Masses, platforms, and the new data domination: Repressive desublimation revisited

The world now resembles a mosaic of platforms orchestrating subjective responses to myriad digital stimuli in everyday communication and conduct. People appear to find fulfillment mainly through intense engagement with platforms that thrive on data produced by online entanglements. This is a world society of data domination where power is derived from high-tech interconnectivity, focused on an interplay between technological innovations and mass distraction. Platforms are seen as digital monopolies banking on mass online participation for data extraction and control. In that sense, they foster new forms of desublimation that Herbert Marcuse would have regarded as a re-flowering of repressive satisfaction. The digital age is a new age of one-dimensionality where technological instrumentality comes to belie repressive desublimation as the ultimate solution to the ‘unhappy consciousness’. Under platform capitalism, the digital ideology of industrial society is ripe for a renewed critique of its role in the proliferation of data-driven thought and behavior.