Kritik an anderen linken Positionen zum Silicon Valley nicht schlecht ist. Was ich oben geschrieben habe ist aber immernoch wahr.
The problem with this approach is that you end up with a beautifully laid out dreamscape of a future society but no way how to get there. You can count the number of pages where the issue of strategy is discussed on one hand, and each time the prescriptions are extremely vague. For the rest of the book, the author contents himself with writing „We need to do X“, implying that these policies should be implemented by elected bourgeois politicians (Muldon calls this „radical reformism“). The idea that there might be a capitalist counter movement to these ideas literally only enters the mind of the author in the last two paragraphs of the book and the genius solution he comes up with is „strengthening democratic alternatives“, whatever that means.
This idealism is perfectly encapsulated by the postscript in which a rags-to-riches WOC programmer describes Muldons version of the next 20 years from her perspective. These years are marked by an increasing centralization of platform capital resulting in a duopoly between China and the US, which is then broken up by politicians in response to a software error that killed 12 people and the subsequent protests. James Muldon might want to sit back and wait for 20 years until a random spontaneous event ushers in his desired anarchist society, but what we really need is to methodically work towards a dictatorship of the proletariat, starting now.
EDIT Nachdem in meinem Englisch Abi das Thema tangiert wurde ist mir bewusst geworden dass die Kritik an anderen linken Positionen zum Silicon Valley nicht schlecht ist. Was ich oben geschrieben habe ist aber immernoch wahr.
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December 18, 2025yeaaaaah let's do it!
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December 30, 2022Czy można wymyślić nowe internety bez chciwych na ludzkie białko platform? A może trzeba wymyślić platformy na nowo, żeby przestały robić krzywdę - a zaczęły przynosić realne korzyści społeczne? Nie czytałam tej książki od deski do deski, bo była jedną z wielu lektur podczas naszego seminarium POST-Platforma. Ale na pewno będę do niej wracać, bo kwestie opisywane przez Muldona są wciąż aktualne i domagają się głębszej refleksji.
March 18, 2022
had to read this for work- great choice. gives a negative account of techs root causes and a positive account of what democratic governance of tech platforms might look like. would want more about colonialism and other forms of oppression tho. highly imaginative and practical.
February 12, 2025
Begon wel boeiend maar toen kwam het deel waar ze me moesten uitleggen hoe platform socialism dan gaan aanpakken, en dat was kak denk ik
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews