Platform Brutality—Closing Down Internet Toxicity

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.

Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist, internet critic and author of many publications, translated into various languages. In 2004 he founded the Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA).