Astra Taylor on The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

Astra Taylor © Deborah Degraffenried

In her new book, The People’s Platform, Astra Taylor, a cultural critic and the director of the documentaries Zizek! and Examined Life, challenges the notion that the Internet has brought us into an age of cultural democracy. While some have hailed the medium as a platform for diverse voices and the free exchange of information and ideas, Taylor shows that these assumptions are suspect at best. Instead, she argues, the new cultural order looks much like the old: big voices overshadow small ones, content is sensationalist and powered by advertisements, quality work is underfunded, and corporate giants like Google and Facebook rule. The Internet does offer promising tools, Taylor writes, but a cultural democracy will be born only if we work collaboratively to develop the potential of this powerful resource. I asked her six questions about her book:

1. What were the benefits and challenges of presenting philosophical discussions in writing rather than in film?

There is so much more space to communicate in a book. Most people don’t realize how little information can be conveyed in a feature film. The transcripts of both of my movies are probably equivalent in length to a Harper’s cover story. When you’re writing, you can incorporate digressions, caveats, counterarguments, and footnotes that would cause a movie to lose all of its momentum. Of course cinema communicates on other registers: there are visual and sonic elements, video editing has its own logic, there are facial expressions and body language to interpret, and so on. But with the book I was relieved to work on something that didn’t require a big budget or a crew or insurance or worrying about whether it was going to rain. Still, I miss filmmaking, which is why I’m starting work on another philosophy documentary, this one about democracy and political theory.

2. How did you come to realize that the predictions made by techno-optimists about the Internet were flawed?

In 2009 I attended a conference about Web 2.0 and felt something was amiss. There was this conflation of communal creative spirit and capitalist spunk; the general assumption was that a combination of networked technology and the free market was going to overthrow the old order and usher in this new egalitarian age. The speakers and audience were all deeply critical of legacy media, of Hollywood and newspapers and the Recording Industry Association of America (and rightly so; there are lots of things to criticize them all for) but they refused to apply the same skeptical sensibility to the emerging Internet giants, which they were mindlessly cheering. But why should Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google get a free pass? Why should we expect them to behave any differently over the long term? The tradition of progressive media criticism that came out of the Frankfurt School, not to mention the basic concept of political economy (looking at the way business interests shape the cultural landscape), was nowhere to be seen, and that worried me. It’s not like political economy became irrelevant the second the Internet was invented.

From where I stood it seemed obvious that the popular narrative — new communications technologies would topple the establishment and empower regular people — didn’t accurately capture reality. Something more complex and predictable was happening. The old-media dinosaurs weren’t dying out, but were adapting to the online environment; meanwhile the new tech titans were coming increasingly to resemble their predecessors. And that was because the underlying economic conditions hadn’t been changed or “disrupted,” to use a favorite Silicon Valley phrase. Google has to serve its shareholders, just like NBCUniversal does. As a result, many of the unappealing aspects of the legacy-media model have simply carried over into a digital age — namely, commercialism, consolidation, and centralization. In fact, the new system is even more dependent on advertising dollars than the one that preceded it, and digital advertising is far more invasive and ubiquitous than the newspaper and television spots of yore.

3. I notice that you continue to use Twitter, even as you recognize the flaws in some of its business practices. How do we reconcile our enjoyment of social media even as we understand that the corporations who control them aren’t always acting in our best interests?

I can’t wholeheartedly say I enjoy Twitter, or at least I’m enjoying it less and less these days, but I don’t think there’s a contradiction. I use lots of products that are created by companies whose business practices I object to and that don’t act in my best interests, or the best interests of workers or the environment — we all do, since that’s part of living under capitalism. That said, I refuse to invest so much in any platform that I can’t quit without remorse, since you never know when there will be a significant change to the terms of service or to the service itself. Facebook’s invitation to “pay to promote” status updates was a tipping point for me and I jumped ship.

Obviously there are benefits to be reaped from social media, but we should also be conscious of how much we give in return. I’m not the first to point out that these services aren’t free even if we don’t pay money for them; we pay with our personal data, with our privacy. This feeds into the larger surveillance debate, since government snooping piggybacks on corporate data collection. As I argue in the book, there are also negative cultural consequences (e.g., when advertisers are paying the tab we get more of the kind of culture marketers like to associate themselves with and less of the stuff they don’t) and worrying social costs. For example, the White House and the Federal Trade Commission have both recently warned that the era of “big data” opens new avenues of discrimination and may erode hard-won consumer protections.

It’s important to keep this bigger picture in mind and focus less on our individual use habits. We hear a lot about whether people are on social media too much or are addicted to their smartphones — the implication being that we need to muster more willpower and regularly “detox” from our devices. It’s also common in discussions of online privacy to hear commenters say users need to practice “good digital hygiene” by adopting encryption or having stronger passwords. Sure, I agree that time away from our phones is healthy and that encryption is important, but I’m resistant to the tendency to place this responsibility solely on the shoulders of users. Gadgets and platforms are designed to be addictive, with every element from color schemes to headlines carefully tested to maximize clickability and engagement. The recent news that Facebook tweaked its algorithms for a week in 2012, showing hundreds of thousands of users only “happy” or “sad” posts in order to study emotional contagion — in other words, to manipulate people’s mental states — is further evidence that these platforms are not neutral. In the end, Facebook wants us to feel the emotion of wanting to visit Facebook frequently. As for digital hygiene, privacy isn’t like toothbrushing; our privacy is being systematically violated by state and private interests in a way that our mouths aren’t. We can and should adjust our behavior where and when it’s appropriate, but structural factors are paramount in my view.

4. The Internet has been heralded by some as the “great equalizer.” Yet you demonstrate that social inequalities that exist in the real world remain meaningful online. What are the particular dangers of discrimination on the Internet?

That it’s invisible or at least harder to track and prove. We haven’t figured out how to deal with the unique ways prejudice plays out over digital channels, and that’s partly because some folks can’t accept the fact that discrimination persists online. (After all, there is no sign on the door that reads Minorities Not Allowed.) But just because the Internet is open doesn’t mean it’s equal; offline hierarchies carry over to the online world and are even amplified there. For the past year or so, there has been a lively discussion taking place about the disproportionate and often outrageous sexual harassment women face simply for entering virtual space and asserting themselves there — research verifies that female Internet users are dramatically more likely to be threatened or stalked than their male counterparts — and yet there is very little agreement about what, if anything, can be done to address the problem. How can we adapt hard-won protections to this new, networked landscape? It’s a fascinating and complicated issue, and fortunately some smart legal scholars, for example Danielle Citron and Mary Anne Franks, are taking it seriously.

5. You use the expression “starving in the midst of plenty” to describe today’s digital climate, where commercial media overwhelmingly reigns despite the vast quantity of media accessible to us. What steps can we take to encourage better representation of independent and non-commercial media?

We need to fund it, first and foremost. As individuals this means paying for the stuff we believe in and want to see thrive. But I don’t think enlightened consumption can get us where we need to go on its own. I’m skeptical of the idea that we can shop our way to a better world. The dominance of commercial media is a social and political problem that demands a collective solution, so I make an argument for state funding and propose a reconceptualization of public media. More generally, I’m struck by the fact that we use these civic-minded metaphors, calling Google Books a “library” or Twitter a “town square” — or even calling social media “social” — but real public options are off the table, at least in the United States. We hand the digital commons over to private corporations at our peril.

6. You advocate for greater government regulation of the Internet. Why is this important?

I wouldn’t say “regulation of the Internet,” which is a common phrase but a misleading one. I’m for regulating specific things, like Internet access, which is what the fight for net neutrality is ultimately about. We also need stronger privacy protections and restrictions on data gathering, retention, and use, which won’t happen without a fight. The ongoing battles between Amazon and the publisher Hachette, and between YouTube and independent record labels are good examples of how crucial antitrust protection is.  The United States could learn a lot on this front from Europe, where officials are being far more aggressive.

In the book I challenge the techno-libertarian insistence that the government has no productive role to play and that it needs to keep its hands off the Internet for fear that it will be “broken.” The Internet and personal computing as we know them wouldn’t exist without state investment and innovation, so let’s be real. Related to this, there’s a pervasive and ill-advised faith that technology will promote competition if left to its own devices (“competition is a click away,” tech executives like to say), but that’s not true for a variety of reasons. The paradox of our current media landscape is this: our devices and consumption patterns are ever more personalized, yet we’re simultaneously connected to this immense, opaque, centralized infrastructure. We’re all dependent on a handful of firms that are effectively monopolies — from Time Warner and Comcast on up to Google and Facebook — and we’re seeing increased vertical integration, with companies acting as both distributors and creators of content. Amazon aspires to be the bookstore, the bookshelf, and the book. Google isn’t just a search engine, a popular browser, and an operating system; it also invests in original content, having opened video-production studios in various cities, and offered fiber-optic broadband in select cities, not to mention all of its other endeavors and acquisitions, including robotics, home appliances, satellites, you name it.

So it’s not that the Internet needs to be regulated but that these big tech corporations need to be subject to governmental oversight. After all, they are reaching farther and farther into our intimate lives. They’re watching us. Someone should be watching them.