# Chapter 3: Why to escape platforms?

## Outline

A taxonomy of (political) issues:

* BASICALLY THE PLATFORMS' BUSINESS IS NOT TO PROMOTE PUBLIC CONVERSATIONS. All they can do is block and censor. Their business model is concerned with the sheer volume of messages (like telcos) and the commercially-relevant data that can be extracted from them, not their quality nor their contribution to "the city" (civic life) - Example of Facebook's dealing with Whatsapp appropriation by its users to turn it into a group communication system (by curbing them from large scale message forwarding)
* Cognition-related issues: attention suckers, unconscious manipulation vs. informed consent [@Yeung2017a], cognitive skills weakened [@Hayles2007a]
* Privacy-related issues: numerous breaches, data sovereignty, surveillance capitalism: both business and governance model [@Zuboff2015a]
* Democracy-related issues: undermining democratic public sphere and national sovereignty [@Bratton2015b]
* Market-related issues: market concentration [@Srnicek2016a], anti-trust problematic, social media monopolies (because of network effects, falling transaction costs because of automation), US hegemony

# From @Maxigas2017c

Eventually, *surveillance* came to be the key means for both maintaining social peace and deepening exploitation on social media platforms. [^3] Everyday, informal, even intimate gestures are captured and stored, sorted and mined for the purposes of both targeted advertising and targeted policing.

[TODO: concrete example here!]

> [name=Alix-]

We will need to refrain from using a too obvious ideological tone in the analytical sections. I suggest using “targeted policing” (but we need to provide an example). Additionally, I think what follows should take place either at the end of the chapter, in a more reflective section (rather than analytical, as the chapter should start with), or in the beginning of the next chapter, as a fundamental argument for "pressing the ESC key".

Such revenue is indispensable to the capital accumulation mechanisms of a growing section of capital, while the intelligence gained by authorities who share access to the information flows is essential to the maintenance of social order in both dictatorships *and* democracies. For instance, surveillance – technically based on the analysis of log files – accounted for 89% of Google’s profit in 2014 [@Griffith2015a]. [^4] All this hinges on successful *platformisation*: the ability of a vendor to install themselves as an obligatory passage point for generally mundane and often minuscule social interactions [@Gillespie2010a]. The kind of digital milieus where average Internet users chit-chat nowadays have been variously described by scholars as *enclosures*, *walled gardens* and *social media monopolies* [@LovinkRasch2013a].

…

Notably, neither chat [@LatzkoToth2010a] nor personal computing [@Levy1984a] were “inventions” in the sense that a good idea was implemented and socialised through commodity circulation. Both found a foothold in the market only after a relatively long period where fringe elements fought for them, often breaking existing laws, regulations and social norms. Society then slowly tamed these technologies – and now they are used to pacify society itself.

## Also from @Maxigas2017c

The anxiety experienced by users stems from the fact that a supposedly informal space of social interaction is mediated by capital and overseen by the state, through mechanisms that seem obscure, arbitrary and partial from below. One can remember that the two defining characteristics of a healthy *civil society* that can support technological sovereignty are its independence from capital and separation from the state [@Hache2014d]. It is *privacy* in a structural and collective sense that can be reclaimed through technological sovereignty initiatives, but only through the continuous struggle of users for taking the technological mediation of their social life into their own hands.

## References

Bratton, Benjamin. 2015. *The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty*. Boston, MA: MIT Press.

Hayles, N. K. (2007). Hyper and deep attention: The generational divide in cognitive modes. Profession, 2007(1), 187-199.

Srnicek, Nick. 2016. *Platform Capitalism*. London: Polity Press.

Yeung, Karen. 2017. ‘Hypernudge’: Big Data as a Mode of Regulation by Design. Information, Communication & Society 20(1): 118-136.

Zuboff, Shoshana. 2015. "Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization." *Journal of Information Technology* 30 (1). doi:10.1057/jit.2015.5