Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism

Melancholy has always been with us. Nowadays, though, it’s a design problem—its highs and lows coded into the social media platforms on which we spend so much of our lives. We click, we scroll; we swipe, we like. And after it all, we wonder where the time went, and what, other than a flat and empty feeling, we got for it.
Sad by Design offers a critical analysis of our social media environment and what it’s doing to us. Geert Lovink analyzes the problems of toxic viral memes, online addiction, and the lure of fake news. He shows how attempts to design sites to solve these problems have, in their studied efforts to be apolitical, been unable to generate either a serious critique or legitimate alternatives. But there is an answer: Lovink calls for us to acknowledge the engineered intimacy of these sites—because boredom, he argues, is the first stage of overcoming “platform nihilism,” which can free us to organize to stop the data harvesting industries that run them.
'Geert Lovink, who is expertly familiar with digital dynamics - technological as well as social - provides in this book a searing criticism of platform nihilism, considered above all as a perversion of computational design' -- Bernard Stiegler, author of 'The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism' 'Sad by Design: on Platform Nihilism, despite the title, is not a sad book. It dissects our digital addictions with the dynamite power of critical theory. It's a savage journey into the heart of the digital self, and a wake-up call to break free of our own enslavement' -- Donatella Della Ratta, author of 'Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria' 'Dystopian ... a scathing indictment of a technology that transforms the very notion of self into a sharing platform.' -- Eva Illouz, author of 'Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation'