The People's Platform

Astra Taylor’s The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age focuses on the modern phenomena of the commodification of philosophy, art, and human culture, which have been accelerated by the advent of the Internet. Rather than treat these trends as harbingers of an end to creativity or human expression, Taylor contends that modern people must learn to reclaim their expressive registers, and to actively value creative endeavors over the production of “content.” Taylor expounds on her thesis mainly through a critique of the Internet and its false promises.

Taylor begins by outlining a paradigm shift in the production and dissemination of power and culture in the contemporary age. Due to the Internet, the people and institutions that used to exert control over access to information and media are rendered powerless to do so. This event has both good and bad consequences: the Internet, the greatest knowledge base ever created, is more accessible to people than ever before; at the same time, it is a kind of Robin Hood, stealing ideas, stripping them of attribution, and releasing them democratically. Taylor states that this gives industry beginners, including writers and artists, an unprecedented advantage over big-name players, since they can now thrive without the support of institutions. They can also control almost every step in the syndication of their work, except for the audience whom it reaches. Taylor asserts that this has set the conditions for a “golden age” of open source platforms that rely on collaboration.

Taylor qualifies the idea of this golden age, alleging that, although it fulfills many of the aspirations people have always had about the Internet, it has also misled us. Much of the content we are now exposed to online is overstimulating and shallow, click-driven rather than scrupulously researched and composed. The opposing camp of new media thinkers contends this is the next evolutionary stage in humans’ tendency to synthesize information, and this apparent shallowness is simply a more efficient, but no less intelligent, form of knowledge transmission. Taylor refuses to side wholly with either point of view, believing that both camps erroneously use technology as the object of debate, rather than the social constructs that frame it.



To highlight her point, Taylor takes the example of “new media.” New media, in her view, is not the best phrase to characterize what she sees is the recapitulation of what it would deem “old media” in new technological modes. The perceptions and assumptions undergirding the production of new media are still essentially the same, since many social constructs, still in the stranglehold of capitalist ideology and its powerful institutions, have failed to evolve. Many of these enduring propositions are failing ones; for example, the proposition that commercialism is inherently good.

In response to the failed promises of the Internet and the weak metaphors of the contemporary age, Taylor asserts that technology by itself will never be enough to transform culture. Rather, the sites of change will always be primarily economic and social. The Internet will never be the platform of the people, as it was dreamed to become at its outset, unless the conditions that frame and exceed it allow it to be so. Taylor suggests that part of the solution will be to recover the economic rights of artists and writers, who are currently at the mercy of huge corporations that profit off their work. She condemns platforms which only serve to consolidate the power to effectively express into ever bigger bureaucratic powers, with the aim of maximizing ad revenue. These platform-makers care little about artists, leveraging their work as “content” to accumulate signals that can be mined for useful demographic data.

In the final section of The People’s Platform, Taylor critiques the mantra that digital spaces should remain “open,” and its implicit idealization of culture as a nebulous, boundless, costless resource. In her view, there are always costs and delineations to cultural media; in fact, the lines that we draw to differentiate cultural artifacts are critical to the formation and reproduction of cultural identity. However, Taylor does not look pessimistically toward the future. She asserts that radical ideas, combined with a democratic mindset, can help us reclaim our cultural commons for artists and people rather than elite businessmen.