I have had a laminated image pinned, stuck, or otherwise attached to various office walls for many years, since 2003 indeed, as I’ve moved between roles and institutions this has been one constant. The image is from the cover of Mute Magazine, Issue 26. It is a line drawing depicting a desk, on it a Macintosh PowerBook G4, Apple’s then state of the art portable computer – around it are drawn scenes from the global anti-capitalist struggles of the period. There is a picture of Sub-Commandant Marcos of the Mexican Zapatistas, in iconic balaclava, smoking a pipe and looking away into the mid-distance. There is another picture of workers in a field of GM crops, and one of a high-tech …

How useful is it to think about politics and power in terms of a patriarchy? What if we think about the US celebrity founders who own monopoly tech companies as a racialized patriarchal network? Patriarchy can be a blunt instrument if we don’t investigate what is particular about a patriarchal system. But if we try to understand who the patriarchs might be, what is specific about their formation, and how they legitimate and wield dominance, then this could be part of forging a resistance. In our book The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism: Celebrity Tech Founders and Networks of Power we look at the powerful celebrity men that founded US monopoly tech companies: Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Larry …

While the idea of platform governance is not new, the complex nature of its functioning and the reasons for its emergence and entrenchment still lack holistic conceptualisation. While it is impossible to develop such a perspective in a single blog post, the considerations below are intended as a sensitising tool and a call to think about platform governance as simultaneously premised upon societal developments from which it has emerged and a pervasive force shaping contemporary societies. In order to better understand the how and why of platform governance, at least two arguments are possible, although they are by no means mutually exclusive: a historico-political and an economic one. On the historico-political side – and for perhaps the most eloquent account, …

Visual campaigning is not new to the social media era. In the US, the first political cartoon was published by Benjamin Franklin in political pamphlets in 1747. Visual symbols such as the bald eagle, stars and stripes, and the colours of red, white and blue have been used in campaign posters going back to 1828. Visual campaigning only intensified from the 1960s onwards with the proliferation of television, with the first televised debate between Nixon and Kennedy in 1964 widely hailed as being a turning point. A young and charismatic Kennedy contrasted sharply with an older Nixon, who appeared sweaty and pale (Messaris 2019), and the appearance and personalities of party leaders has played an increasingly important role in political …

Early criticisms of clicktivism lamenting the end of real activism have poisoned the well to the extent that the image conjured is one of someone sprawled lazily in an armchair scrolling through their mobile phone, liking and sharing, but not making much difference to politics. However, clicktivism is one of the most prevalent forms of contemporary political participation that is quick, easy and can be incredibly powerful when performed individually or as a collective. It is also a means of lowering the barriers to politics that dominant power structures and processes have put in place to restrict what politics is, and where it can be performed. Political participation has various definitions and contexts of use that concentrate on traditional processes …

There is a burgeoning element of social media: subscription services. One might assume that Elon Musk’s announcement of “Twitter Blue” was the spark for social media’s subscription service.  In fact, taking a step back one could have seen the writing on the wall. An early and famous (yet implicit) statement on subscription services came from Mark Zuckerberg. In April 2018, Zuckerberg was brought to the US Senate to be questioned about Facebook’s role in the 2016 US Presidential election. During his appearance, former Senator Orrin Grant Hatch asked Zuckerberg, “In 2010… you said back then that Facebook would always be free. Is that still your objective?” to which Zuckerberg responded, “Senator, yes. There will always be a version of Facebook …

    Those that define internet standards shape our thinking and hold the key to our freedom of communication—no trivial task. Yet tech policy is seen as boring, a yawn-inducing issue offloaded to engineers, corporate lawyers, research universities, and government ministries. In the previous age of global internet governance, regulations and protocols were outsourced to technocrats (and a few “civil society” NGOs agitating on the margins). However, in this age of “techno sovereignty,” where everything from 5G to TikTok is capable of causing geopolitical conflict, there is no more consensus. In short, we demand protocols, not platforms. But who’s going to get us there? Meet the stacktivists.   What is the Stack? Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack (2016) can be useful to …