<nettime> Out Now: Platform Brutality by Geert Lovink

[Geert Lovink via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Out Now: Platform Brutality by Geert Lovink, Valiz, Amsterdam, September 2025

The internet has become an integral part of all human activities. Its toxic aspects have fully permeated our personal, social and political lives, with people using it to attack others, normalise violence, spread fake news and make propaganda for extrme-right causes, to name just a few. This brutal turn ultimately affects all. The central thesis is that social media no longer just distracts—it wounds. And yet, we stay.

Technological violence is essentially remote, invisible and indirect. Exclusion, which many do not immediately notice, happens deep inside the code and network architecture. The answer will not be pacification or regulation but the dismantling of the platform principle itself.

Platform Brutality not just offers critical analyses but also dives into alternatives. Topics range from the violent turn of the internet and techno-feudalism debates, to loneliness on social media, radical data critique, mythologies that surround the smart phone, dreaming in the computer age, offline romanticism to question how to leave the platforms, bring back social networks and design a new balance between analogue and digital.

Design: Irene Stracuzzi
Series: Making Public
pb | 240 pp. | ISBN 978-94-93246-58-4 | € 26,50
Order here: https://valiz.nl/en/publications/platform-brutality
Book launches: Berlin (Disruptionlab, September 20, Warsaw (MSN, September 24), Rotterdam (V2, October 10)

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Geert Lovink’s Platform Brutality is a scathing diagnosis of our digital condition from the aftermath of Covid till the early days of Trump 2, grappling with a world overwhelmed by platform decay, social media addiction, and the psychic toll of techno-capitalism. As the eighth volume in Lovink’s critical internet cultures series, the book moves from critique to exit strategies—urging readers to confront and abandon the collapsing social media ecosystem.

Lovink frames the internet’s current state as one of permacrisis: a permanent condition of stagnation, rage, and numbness, where algorithmic manipulation, AI slop, platform enshittification, and techno-feudalism define everyday life. He labels the dominant emotional landscape as copium—a metaphorical opiate for digital despair, numbing users trapped in endless loops of scrolling, doom, and distraction.

Platform Brutality is a call for a new materialist, critical internet theory grounded in collective mental health, code sovereignty, and psycho-social repair. The book traverses several key areas such as he brutal nature of platforms and the loneliness they induce; mythologies of smartphones and their effect on identity and desire; techno-feudalism as the political economy of Big Tech oligarchy; shortcomings of regulatory efforts and the failure of existing alternatives.

The thesis is that social media no longer just distracts—it wounds. And yet, we stay. Lovink proposes “the social media exodus” not just as deletion, but as a radical act of desertion from digital brutality. It’s both a lament and a battle cry, one that calls on artists, theorists, and users alike to reimagine the internet—or leave it behind altogether.

Platform Brutality is not merely a critique but a eulogy, a monument to digital fatigue, and a final urgent appeal for collective withdrawal—or radical reinvention.

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Contents

Introduction: From Radical Critique to Social Media Exit
1. Copium Compendium: How Do You Cope in this Digital Age of Permacrisis?
2 . On Platform Brutality
3. Debating Techno-Feudalism
4. Loneliness in the Social Media Age
5. What Is Radical Data Critique?
6. Smart Phone Mythologies
7. Nomos of the Network: Magna Digitalia Fragments
8. Principles of Figure Design
9. Probes into Dreamful Computing
10. Undoing Networks: A Response to Offline Romanticism
11. Expanded Publishing and the Stream Art Network
12. What's Social Networking Today?
13. Via Tactica and the Principles of Perma-Hybridity

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