The People’s Platform

by Astra Taylor

The internet, before it sold out.

For you if

you believed the internet would democratize culture and are reckoning with what it actually did instead

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Taylor rips the utopian veneer off the internet age to expose who’s really cashing in on “sharing.” She argues that without structural change, the digital commons will keep replicating the old hierarchies — just with better branding. A sharp, humane call to reclaim culture from algorithms and turn the web back into a tool for people, not platforms.

Where This Book Lives

Themes: capital machinery technology and society

Related Viewing

Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.

The Corporation(2003)

dir. Mark Achbar & Jennifer Abbott

The 150-year rise of a legal 'person' with no soul.

A wide-ranging examination of the modern corporation as a legal 'person' — tracing its rise, its psychology, and the reformers and whistleblowers pushing back against it.

Why it’s here: Corporations gained the legal rights of a person a century and a half ago and never picked up the responsibilities that come with personhood. Chomsky, Klein, and even sympathetic CEOs get equal time here, and the argument holds up without needing to shout.

Letterboxd ↗

Same pattern, different era

Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.

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David Graeber