Platform politics and a world beyond catastrophe

In this chapter the authors set out some of the stakes of platform politics at the current conjuncture. Data governance issues concerning the social production of value, data rights in automated markets, data surveillance motivated by pervasive paranoia and a general ideological intolerance against off-message articulations of disaffection. These are just some of the prevailing discursive and governmental tendencies that define the horizon of our platform present. Yet there is more, and the authors write their way through crisis to find some bearing and orientation in a world of real-time updates and automated injunctions. The machinic signalling of pervasive despair is wrought by contagion, climate and a future at once forestalled and bearing down upon us.