Platform Utopianism after Democracy

Ceraso and Pruchnic examine digital platforms as microcosmic political economies, or environments that function to enact various human political models. First, they argue that competing platforms become sites to try out the various rhetorical potentials of their grounding political models. Second, they suggest that the vulnerability of platforms to destructive rhetorics functions in the gap between the human political models that they seek to emulate and the digital structures that enact those models. They close by discussing the historically foreclosed political model of isonomia, as described in Kojin Karatani’s Isonomia and the History of Philosophy, arguing that it provides a way to think through the vulnerabilities of “platform democracy.”