“If you don’t have a strong social media game, you might as well hang up your instrument”: Algorithms, (mis)interpellation, and planetary Silicon Valley ideology

This study of independent music producers in Liverpool, United Kingdom, investigates how music streaming services and social media platforms organise the conditions of cultural production. We argue that big tech firms increasingly entrench new forms of domination, control, and compliance through platform governance and algorithmic infrastructure. We trace the legacy of the Californian ideology, a blend of countercultural idealism and neoliberal entrepreneurialism that shaped early Silicon Valley. This ideology has since globalised into what we term Planetary Silicon Valley Ideology, a hegemonic yet diffuse formation reproduced through contemporary platform infrastructures. Drawing on Althusserian and post-Marxist critiques, we theorise how social and streaming media act as hailing devices, interpellating, and misinterpellating musicians into ideological subjecthood. We extend Althusser’s framework by conceptualising platforms as digital media ideological apparatuses: privately owned, algorithmically mediated infrastructures that reproduce ideology by structuring the conditions of participation. Platformised cultural production thus becomes a site of ideological reproduction, while also providing opportunities for musicians to challenge, negotiate, or subvert Planetary Silicon Valley hegemony. Based on ethnographic research, our central contribution extends theories of interpellation and misinterpellation by showing how subject formation can also occur through over-identification, where musicians’ hyper-conformity to algorithmic optimisation paradoxically undermines the ideology from within. While existing work emphasises detachment or failure as a site where ideology unravels, we develop the concept of overinterpellation to capture how excessive, contradictory, or unsustainable algorithmic demands generate misalignment, burnout, and moments of refusal.