# Can we escape platforms?

- [Introduction](/@escape/introduction)
- [Chapter 1: What are socio-digital platforms?](/@escape/chapter1)
- [Chapter 2: The platformisation of social media](/@escape/chapter2)
- [Chapter 3: Why to escape platforms?](/@escape/chapter3)
- [Chapter 4: What are the alternatives?](/@escape/chapter4)
- [Conclusion: Towards a social media commons?](/@escape/conclusion)

We try to write 8-10.000 words per chapter, so TOTAL 48.000-60.000 words.

## Rationale

Socio-digital platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram have become the de facto infrastructures of everyday public and private communication online. Despite important flaws and issues related to them, repeatedly denounced in the public sphere, they seem unavoidable. And while the mass of users sometimes “migrate” from a platform to another, they mostly stay within the digital premises of the giant companies (Google/Alphabet, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) that epitomize capitalism in the digital age. At the same time, alternative platforms based on non-commercial, privacy, and emancipatory principles (e.g. Diaspora, Mastondon) fail to catch on on a large scale.
How did we come to this situation? Is it true that there is no viable alternative to commercial platforms to constitute the communication infrastructure of our mediated social lives? These are the central questions that this book will tackle to answer.
The overall picture that emerges both from news events and academic scholarship is that platforms pose significant challenges for civil society, economic stability and liberal democracy. Our book will engage with the debate on platforms and argue that plaforms could be overcome. It will bring critical and constructive arguments based on empirical research in the fields of media history as well as science and technology studies.

## Argument

Platforms in recent years have been studied in relation to neoliberal policies which undermine infrastructures as utilities. They shape public debate and outmaneuver informed consent, contribute to financial bubbles, and incurse on national sovereignty, for instance through election manipulation. They have been construed as the centrepiece of surveillance capitalism. In this book, we provide notions of what are socio-digital platforms, trace their emergence, and unpack their socio-economic logic. Then, we document the trajectory of the computer-mediated communication devices and social media that predate Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Snapchat and alikes. One of these devices, the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol, will be used as a schoolbook case to understand the contemporary prevalence of platforms, their persistence, as well as the subversive potential of nonproprietary social media. Still thriving within certain groups of Internet users, IRC is at the core of the everyday activities in peer-production. IRC is used in free software, open knowledge and wikis, makerspaces and hackerspaces, hacktivism… and these are the factory of our digital world.