From Platform Brutality to Social Media Alternatives

“Platform Brutality” is a scathing diagnosis of our digital condition in the aftermath of Covid, grappling with a world overwhelmed by platform decay, social media addiction, and psychic toll. The central thesis is that social media no longer just distracts—it wounds. And yet, we stay. Lovink labels the dominant emotional landscape as copium—a metaphorical opiate for digital despair, numbing users trapped in endless loops of scrolling, doom, and distraction. 

The book covers topics such as the paradox of loneliness on social media, mythologies of smart phones, the role of dreaming in this digital age and techno-feudalism as the political economy of Big Tech oligarchy. The internet’s current state is one of permacrisis: a condition of stagnation, rage, and numbness, where algorithmic manipulation, AI slop, enshittification, and techno-feudalism define the everyday. As the eighth volume in Lovink’s critical internet cultures series, the book moves from critique to exit strategies: first diagnosis, then treatment. Platform Brutality is a monument to digital fatigue, and a final urgent appeal for collective withdrawal.

Lovink proposes a distinction, a dialectic between the accelerationist, violent phase of internet culture unfolding under the rise of the Elon – Trump regime, and the long-term attempt to establish a techno-feudalist economy in which “cloud rent” and enslaved users play vital roles. How can we resist this trajectory? Can we accelerate with our stacktivist proposals to build a European digital infrastructure? Stop dreaming of sovereignty and join the Internet Core.

The event is co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland as part of the own programme of the Centre for the Development of Creative Industries: Rozwój Sektorów Kreatywnych.