Against Platforms by Mike Pepi

Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia

by Mike Pepi

Melville House 2025

Ridiculous professional designations are always low-key warnings. The business world has the Chief Wisdom Officer, for instance, and the publishing world has “sensitivity readers.” By a long, long margin the worst of these is Thought Leader, but there are lesser, attendant offenses like “futurist” or “technologist.”

The reason for the warning bell should be obvious: these professional designations might indeed be ridiculous, but they're nonetheless real. They're paid, officed, printed on embossed business cards, and if they have employees, those employees don't spend their work days simply laughing at the absurdity of the ridiculous professional designation. People can be hoodwinked or coerced into taking these designations seriously, and since the designations themselves don't actually mean anything, this can place a large amount of power into the hands of charlatans who aren't even trying to stipulate how they'll use it.

Mike Pepi, author of Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia, is described in the book's jacket copy as a technologist, and he describes his “double life” of being “in tech” while also writing about it, but thankfully, he's not exactly Batman; he's just been a freelance tech journalist for a long time. And Against Platforms is likewise a bit sly in its title, since Pepi isn't actually against algorithm-driven social media tech platforms, although he sees them in refreshingly moral terms and writes about them with often corrosive clarity, describing the technological advances underlying them as “just capitalism, but faster and worse.”

Since Against Platforms is essentially a manifesto but nevertheless stretches to well over 200 pages, there's plenty of padding, and most of it is as tedious as most padding is. Since he's in large part talking about the whole ideology of techno-utopianism, poor old Thomas More gets hauled in, for instance. But a satisfying amount of the book is Pepi writing with knowing insight about the evolution of Silicon Valley venture startups and the wild explosion of platform-based technologies growing in power and influence, hoovering up personal data from every person on the planet.

Pepi decries this necrotic blending of tech-bro utopianism and late-stage capitalism and has the gist of a remedy. When it comes to reining in the excesses of platform overreach and creating healthier ways to be online, he asks, “Why shouldn't we use our existing institutions?”

Democratic governments often impose their will in undemocratic ways, he allows, but even so, they're at least in some kind of contract with their citizens. “They have institutions by which changes can be shaped by constituents,” he writes. “Private platforms have no such recourse … they capture you, lured in by sticky dark patterns and convenient low prices.” He warns that perpetual growth of platforms is impossible and issues a call for the whole situation to be brought under some kind of control before it destroys everybody involved. Not, he insists, “the institutional form of yore” but rather “a new institution crafted from the still burning embers of society 'eaten' by venture capital.”

He's necessarily vague about what this new institution would be, although late in his book he subscribes to Joshua Citarella's concept of a “public option” version of the Web dubbed StateBook and briefly describes how it would work (everybody issued a Your-Name@usps.gov email address at birth, and so on) without ever seeming even hypothetically aware of the horrors of what he's endorsing. But regardless of the eventual answer, he's emphatic about the question: previous generations had marvellous institutional creations like the GI Bill, or the New Deal, or the National Endowment for the Arts … so how come this generation shouldn't expect such virtuous, society-improving interventions? “Take heart, digital subject!” he declares in one of the book's many inadvertent admissions (note: it's very, very much not “fellow digital subject”) – StateBook or something like it could yet save us all. There's a very concrete, very specific reason why institutional creations of the type he describes are so much rarer in the last half-century, a reason so specific it has a one-word name that rhymes with “Leelusicans,” but Pepi seems to think it's more complicated than that.

Not that it matters. More than likely, you stopped dead cold in your tracks at that question “Why shouldn't we use our existing institutions?” Any person stupefyingly naive enough to ask that question sincerely would be unable to tie his shoes in the morning, much less write a book. And if the question isn't sincere, well, then what does that do to the rest of Against Platforms?

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News