[Book Launch] Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia - Jan 17

Friday, January 17th - 6pm - Riff Raff, Providence RI

I am extremely excited to join Mike Pepi for a conversation to mark the launch of “Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia.” I have been following Mike’s work for years now, he is one of the people who is known as “someone who actually knows wtf is going on.” His description of the “Take Treadmill” on Montez Press Radio with Joshua Citarella in 2020 (a metaphor for social commentators & political pundits that are locked into constantly reacting to the current viral story instead of doing deep thinking or research) basically set my agenda for the work I made and the writing I published. (i.e. stepping off the take treadmill to find underreported stories and exploring pro-complexity)

Against Platforms is a compression of an incredible amount of analysis, research and desperately needed re-framing. Among many critiques of digital structures, the book grapples with one of the most pressing issues in the arts & humanities: What happens when the institution is turned into a database and served up to platform capitalist? How does this shift change our relationship to the archive and who benefits?

I can’t wait to get into it Friday. I am sure that no matter how far we go down the rabbit hole we will only really scratch the surface, so if you are in NYC don't miss a second dive with Mike and Ali Breland at P&T Knitwear later this month.

I made this video remix of "Crush!" by Apple for iPad Pro released in May 2024. Pepi writes about this ad in the introduction:

"For some, the advertisement captured the feeling of the past twenty years under platforms. So-called innovative disruption colonized our political, cultural, and social institutions. Many institutions did little to stop it. In some cases, they encouraged it. We watched in slow motion as the very fabric of everyday life was subjected to platforms that treated our activities like so much raw material to be harvested, monetized, and reduced to its most commercially optimized form. Apple’s cofounder Steve Jobs famously remarked that the computer should “be a bicycle for the mind,” but it turned out to be a steamroller for management. How did we get here?"

I hope to see you there tomorrow!

Here is a new episode from Joshua Citarella's breakout hit podcast, Doomscroll that goes into the arguments of the book and is a good groundwork for what we will be discussing at the launch.

More Mike Pepi content: