“Where’s the Vibe?” How to Avoid Getting Stuck in Outdated Cultural Criticism and Reclaim Reflection in the Social Media Discussion

Abstract

This paper examines the characteristic features of contemporary left-wing cultural critique of social media on an example of the writings of Geert Lovink, a Dutch media theorist and founder of the Institute of Network Cultures. The first part of the paper scrutinizes the connection between the author’s professional trajectory and the dystopian rhetoric underlying his critique of technology. The second part explores the main theses of ‘Stuck on the Platform. Reclaiming the Internet’, Lovink’s most recent monograph. I use it as a starting point for a discussion on the specific place of activism in the academy and the combined roles of researcher and activist. Turning to a number of issues of platform capitalism — from the collection and trading of data to the conversion of all workflows to Zoom during the pandemic — Lovink frames platform capitalism in the context of the well-known critique of neoliberalism. He constructs social media users as totally inactive and no longer able to resist the ‘platform capitalism’ on their own. I show that this assumption contradicts the existing anthropological and ethnographic studies published at the time of Lovink’s work. In actuality, user relationships with platforms are in most cases far more complex and non-obvious. I suggest that the shortcomings of Lovink’s theoretical reasoning are directly related to the author’s institutional position as a left-wing activist within the academy, who, at the same time, produces journalistic texts.