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Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse…[1]About Enshittification, Platformness and Counter-Spectacles

Misogyny, conspiracy theories, surveillance, manipulation, fraud, and AI slop are flooding the internet. For the monopolists who dominate our online lives - X, TikTok, Amazon, Meta, Apple - this isn’t an accident. It’s the model. As tech critic Cory Doctorow puts it, the process is called enshittification: first, platforms lure us in with bait like free access; then they monetize our activity, degrading the experience while wooing advertisers; finally, once we’re locked in and rivals crushed, every drop of value is siphoned upward to executives and shareholders. The result? Our supposed digital commons have curdled into arenas of torment. The utopian promise of the networked world, to bring people together to solve problems, has been thoroughly, irreversibly enshittified.

In Against Platforms (2025), critic Mike Pepi argues that these techno-feudalist infrastructures have hollowed out institutions, replacing them with skeletal logistical shells run on private data pipelines. The problem isn’t just surveillance, he insists, it’s dependence: entire societies lashed to systems engineered to maximize virality and extract engagement at any cost. Pepi calls for a radical rethink, perhaps even a redesign of what a platform is. Similarly, Joshua Citarella stresses that “we need new platforms to tell new stories” (Politigram & the Post-Left, 2018), underscoring the urgency of experimental infrastructures that can host alternative forms of collectivity.

THE STUDIO ASKS
Which individuals/communities sustain the platform economy, and what does this mean for our cities?

Where are the hidden nodes of platform urbanism, and how might we map them to expose their invisible infrastructures?

What digital and spatial situations, events, and activities unfold in these spaces, and how might platform logics be subverted and redirected toward counter-narratives?

How can these investigations translate into architectural expression: drawings, models, or a collective virtual space for protest, solidarity, and alternative gatherings?

THIS STUDIO INVESTIGATES how digital platforms organize both spatial and social experiences, from rituals to resistance. We begin by tracing sites where conflict is staged and monetized: platforms of extraction where every gesture is mined for value; chats that spiral into shitstorms; markets of engineered stupidity; staged “viral” events grown in click farms; synthetic feel-good feeds that pump dopamine on demand; the endless abyss of doomscrolling; laboratories of the attention economy where outrage is preprogrammed; clickbait farms where curiosity is stripped and sold.

[1] Title adapted from Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It (Verso, 2024)

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