Abstract
The social media platforms we use every day are designed to make us feel bad. This is something we feel intuitively, and Geert Lovink spends some time explaining how these architectures operate in his latest book, Sad By Design: On Platform Nihilism. Lovink, though, is even more interested in offering a fragmentary polemic about the mess of selfhood in the digital age.
Within the disjointed subfield of platform studies, which deals with our digital lives and the structures that shape them, Lovink is a leading thinker, with a long history of charting the dystopian domination of platform capitalism. This may be why he operates in this book with an assumed familiarity, rarely pausing to explain concepts that might be new to anyone approaching platform studies with interest. While potentially off-putting, this does provide ample opportunity for Lovink to dive deep into his current preoccupations, namely, online addiction, ideology, and toxicity. Lovink references others’ work frequently, but never goes in depth on their qualities, never situates himself within debates about digital affect. It would have been useful, for example, for Lovink to have engaged more explicitly with books like Networked Affect (2015), edited by Susanna Paasonen, Ken Hillis, and Michael Petit, to get a sense of where he sees his argument within the field (Hillis et al., 2015). Nor does he properly explain what he means by sadness and what he means by nihilism, a difference without a distinction that fails to put readers at ease from the get-go.
Lovink poses questions without always offering answers. The language is eminently readable and welcoming, though punctuated by moments of digression that feel stranded by his refusal to properly contextualize them. The narrative arc of the book tracks how depoliticized Internet studies has become, hobbled by a defeatism instigated by an inability to make sense of a massive cultural and technological shift. Social media platforms in particular have managed to re-engineer our lives and behavior (“Social media is reformatting our interior lives” [p. 1] is how he opens the book), and Lovink argues that this has resulted in critical impotence, with no real vision for radical ideas of change or resistance.
He offers a wide-ranging diagnosis through chapters on ideology, distraction, media architectures, narcissism, anonymity, memes, and digital commons, consistently identifying how these systems engender a stultifying inaction. “Instead of facing the titanic forces right in the eye, we’re numbed, bittersweet, absent-minded, quirky, and sometimes straight-out depressed” (p. 3). He sets out to articulate a “radical critique . . . by staging a subjective encounter with the multitude and their intimate dependencies on their mobile devices” (p. 4). He seems to be saying that there are sharp judgments to be made, but he maintains the veneer of hope. Indeed, while his dystopian rhetoric can get away from him through calcified attempts to flamboyantly explain our doomed world, he quotes Mark Fisher’s immortal words: “pessimism of the emotions, optimism of the act” (p. 12). As such, this is a relatively optimistic book, interested in laying out these design problems so that we can come together to reclaim the opportunity provided by computational power.
This call to action is not always convincing. Lovink argues that adopting the aesthetic of the avant-garde could save us, and “in the absence of a cultural avant-garde that is tech savvy, the political vision of the citizen-as-user remains unrealized and inadequate” (p. 65). He never properly explains how such an approach would effectively confront the cross-purposed task of reinventing public infrastructure, nor does he back up his claim about the lack of a digital-era avant-garde. Nevertheless, the book is an understandably exasperated screed, the product of a thinker who is fed up with the lack of alternatives, someone determined to politicize social media platforms and bring them to bear on a better future.
Considering how scholars like Jodi Dean in books like Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Dean, 2010), for whom Lovink shows great respect, have suggested that being politically effective on social platforms is impossible, what would that future even look like? He writes, “From the moment it is instigated, every subversive gesture has already been disarmed, every resistive act integrated into the machine. This stops us from acting altogether and makes us depressed” (p. 82). Every utterance is just another piece of data, consumed and utilized by the machine regardless of its content. Early on, Lovink points to the Jamesonian challenge we face: “While corporations can grow overnight to become behemoth structures, outlandish in their infrastructure, our understanding of the world lags behind or even shrinks. Limited understanding limits our ability to frame the problem” (p. 3). The resulting sadness, primarily a by-product of our digital exhaustion, “has no end, it’s bottomless” (p. 2).
There are three options before us: use, non-use (unplugging, which he says is a non-starter), and misuse. The latter is where we have some hope, just barely, through practices that are possible but may not be advisable, at least according to the platforms themselves. Lovink is largely interested in illustrating our dystopian circumstances, from the corrosive impacts of the attention economy to, in a fairly provocative section, the ways in which modern data-gathering parallels the efforts made by the Nazi regime, using IBM technology, to identify and process millions of Jews—a technological violence. He even takes an ill-advised and fruitless detour into analysis of selfies. These chapters are well-written and contain some surprising insights, but much is well-trod territory.
The book makes its most significant intervention in its penultimate chapter, which examines “memes as strategy.” Here, we get our best look at what effective misuse could look like. Throughout the book, Lovink has considered the notion of collectivity, and whether it can be harnessed within platform capitalism. For example, after calling for us to politicize our online behaviors, he warns that “the problem is not our lack of willpower but our collective inability to enforce change” (p. 36). In this chapter, though, he argues that memes are powerful cultural artifacts, and the right (and more specifically the alt-right) has seized this power to great effect in recent years. Particularly since Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, the media has been overwhelmed by stories about trollish memes, and the right has dominated these discussions.
In short, he says, the left doesn’t know how to meme. Memes resist efforts at top-down engineering, he says, so attempts to create a meme-led political movement will fail unless it is organic, with horizontal growth. He uses the example of 4chan, where “everyone is anonymous and there are no static users to grant any kind of continuity between posts, the only way for anything to gain any sort of traction is for it to be replicated ad infinitum” (pp. 131–132). This may seem like a minor point, but it is crucial to understand that the mechanics of memes were codified in a space where these were the structures in place. In fact, Lovink spends too little time underlining this point, but he notes there is “an effective way to weaponize memes for ideological purposes, by steering ones which are already popular and meaningful for a contested demographic” (p. 132). Our current distributed network logic and social media architectures prohibit or downplay these efforts, and would have to be rebuilt to truly put an end to the alt-right’s success.
But by having a hold on meme literacy, the left can manipulate existing meme formations to their own ends, hopefully by speaking the same language and organically spreading their message. This is an effective line of argument, and while Lovink could have provided some powerful concrete examples to strengthen it, many of us observe this every day online. An existing meme is co-opted to serve interests entirely unrelated to the original meme’s intention or context, but it still carries the same cultural cachet and finds its way into new meanings.
Lovink puts forward numerous questions in Sad By Design and provides few answers. It would’ve been helpful to hear in more detail how exactly these platforms are designed to make us sad, or how they are defined by nihilism—it’s unclear whether Lovink believes they are programmed nihilistically, or if they instill nihilism within their users, or both (this seems most likely), or something else altogether. Yet his frustration is palpable and contagious. In an age when “social media architecture actively closes down possibilities, leaving zero space for users to reprogram their communication spaces” (p. 27), where “social media’s power is due to its very banality” (p. 31), with the evil presumably therein, “sadness is the default mental state of the online billions . . . a chronic background condition” (p. 48). Lovink points out the dead-endedness of legal or ethical solutions or alternatives, and instead posits that there is potential within activist or artistic experiments in collectivity, with memetic tools at our disposal. It’s worth a shot.
