Platforms like Google and Facebook are increasingly an infrastructural underlay for public culture.

A brand is a device for coding lived experience and living bodies into market processes. A couple of important coordinates to lay out about how to think about brands. The first is to say that the relationship between brands and media platforms is a critical one for any understanding of our public culture. Facebook and Google now account for ~70% of all online advertising revenue, and ~90% of growth in online ad revenue. In these two media giants, advertisers finally have a form of media engineered entirely on their terms.

To invoke the cyborg is to critically consider the dreams and nightmares of a world where the human body cannot be disentangled from the machines it has created. The term cyborg was coined by the cybernetic researchers Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in 1960. The word combines ‘cybernetic’ with ‘organism’.

This process is at the heart of technocultural capitalism. If we look carefully we can discern in many Silicon Valley investments the effort to engineer away the friction between living bodies and the capacity of platforms to translate life into data, calculate and intervene.

I like this Tweet a lot. Fr Bob makes an incisive observation about the logic and politics of augmented reality – at least as its imagined by the major media platforms. Platforms like Facebook and Google are investing in virtual, augmented and mixed reality technologies. And, as with most of their engineering projects, encoded into these technologies is a disruptive vision for public life.

The constant flood of views, opinions, theories and images amounts to a kind of disinformation. It becomes harder for us to mediate a shared reality that corresponds with lived experience, that coheres with history or that is jointly understood.

everyday infrastructure. This gets called the ‘internet of things’. Watches, Televisions, Cars, Fridges, Kettles, Air Conditioners, Home Stereos are just some of the everyday objects that are getting ‘connected to the internet’.

That’s not a hypothetical story. Facebook actually did that in 2014, to 689000 users. They changed the ‘mood’ of their News Feeds. Some people got happier feeds, some got sadder feeds. They wanted to see if they ‘tweaked’ your feed sad, if you would get sad.

This is Jose van Dijck’s definition of a platform. ‘The providers of software, (sometimes) hardware, and services that help code social activities into a computational architecture; they process (meta)data through algorithms and formatted protocols before presenting their interpreted logic in the form of user-friendly interfaces with default settings that reflect the platform owner’s strategic choices.’

I type ‘platform’ into Google. Ask a platform what a platform is. Google suggests a nearby bar, a train station, a Wikipedia entry.