On Platform Brutality
“Uncooling the Apps” with Geert Lovink
Platform criticism has arrived at an awkward moment. The diagnosis is arguably settled — extraction, dependency, and the degradation of services — and accepted, including by the many who continue to scroll unthinkingly. What remains is what a critical concept must do to matter.
In Platform Brutality: Closing Down Internet Toxicity (Valiz, 2025), media theorist Geert Lovink examines the increasingly coercive conditions of platform culture, from the capture of attention and the paradox of electronic loneliness to our growing dependence on digital infrastructures that have become difficult to leave.
In this conversation, we consider the relationship between the book’s strong diagnostic force and the more provisional character of its constructive proposals — particularly the invention of concepts and figures, the limits of disconnection, and the material conditions under which both critique and invention become possible. Our discussion moves through Bernard Stiegler and the politics of attention, Hannah Arendt and mass culture, distraction and “copium,” before returning to the term at the center of Lovink’s argument: what does “brutality” name that platform power alone does not?
Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist, internet critic, and founder of the Institute of Network Cultures (INC) in Amsterdam. His research examines digital culture, social media, networked publics, and the political and psychological consequences of platform technologies.
The author of numerous books on internet culture and media theory, including Uncanny Networks (2002), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2011), Social Media Abyss (2016), Sad by Design (2019), and Stuck on the Platform (2022), Lovink is also a member of Adilkno, the Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge, a Dutch media and art collective founded in 1983, whose collected work appeared as The Media Archive.
a conversation
Chennie Huang: Before we start, let’s please address the elephant in the room: how should we understand your definition of “platform” when speaking of Platform Brutality? “Axis of Culture” is known as an editorial platform; we aim to be a place for productive discourse on contemporary art and culture. Meanwhile, the word “platform” has taken on very different meanings over the past two decades. The "platform" in this book seems to denote something much more specific; how would you draw that distinction?
Geert Lovink: Until a decade ago, platform was still an aspirational term. It was used in start-up and influencer circles as something more ambitious than maintaining one’s website, blog or social media account. Platforms don't just have visitors; users must create a profile. The cut-off date for the consolidation of platform power would be 2016, with Trump 1, Brexit, and the rise of right-wing populist movements. This is also when belief in globalist neo-liberal progress turned into a feeling of regression and stagnation (which can be traced back to the 2008 economic crisis). 4chan is becoming visible. The dark star is rising. Before this political-cultural turn, the platform concept still echoed its original meaning of a launching pad, a public place that gathers forces and voices. This is how you, Axis of Culture, perhaps still see its task. The current understanding has lost the element of agency. Users are potentially nasty customers, subjects, aware that they are surveilled, with limited possibilities to act: scroll, watch, click, like, and follow. It is a culture of suspicion. After a period of hypergrowth, platforms become associated with a centralized infrastructure that ‘weaponizes’ the literally billions of users it facilitates.
The limited yet powerful definition of platforms is not written in stone. There’s always a possibility that Big Tech can lose its grip on the term. War can make them submissive to higher goals. A crisis can turn mass attention and loyalty away for good. We’re not there yet. Until recently, scholars believed that power was about to move a level up and hide in the “stack.” This is what was called the infrastructural turn. Think of IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and even Google, retreating into an invisible level of hegemony. This image still circles about certain benevolent AI companies that will merely facilitate automation, running in the background, instead of constantly dominating the news with scary stories about machines gaining consciousness and taking over.
The opposite happened. As I describe in my book, platformization took a violent, DOGE-style turn. Innocent data extractivism came to a halt, while former libertarian tech bros sided with Trump and the military. As users are locked in, their inability to move on backfires inside, causing mental health issues ranging from mild forms such as sadness to anxiety, depression, indifference, and paranoia. Spam, shitposting, and a rug pull are an integral part of life. Platform dependency is such that there’s literally nowhere else to go. Why haven’t you moved from Instagram in the same way as you once left MySpace or Tumblr? It’s unthinkable to delete WhatsApp, forget YouTube, and forget one’s Google password. That’s platform power. Instead of legalistic regulatory impulses or “European” offline romanticism, I propose dropping the platform altogether, reclaiming the speculative media imagination: build new communities and focus on the tasks ahead. Why and what to communicate? Instead of dreaming of digital totalities, start using the media you’ve created as tools, not as environments that cannot be turned off.
“Manipulation of content is rampant. Anno 2026, everyone’s numbed. No one cares.”
CH: Your analysis of platform power seems to me to align with Stiegler’s account of platform capitalism as a form of neuropower that systematically disrupts attention span and eliminates noetic depth. Therefore, the task is to reconstitute the conditions of attention and knowledge rather than to criticize their destruction. How do you see the relationship between that claim and your own emphasis on inventing concepts and figures?
GL: Stiegler’s strategy to overcome the attention crisis and the wider entropy collapse is twofold. On the one hand, he argued for restoring the attention span through close reading, deep thinking, and time for reflection. After his unfortunate passing in 2020, it is now up to us to carry on his legacy. This will not merely be the continuation of his philosophy of technology, which even Bernard, at the time, presented as a half-finished building. Besides this necessary, yet still marginal, intellectual project, we will have to find creative, hands-on ways to undermine the power of Big Tech. It’s urgent to find seductive ways to uncool the apps. Why aren’t social media platforms perceived by youngsters as boring, ugly, old-fart toys that have been the same for over two decades?
The second strategy was Stiegler’s emphasis on the pharmakon: tech as a double-edged sword. It is a poison and medicine. This matters as we move into a dangerous and unstable era in which the poisonous side is becoming so profound that it can easily overrule the healing side. Who seriously works on its new epistemological foundations? Take Jonathan Haidt’s bestseller The Anxious Generation, which confirms all Stiegler’s theses. All good. However, it offers no creative communication alternatives. In Haidt's follow-up, there’s only repressive regulation and medicalization of youngsters. Just moralistic warnings, no sign of liberation or rebellion, only restrictions. This leads to policing, not to a fertile counterculture. We should do a better job.
Fine, we made progress in diagnosis. But what strategies will provoke a mass exodus? Sadly, artists will be the last to leave. I feel for this retrograde. This might be because of their precarity, but this is a serious concern. Same story with civil society activists. Recent “woke” movements have been policing everyone else except their own social media usage. Will experimentation have to come from elsewhere? You tell me. Gen Z is exposed to the max. It is a delight to work with them, but I feel for them. Levels of anxiety should perhaps even be accelerated and not compensated for by knitting in class, with offline weekends or corporate time limits.
Let’s bring on radical disgust, in public. How could such an impulsive physical rejection be provoked? What turns you off? Why are we all the poor suckers? No exception: even the old money elites, illegal migrants, billionaire bimbos, we’re all in. My modest contribution is to open up conceptual spaces, collective forms of imagination, where another techno-social is possible. Magic words are machines (yes, I am Deleuzian in that sense), embodied by radical forms of subjectivity I call “figures.” Lately, these figures are mainly reactionary and resentful, such as the chud, due to the conservative Zeitgeist, also amongst Gen Z. World events may be the only driver to change this.
CH: In “Principles of Figure Design,” you quote Urbanomic's copy for Grelet's Theory of the Solitary Sailor as "complex marketing marble." The sequence you then describe — notice, name, give it shape, style and gesture, until the description flips into a convincing definition — calls to mind the cycle of commercial brand development. That also seems close to Adorno and Horkheimer’s culture industry framework you invoked elsewhere in the book. Why not here? In your opinion, should the promotion of an anti-philosophy thought, as in Grelet’s book, be exempt from the very culture-industrial operations you are analyzing?
GL: Singular lifestyles provoke our minds to get out, quit, leave the scene, and go in whatever direction, not just the Grelet route. Solitude is a choice one can respect. It doesn’t beg to be promoted. Real existing, involuntary loneliness, however, is a mass disease that I describe in Platform Brutality in a separate essay called “Loneliness in the Age of Social Media.” In it I focus on electronic loneliness, which I see as a lived paradox. How can socials (!) contribute to such an extent of loneliness? Why is it tolerated in the first place and, in essence, facilitated? Why have community functions been so reduced in favor of aimless scrolling? Are these apps perhaps not social in the first place, and in whose interest is it that we still use the term “social media” so widely, so uncritically?
A figure like the solitary sailor may be sold as an identity, but what I am more interested in is how figures can turn into currents, scenes, tribes, and, ultimately, movements. In this late neo-liberal age, solo solutions are everywhere. The trick will be to re-invent the social in truly 21st-century styles. Appropriation, misuse, and profiting from other people’s work may be more than ever. Yet, it’s not one of today’s urgent questions. The generic cult of suspicion, creating this or that sectarian field in need to fence off its own (imaginary) borders, stops us from coming together. Or going separate ways, for that matter.
“In previous decades, it was all about access, links, connections. Internet as a human right. No one thought about deletion. In this sense, we’re back at square one, with the internet as a spinoff from Cold War computer network research, aimed at surviving a nuclear attack.”
CH: In the same chapter, you stress that interpreting existing concepts is no longer enough, and that the work now is to cast new ones. Then you also say concepts are found footage, that the process is re-discovery followed by updating. What does a good updating look like, and what makes one recombination worth more than another?
GL: There may be an eternal return of the same. That should not stop us from trying out new constellations. Language is magic. Forgotten words and banal sayings suddenly get twisted, are turned inside out, recombined, and then start to shine again. I am influenced here by Baudrillard and Canetti, and their idea of the crystal, this tiny compressed object. To me, miraculous concepts are crystals. They are not vulnerable. Quite the opposite: they are tiny but proud and seem to talk to us. Like in the chip industry, they get exponentially smaller — and more powerful. A concept may be minuscule, but it shines (as Dutch architecture theorist Maurice Nio explained). That’s their seductive quality. You load up your concept with meaning, with potential energy to transform energy into events, and there it goes.
On the image level, the viral meme dynamic has been studied more lately. I also contribute to that field with meme theory, the three readers we produced at the Institute of Network Cultures, and my own memes that I use during lectures and theory rap performances. Note that the good old William Burroughs “language is a virus” phrase has not had much airtime lately. If you start playing with words, the potential is amazing. This includes naming emerging figures, such as “the girl” for an example (see the upcoming INC-related Girl Theory Reader, edited by Mela Miekus and Mita Medri, published by Set Margins’). It’s an interesting question whether you can train yourself to “run into” concepts or have to sit down and “invent” them. I collect and publish slogans of the day, aphorisms, and quotes. I further compress them and often publish them with graphic designer Mieke Gerritzen. This is visual poetry. Even the art of prompting can be viewed through this lens, as the upcoming book by Mieke Gerritzen and Peter Lunenfeld shows (with BIS Publishers). In the early 1990s, our theory collective Adilkno coined the Unidentified Theory Objects, or UTOs. Autonomedia in Brooklyn brought them together in 1998, in an untimely book called The Media Archive. Some of the better-known ones are “the data dandy” figure and sovereign media (which broadcasts to itself, no longer needing a fictitious audience, or followers, for that matter).
CH: In "What's Social Networking Today?" you draw from Arendt's essay “The Crisis in Culture,” and her response to Rosenberg's essay on the "intellectualization of kitsch." Arendt's reference to Rosenberg’s view seems to function as part of her critical account of how mass culture became an object of intellectual interpretation, questioning whether mass society precedes mass culture. Did you intend to continue the view that popular culture cannot be left to the populace? And how do you see the force of that idea today, when platforms can turn critical gestures into circulating content, severing them from the contexts that gave them meaning and weakening their critical force?
GL: It is not immediately obvious how the “old media” techniques of editorial control, propaganda, and guidance of the masses eventually reappeared in the internet context. A fact is that the “short summer of internet”, with its claim of new media as tools for democratic participation, has long been a closed chapter. Ever since algorithms came to organize content, priority has been back on the agenda. What do we get to see? This started with the ranking of search engine results and a decade later with the introduction of news feeds in social networks. Manipulation of content is rampant. Anno 2026, everyone’s numbed. No one cares. It’s widely accepted that Musk and Zuckerberg run ideological machines: filter, shadow ban, delete.
We let this happen — and now it seems too late. There is no difference from how radio, television, and newspapers operated 50 years ago. Except there’s no accountable editorial staff. They are invisible, 24/7, and have content-moderator as job title. They may work in anonymous offices in Manila, Nairobi, New York, or Dublin. User voices have been reduced to comments and likes. Most refrain from uploading anything. The content that shows up is professionally produced: videos that briefly explain, that are optimized, compressed, without context or nuance, let alone dissent or discussion. Tons of it, impossible to keep up. AI-produced summaries only add to the problem. Has the automated spectacle anything to do with popular culture? I doubt it.
CH: In "Copium Compendium" you describe copium as a defense mechanism — a psychological strategy that allows survival without provoking political action. You also refuse the moralism around it: coping follows from losing the positive side of ideology, and apathy needn't carry a stigma. If copium is both a rational response to the conditions and part of what keeps those conditions in place, how might a distinction be drawn between coping that retains critical force and coping that doesn't?
GL: The online billions need to get through the day. They do this through their phone and the temporary relief of aimlessly scrolling through slop they cannot control. The planetary multitudes struggle. They have more than one job and not enough income to get by. They are permanently exhausted, bored, brain-dead. The growing social inequality is visible everywhere, yet this has not been generally accepted as a reality to the same degree as mass migration or the climate crisis have. The working class has the right to be entertained and to have a break. The Marxian understanding of the reproduction of the labor force still stands (despite shifts in class composition). Checking your phone whenever possible is like smoking a cigarette decades ago. If you want to dive deeper, please read the interview I did with Petra Löffler in 2013 about her history of distraction from a German media theory perspective. That same year, she debated with Stiegler and others about social media and the collapse of attention during the third Unlike Us conference in Amsterdam. It’s important to keep in mind the shift from the historical right of the working class to be distracted (as Kracauer and Benjamin once defended), to the current messy mixture of attention and constant distraction during work hours itself and the extension of work hours to day and night, including long commutes. The ability to remain focused during a longer period of time, in any work context, has become a rare skill, a hard-earned skill of New Age people that constantly has to be maintained through daily yoga and meditation exercises. Deep attention is a luxury only a few can afford.
CH: In “Undoing Networks,” you ask who can afford to withdraw, and the answer — those precarious workers, whose livelihoods make withdrawal difficult, cannot — becomes a critique of digital detox as a lifestyle solution. In “Principles of Figure Design,” you make a related observation: you reject the romanticization of poverty and unemployment, and describe invention as requiring freedom, privacy, autonomy, and the capacity to stretch time. But the acknowledgment of material constraint does not seem to change the conditions you prescribe for invention. To what social or economic position is the kind of intellectual independence and inventiveness you describe available?
GL: There is no freedom or autonomy around the corner. I am the last one to suggest otherwise, even though I have been fighting social media monopolies since 2011. I do not promote the offline. The messy everyday life of billions requires constant coordination and updates. Relevant local news can go viral and be lifesaving, but most of the time it's just silly noise. The chat goes on forever, and the flirtation goes nowhere as kids need to be picked up. A friend is in trouble, parents call, a package wasn't delivered, neighbors aren't home. The train was delayed, the Uber was late, and the café wasn't open. Should I bring the Parmigiano? Life must have been way more complex in the past. Or simpler? I can’t think about it right now. Will AI complicate things even further?
“My modest contribution is to open up conceptual spaces, collective forms of imagination, where another techno-social is possible.”
CH: To me, your term “Platform Brutality” suggests more than economic and political violence; it also describes a transformation in how knowledge, attention, and meaning are produced. What does “brutality” name here that “platform power” alone would not? Does its strongest force lie in what platforms do economically and politically, or in their capacity to reorganize the conditions under which knowledge is formed, and thought is processed?
GL: The violent turn I describe unfolds in a dramatic period, with platform functionality at full capacity. Optimization is still going strong, amidst lockdowns, wars, and system crashes. While decline may be visible everywhere, hypermodernity continues its journey. Is this the dialectics of technology philosophers politely refuse to talk about? With no synthesis in sight, the acceleration is going in all directions — including those few anticipated. Here I build on Hannah Arendt, who stated that violence occurs when (soft) power no longer works. Silicon Valley is a classic case. Why did they so openly side with Trump in early 2025? They could have politely refused and stayed away, as they did before. Instead, they sided with the brutal forces because their hegemonic, invisible data extractivism no longer worked. Contradictions had reached the surface. The mainstream started questioning Big Tech. Not openly, out of protest, or because they disagreed, but because of their arrogant display of wealth and power.
The spell was broken. Connect this to ICE, the wave of militarization, and the rise of Palantir. After the manuscript was finished, I wrote an essay about DOGE and their experimentation with mass deletion: structural violence with devastating consequences. Think of the 300,000 who were fired, and the erasure of USAID and its implications — in Congo, for instance, with the current Ebola outbreak. In previous decades, it was all about access, links, connections. Internet as a human right. No one thought about deletion. In this sense, we’re back at square one, with the internet as a spinoff from Cold War computer network research, aimed at surviving a nuclear attack.
“The ability to remain focused during a longer period of time, in any work context, has become a rare skill, a hard-earned skill of New Age people that constantly has to be maintained through daily yoga and meditation exercises.”
This conversation is part of Axis of Culture’s Autumn 2026 issue exploring how cultural, social, and technological disruptions shape thought, creative practice, and the ways we interpret and inhabit the world.Chennie Huang is the Founder of Axis of Culture.