
Against Platforms
Surviving Digital Utopia (Activist Citizens Library)
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Narrated by:
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Tim Andres Pabon
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By:
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Mike Pepi
About this listen
A bold and imaginative critique of the hidden costs of digital life—and a manifesto for a better future . . .
At the turn of the millennium, digital technologies seemed to have immense promise for transforming our society. With these powerful new tools, the thinking went, we would be free to live our best lives, connected to our communities in ways full of infinite potential.
A quarter of a century on, this form of utopianism seems like a cruel mirage. Our lives are more fragmented and pressure-filled as ever, as we race to keep up with technologies that manipulate, command, and drain us at every turn.
So what happened? In Against Platforms, technologist and creator Mike Pepi lays out an explanation of what went wrong—and a manifesto for putting it right.
The key, says Pepi, is that we have been taught that digital technologies are neutral tools, transparent, easily understood, and here to serve us. The reality, Pepi says, is that they are laden with assumptions and collateral consequences—ideology, in other words. And it is this hidden ideology that must be dismantled if we are to harness technology for the fullest expression of our humanity.
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In a world where there is so much conflicting information about how we are supposed to live, what can we really know? Knowing the truth, what’s real from what’s fake, should be easy. In today’s world, that’s far from the case. In The Certainty Illusion, Timothy Caulfield lifts the curtain on the forces contributing to our information chaos and unpacks why it’s so difficult—sometimes even for experts—to escape the fake.
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Truth is still important
- By BiLL on 01-27-25
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Why Taiwan Matters
- A Short History of a Small Island That Will Dictate Our Future
- By: Kerry Brown
- Narrated by: Kerry Brown
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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When the bloody Chinese Civil War concluded in 1949, two Chinas were born. Mao’s Communists won and took China’s mainland; Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists fled to Taiwan island. Since then, China and Taiwan have drifted into being separate political and cultural entities. Taiwan is now a flourishing democracy and an economic success story: just one of its companies produces over 90 per cent of the semiconductors that power the world’s economy. It is a free and vibrant society.
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Redundant
- By Phillip Enoch on 03-06-25
By: Kerry Brown
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Y2K
- How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was)
- By: Colette Shade
- Narrated by: Eva Kaminsky
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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THE EARLY 2000s conjures images of inflatable furniture, flip phones, and low-rise jeans. It was a new millennium and the future looked bright, promising prosperity for all. The internet had arrived, and technology was shiny and fun. For many, it felt like the end of history: no more wars, racism, or sexism. But then history kept happening. Twenty-five years after the ball dropped on December 31st, 1999, we are still living in the shadows of the Y2K Era.
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Not brilliant but entertaining
- By joan Morell on 02-05-25
By: Colette Shade
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Superbloom
- How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart
- By: Nicholas Carr
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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From the telegraph and telephone in the 1800s to the internet and social media in our own day, the public has welcomed new communication systems. Whenever people gain more power to share information, the assumption goes, society prospers. Superbloom tells a startlingly different story. As communication becomes more mechanized and efficient, it breeds confusion more than understanding, strife more than harmony. Media technologies all too often bring out the worst in us.
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Humanity is really doomed, eh?
- By Classical Ideas Podcast on 02-14-25
By: Nicholas Carr
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Ghosts of My Life
- Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures
- By: Mark Fisher
- Narrated by: Tom Lawrence
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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This collection of writings by Mark Fisher, author of the acclaimed Capitalist Realism, argues that we are haunted by futures that failed to happen. Fisher searches for the traces of these lost futures in the work of David Peace, John Le Carré, Christopher Nolan, Joy Division, Burial, and many others.
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An anthology of varying interest
- By Tezby on 07-31-21
By: Mark Fisher
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The Age of Choice
- A History of Freedom in Modern Life
- By: Sophia Rosenfeld
- Narrated by: Greg D. Barnett
- Length: 13 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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The Age of Choice tells the long history of the invention of choice as the defining feature of modern freedom. Taking listeners from the seventeenth century to today, Sophia Rosenfeld describes how the early modern world witnessed the simultaneous rise of shopping as an activity and religious freedom as a matter of being able to pick one's convictions. Similarly, she traces the history of choice in romantic life, politics, and the ideals of human rights. Throughout, she pays particular attention to the lives of women, who have frequently been the drivers of this change.
By: Sophia Rosenfeld
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Inventing the Future
- Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
- By: Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams
- Narrated by: Liam Gerrard
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Inventing the Future is a bold new manifesto for life after capitalism. Against the confused understanding of our high-tech world by both the right and the left, this book claims that the emancipatory and future-oriented possibilities of our society can be reclaimed. Instead of running from a complex future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams demand a postcapitalist economy capable of advancing standards, liberating humanity from work and developing technologies that expand our freedoms.
By: Nick Srnicek, and others
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Mindmasters (Anna Caputo version)
- The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior
- By: Sandra Matz
- Narrated by: Anna Caputo
- Length: 6 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Columbia Business School professor Sandra Matz reveals in fascinating detail how big data offers insights into the most intimate aspects of our psyches and how these insights empower an external influence over the choices we make. This can be creepy, manipulative, and downright harmful, with scandals like that of British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica being merely the tip of the iceberg.
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boring redundant
- By Linda Mueller on 02-21-25
By: Sandra Matz
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Capitalist Realism
- Is There No Alternative?
- By: Mark Fisher
- Narrated by: Tom Lawrence
- Length: 4 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system–a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework.
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Mind-blowing
- By John Erlandsen on 10-04-24
By: Mark Fisher
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Doctored
- Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer's
- By: Charles Piller
- Narrated by: Lyle Blaker
- Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Nearly seven million Americans live with Alzheimer’s disease, a tragedy that is already projected to grow into a $1 trillion crisis by 2050. While families suffer and promises of pharmaceutical breakthroughs keep coming up short, investigative journalist Charles Piller’s Doctored shows that we’ve quite likely been walking the wrong path to finding a cure all along—led astray by a cabal of self-interested researchers, government accomplices, and corporate greed.
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Misconduct is the antithesis of science
- By Amazon Customer on 03-08-25
By: Charles Piller
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Genesis
- Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit
- By: Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, Craig Mundie
- Narrated by: Niall Ferguson, Byron Wagner
- Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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As it absorbs data, gains agency, and intermediates between humans and reality, AI will help us to address enormous crises, from climate change to geopolitical conflicts to income inequality. It might well solve some of the greatest mysteries of our universe, revolutionize fields as diverse as medicine and architecture, and elevate the human spirit to unimaginable heights. But it will also pose challenges on a scale and of an intensity that we have never seen.
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Not as good as I expected
- By @CaffeinatedRunner on 11-21-24
By: Henry A. Kissinger, and others
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Mood Machine
- The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist
- By: Liz Pelly
- Narrated by: Liz Pelly
- Length: 11 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawing on over a hundred interviews with industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians, Mood Machine takes us to the inner workings of today’s highly consolidated record business, showing what has changed as music has become increasingly playlisted, personalized, and autoplayed.
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Vocal fry
- By Anonymous User on 01-19-25
By: Liz Pelly
What listeners say about Against Platforms
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- north3001
- 03-01-25
Debunks common techno-utopian shibboleths
Also offers a peek behind the curtain of how platforms came to be the dominant organizational form of our time.
Platforms eat institutions alive from the inside.
Institutions may not be perfect, but we can intervene in them in ways that will never be possible with platforms.
Democracy, culture, and our humanity are at stake. It’s time to decide whether we exist to serve technology or whether it exists to serve us.
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