Astra Taylor: People's Platform (2014, Holt & Company, Henry)
English language
Published Jan. 3, 2014 by Holt & Company, Henry.
The People's Platform argues that for all our 'sharing', 'up-voting', and 'liking', the Internet reflects real-world inequalities as much as it reduces them. Attention and influence accrue to those who already have plenty of both. Cultural products are primarily valued as opportunities for data collection, while creators receive little or no compensation for their efforts. And we pay for our 'free' access to content and services with our privacy, offering up our personal information to advertisers.
We can do better. Employing a mixture of reportage, research and her own experiences working in a creative field, Astra Taylor not only offers an audacious rebuttal to the current Internet orthodoxy, she also presents viable solutions to our predicament. If we want the Internet to be a people's platfrom, we will have to make so.
Excellent. Clear, interesting, and concise discussion of how the internet won't automatically solve problems of democracy, inequality, creativity - in fact it mirrors and exacerbates existing problems if we don't make different (political) choices
Rather than a deliberate, even-handed analysis of internet labour, the book often seems a rallying cry for Taylor’s Occupy comrades.
Possibly the biggest weakness of Taylor’s analysis, one common to many critiques of the internet, is its neglect of the role of the most essential creative labour force of the internet—the lowly software developer.
Full review at The Literary Review of Canada: Occupy the Internet!
It was interesting to read this book after reading Alice Marwick's Status Update, an ehtnogrpahic study of the cool kids who brought us social media while harwiring their values into it. Taylor's book is not based on fieldwork but is a sustained argument for separating culture and cultural production from the business model of the Internet, which (as Bruce Schneier has accurately said) is ubiquitous surveillance. Almost all of the book is an exploration of what's gone wrong in the shift from an old information economy to a new one which largely is fed by cultural production donated in exchange for attention, all in the service of gathering personal information that can be aggregated, resold, and mined. In the process she raises good questions, but also sometimes unfairly characterizes opponents. She has what seems to me an unaccountably uncharitable view of Lawrence Lessig in particular and the free culture …
It was interesting to read this book after reading Alice Marwick's Status Update, an ehtnogrpahic study of the cool kids who brought us social media while harwiring their values into it. Taylor's book is not based on fieldwork but is a sustained argument for separating culture and cultural production from the business model of the Internet, which (as Bruce Schneier has accurately said) is ubiquitous surveillance. Almost all of the book is an exploration of what's gone wrong in the shift from an old information economy to a new one which largely is fed by cultural production donated in exchange for attention, all in the service of gathering personal information that can be aggregated, resold, and mined. In the process she raises good questions, but also sometimes unfairly characterizes opponents. She has what seems to me an unaccountably uncharitable view of Lawrence Lessig in particular and the free culture movement generally, which I think she gets wrong, The book concludes with a "defense of the commons" that draws a distinction between "free" culture (which she feels is either deceptive advertising, exploitation of artists, or both) and "fair" culture - seeking a "fair trade" movement that will reward labor appropriately. She draws on the scholarship of Elinor Ostrom to imagine a cultural commons that (like the functioning commons Ostrom studied) is carefully regulated and balanced for sustainability. returnreturnBeyond that general call for action - to reject Silicon Valley's business model for the Internet and to oppose commodification of culture and the concentration of media ownership - she hasn't got many concrete suggestions. That may not be surprising,as the problem she's addressing is devilishly hard, but I was hoping for more specific ideas beyond using fair trade and local food movements as possible models. There are projects out there that have found ways to sustain neat things. There are even some social institutions that have defended these values for a long time - cough, libraries cough. Taylor is good at exposing the problems with assuming the Internet will set us free, though at times flings the tar on her brush a bit indiscriminately, but I would have liked to hear more about the alternatives. A handful of closely-read case studies of alternative approaches would be welcome. As it is, phrases in the title - "the people's platform" and "taking back power and culture" - turn out to be unfulfilled promises. To borrow another book's title, when will there be good news?
