Platforms Rule Everything Around Me
how tech platforms remade the world
Over the past three decades, digital platforms—online portals where people interact by sharing information, transacting, and consuming content—have transformed the world. This transformation has unfolded incrementally, update by update, in the background of my life. Until recently, I hadn’t given it much thought. It was easy to ignore—when I moved from BBM to WhatsApp, for example, I was more concerned with the lives of the people around me than with the technology mediating my access to them. Everyday drama ruled the roost.
It’s no longer so easy to ignore how platforms remake reality. The water I was born swimming in has slowly been replaced with lemonade, and I only noticed once my eyes begun to sting—that’s how it feels. Platforms have altered the shape of politics, media, commerce, art, love, war, and more.
Writing in 2025, this seems so obvious—so widely accepted and understood—that to point it out may seem trite. I don’t think it is, because the impact platforms have had on society is strangely undertheorized, despite constant noise around the topic. Most public discourse focuses on relatively narrow issues, like whether social media makes people depressed, whether Airbnb harms local economies, and whether misinformation damages democracy. These are important questions, worth asking! But I think each one is symptomatic of a broader transformation, and our discussion of specific issues is impoverished to the extent that we don’t see the big picture.
Here's how I think that big picture has changed: today, digital platforms are ubiquitous, effectively functioning as public infrastructure. This has concentrated economic and sociopolitical power in the hands of the people that built them. The decisions these people have made in designing these platforms, overwhelmingly driven by profit incentives, has changed both the flow and the nature of information. And these changes in information flows have in turn changed how we think, behave, communicate, and create; changing relationships, culture, and politics in the process. I don’t think it’s ‘just the phones’ that have changed the world: though of course they are relevant, their social consequences were not inevitable—they were (and are) to a large extent the result of design choices made by platform companies.
I’ve spent months obsessing over this topic with ideas like splinters in my gut, burning, demanding attention. Setting aside how I feel about these changes, it’s patently obvious that they have happened, and I’ve been trying to understand what’s driven them. I’ve felt like Charlie Kelly in front of a pinboard, conspiratorial and crying about how it’s all connected; haunted by the vision of a picture I can’t quite see.
I’m still missing pieces, but—since we are quite clearly at the beginning of another (plausibly more significant) sociopolitical transformation in the form of AI—it seems important to get this out now, before widespread digital agents change the picture once more, turning lemonade to liquor.
Here’s what I’ve seen so far.
1. Platforms everywhere
Today, digital platforms intermediate almost every aspect of modern life.
Some obvious examples are communication platforms like WhatsApp and iMessage and social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter—but these are just the start. Intimacy is often routed through apps like Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge, where many couples now meet. Professional lives are performed on LinkedIn, knowledge-sharing platforms like Wikipedia serve as sources of public record, and video-sharing platforms from TikTok to Pornhub entertain hundreds of millions of people. And virtually every passion you can think of has an associated platform—Letterboxd for movies, Goodreads for books, and Reddit for almost everything else.
Platforms have also changed how we consume goods and services by increasing their availability. Uber lets us get a cab almost anywhere in the world. Airbnb, Property24, and Zillow do the same for housing, Uber Eats and DoorDash do it for food consumption, BetterHelp does it for therapy, and the likes of Amazon, Shein, and Temu do it for just about everything else.
At the same time, video, audio, and game streaming platforms (like Netflix, Spotify, Pocket Casts, and Xbox Game Pass) have enabled unprecedented access to content. There is more music being released per day in 2024 than was released across the entirety of 1989, for example.
Because platforms now sit between our relationships with culture, commerce, and each other, they soak up an extraordinary amount of our time. If you have internet access, you’re probably spending over five hours a day on them.
2. Concentrated power
While digital platforms date back to the dawn of the internet – recall AOL chatrooms – their influence and power has soared over the last 15-20 years. And while countless platforms are currently in operation, this influence and power is concentrated in the hands of a few companies.
Why? Because most platforms benefit from “network effects”: their value increases in proportion to the number of people using them. Uber is useful insofar as other people are on it, so riders can access a large pool of drivers, and drivers a large pool of riders. The same is true of social media – people want to be where the others are. In this light, it’s unsurprising that Twitter competitors like Threads and Mastodon have struggled to gain traction (although maybe BlueSky stands a chance); and that, once enough people left Myspace, its value dropped rapidly, exacerbating the exodus.
There are also network effects at work when it comes to data: the more data that platforms have on users, the better their proprietary algorithms can tailor user’s experiences to keep people hooked. To succeed as a platform, you need enough users to attract others, enough data to offer high-quality personalization, and some luck.
Although we experience platforms as transient digital spaces, glimpsed through a screen, they exist physically: embodied in hardware, in data centres across the world. All this infrastructure costs money, whether to build or to rent. Thus, many of the biggest platforms are backed by venture capital, allowing them to incur large financial losses for years while they try to establish market dominance. Uber, for example, only made its first profit at the end of 2023, 15 years after it was founded.
Platform power is further entrenched through consolidation, as the biggest platforms absorb anyone that threatens them. Meta acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. They’ve acquired over 90 companies to date. Alphabet—Google’s parent company, which operates dozens of digital platforms including Google Search, Google Docs, and Google Maps—has acquired over 250 companies since its inception, including YouTube (2006), Android (2005), and Waze (2013). Microsoft bought LinkedIn (2016) and GitHub (2018).
This makes it hard for other companies to compete—particularly given that most of today’s largest platform companies, like Meta, Google, and Amazon, sprung up in an era that had yet to craft effective regulation (or even to really understand why regulation might be necessary). There is an ongoing tug-of-war between platform companies and regulators—particular when it comes to acquisitions, which regulators often investigate on the grounds that they may be anti-competitive. A good example of this is Microsoft’s acquisition of gaming company Activision Blizzard, which was challenged by both the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Meanwhile, platform companies collectively spend tens of millions of dollars each quarter on lobbying, shaping regulation in their favour.
Once a platform has achieved dominance in one domain, like search, it’s much easier for it to gain traction in others, like docs, maps, and email. Because Google, Amazon, and Microsoft collectively control a majority of the world’s cloud computing infrastructure—a resource that many other platforms rely on—they have inculcated dependencies that grant them immense power.
Power is further shored up by the control that Google and Apple have over mobile app stores, where most people download the apps that let them access different platforms. Controlling the app stores lets them control who is listed in their digital storefronts, while extracting hefty commissions (around 15-30%) on purchases and subscriptions. Concerns like these are why Google is currently embroiled in several antitrust cases, and was recently found to be a monopolist in the search and ad tech spaces.
As one crude metric, consider that the market cap of Alphabet and Meta collectively exceeds the GDP of the African continent (at least at the time of writing). Companies like this shape the world: they use their resources to lobby states and acquire competitors, while their products have changed the nature and flow of information.
3. Information flows
In the past, if you wanted to publish a book or an article, you’d either have to find a publisher to distribute it or print and share it yourself. Now you can just post. If you wanted to sell something, you’d have to find a shop willing to stock it or set up a stall yourself. Now you can just post. Platforms—supported by globalised supply chains that allow goods and information to easily travel the world—have given us access to global marketplaces and means of distribution that allow us to influence and be influenced by the world at astonishing scale. This is historically unprecedented.
For the first time in a century, print and broadcast companies no longer have hierarchical control over culture. These companies used to hold considerable sway relative to an average person, but since the ascendance of platforms has broken their advertising-based business model, today they compete for attention on an even playing field.
This is because platforms have reshaped “information ecosystems”, which we can think of as having three components:
Infrastructure: The platforms through which information flows, including both print/broadcast and digital platforms, and the legal frameworks governing the flow of information
Participants: The actors that produce, consume, and share information, including everyone from individuals to media organisations to governments
Semantic information: the actual information that flows through the ecosystem, which can be evaluated for both its truth and its rhetorical value
Digital platforms have created new infrastructure through which information flows, greatly increased both the number of participants and the degree to which they communicate, and created new forms for information to take, from tweets to stories to short-form vertical video.
These shifts have dramatically undercut the relevance and financial viability traditional media organisations across the globe, since, historically, most traditional media organisations have been funded by advertising. But from an advertiser’s perspective, it’s now much more cost-effective to pay Google or Facebook to target consumers online than to give money directly to a media publication. Around 70% of global ad spend goes toward digital advertising, and of that, about 80% goes to “programmatic advertising”: advertising that is distributed algorithmically.
So if media companies want digital ad revenue, they have to get people to engage with their content by optimising for metrics like ‘clicks’, ‘likes’, and ‘time-on-site’—and pick up the pennies platforms pay them in exchange. These are the same incentives faced by influencers and content creators the world over—people who are generally not bound by any of the professional expectations placed on journalists, and who are free to speak without concern for inaccuracy or the violation of press codes and industry standards.
Since platforms optimise for attention, unconstrained influencers can systematically outcompete the ‘mainstream media’. This is a big part of why media companies across the world are shrinking, and why most remaining publications are trying to sustain themselves through subscriptions. Local news organisations, lacking the resource to compete, have been hit particularly hard, rendering many peripheral spaces “news deserts”.
There’s a great film from 1957—Sweet Smell of Success—about a powerful newspaper columnist, played by Burt Lancaster, who uses his influence to ruin his sister’s relationship. In the movie, we see Lancaster sitting in a back room wreathed in smoke, while politicians and entertainers alike appear before him, obsequious, hoping to win his favour. What Lancaster writes in the New York Globe will shape public opinion—his words at least partly responsible for whether a politician is elected, or a musician’s gig is successful.
There are few (if any) comparable media kingpins today, whose columns could end careers. Instead, power is largely vested in the algorithms that decide what content people see first, and what gets buried beneath everything else; and in the countless content creators that fill every conceivable niche.
4. New mediums
Technology has been revolutionising how we communicate for millennia.
My favourite example of this is the telegraph: prior to its invention in 1844, information could only travel as fast as we could physically transport it, which at the time was about 80km/hour (via train). But once the infrastructure to support the telegraph was installed, this barrier was obliterated—information could travel near-instantaneously between places with the right wires.
Along with enabling instant communication, telegraphs provided a new medium through which to communicate—a phenomenon we’ve seen repeatedly across history. The invention of systems of writing enabled us to communicate with letters; phones enabled phone calls; and digital platforms have enabled stories, posts, and live streams.
The form a piece of content takes shapes the kind of message it can communicate—famously, “the medium is the message”. This is because each medium has unique properties, both intrinsic and contextual, that shape what messages it can convey.
Films use visual and sonic language to elicit emotion. Novels are guided hallucinations that let you experience the inner lives of characters, unmediated by image. Phone calls create a disembodied intimacy quite different from either a video call or an in-person conversation. And so on.
While my parents’ youth was marked by the dominance of TV, my own has been defined by phone use, enabling novel ways to speak. First Facebook posts—public declarations shared to friends’ walls—then BlackBerry Messenger statuses, then 140-character tweets, then Instagram posts and stories. I’ve seen cultural norms swiftly spin up around each medium as if by magic. And since platforms are constantly iterating, I’ve also watched these mediums and their associated norms evolve in real time—watched Twitter go from 140 characters to 280, from primarily a written medium to one littered with visual content.
Features ebb and flow, and with them, communication styles. Friends used to write loving birthday messages to each other on their Facebook walls; now I mostly see public wishes in the form of pictures posted to an Instagram story, with captions like “this one’s birthday 💕” or “hbd king👑”. And while I have aged out of participation in any platform with a snap streak, I still don’t know of any other way to recreate that particular form of intimacy.
As platforms have evolved, they’ve become increasingly addictive. Short-form video is more addictive than a photo, which is more addictive than a written post. Kids today face a set of technologies precision-engineered to hook them, far more so than the ones that hooked me over a decade prior. And while social platforms used to be fairly differentiated, they now tend to converge on the same features to maximise engagement— hence WhatsApp stories, YouTube Shorts, and Twitter Fleets (rip). With these changes, new genres of content have flourished, like reaction videos, video essays, and twitch streams.
Different mediums have different strengths. If you were to spend an hour trying to learn about a particular historical war, for example, you’d end up with a different understanding of it depending on whether you spent that hour on TikTok, Wikipedia, or with a book. From what I can tell, of these three the book would confer the greatest depth of understanding, all things being equal.
I don’t know exactly how all these new mediums are affecting people’s thoughts and actions—this is a live topic, underpinning for example discussion of psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation, about smartphones’ role in worsening mental health outcomes in teenagers—but I’m certain they are having an effect. Anecdotally, almost everyone I know reports that their attention span is getting worse.
Everything as content
Despite this proliferation of new mediums, in the platform era, everything is content. This is because everything—songs, movies, political journalism, jokes, games, sports—is distributed through platforms subject to the same inscrutable algorithmic forces.
When there is a practical infinity of stuff available on every platform, ‘content’, of whatever form, must compete for your attention. And while content itself differs from piece to piece, the tactics used to compete are broadly similar (hence, for example, the convergence of the big lettering and exaggerated reactions that have come to define YouTube thumbnails).
This trend began a long time ago. The popularisation of TV in the mid-20th century led to politics, sports, religion, entertainment, and journalism all being filtered through the incentive of broadcast networks: to maximise ratings. Today, most digital platforms are designed to maximise their ability to hold your attention, so it can be sold to advertisers. Thus every platform is overflowing with hyperstimulating content that provides the informational equivalent of ‘empty calories’.
Of course, stirring art—with real nutritional value—continues to be made. But it must fight for our focus, and the fight is not fair.
To paraphrase Bo Burnham’s excellent song on the topic: welcome to the internet. Apathy's a tragedy and boredom is a crime, anything and everything all of the time.
5. Contingent design
The shape of today’s information ecosystem is neither neutral nor inevitable—it’s the result of deliberate choices made by the companies that build and maintain these platforms.
Most importantly, many (though not all) platform companies chose to build their businesses around advertising revenue. This has proved remarkably profitable: in 2023, advertising accounted for 78% of Google’s revenue and 98% of Meta’s. It’s also a primary source of revenue for Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, TikTok, and Twitch.
While this has been great for companies and their shareholders, it has not necessarily benefited consumers. This is unsurprising: it was predicted by some of the people who built these systems. In a 1998 paper, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote: “we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”
The goal of advertiser-funded platforms is to maximise how much time people spend on them. More time on a platform equals more ad views and more data about user behaviour, which can be used to refine ad targeting. It also allows companies to sell the advertising space on their platforms at higher rates, since more people will see whatever ads are displayed.
Platforms also optimise for clicks, likes, shares, comments, and other “engagement metrics” that serve as proxies for attention. They borrow techniques from slot machine design to create habit-forming experiences. These often take the form of:
incessant notifications
infinite scrolling
“pull-to-refresh” features that deliver unpredictable rewards (goodbye to the funny tweet you saw for two seconds and will have to scroll for thirty to find)
auto-playing videos
daily “streaks”
badges, leaderboards, etc
Some of the world’s smartest engineers are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to increase platform addiction.
Many quirks of the modern internet are tied up in these ad-revenue-optimizing decisions. For example, users that post politically fraught content, which platforms may deem to be bad for advertisers or retaining users, could find themselves and their content “shadow-banned”—covertly hidden from others on the platform, without explicit notice that this has happened. This can also occur as part of routine content moderation, or attempts to prevent spam, but determining exactly whether or why something is shadow-banned is difficult, because the algorithms deciding who sees what are opaque by design; ostensibly to prevent people from gaming them and to protect trade secrets. And besides algorithmic opacity, the revenue-sharing agreements between platforms and content creators are themselves surprisingly opaque: it’s often unclear what the profit split looks like.
It’s already the case that many more people consume content than produce it, which skews our impressions of what others think, by elevating active voices. But the design decisions discussed above exacerbate the problem by systematically favouring sensationalist content. For example, take an issue like abortion. If there are a hundred voices talking about a new court decision, eighty of them are careful to maintain nuance and accuracy, and twenty just aim to be as loud and incendiary as possible, then those twenty will dominate, and skew our perceptions of what people think accordingly. This is true regardless of your political leanings: in the above example, you can imagine thoughtful voices being outcompeted by sensationalist ones on either end of the political spectrum.
Every issue is like this now, with the worst voices on either side of any given issue amplifying each other, surfacing outrage and capturing our attention in the process (hence Andrew Tate). I don’t know what an undistorted view of the world would look like, but even so the one that one ends up with from social media feels particularly warped, like forming an impression of the shape of a river by watching it through a pinhole.
Sometimes I’ll see a post and it has what seems like a lot of likes (a hundred thousand, or a million), and conclude that “everybody must be talking about this”, only to raise it with people whose pinholes show a different part of the river, and to be met with quizzical looks.
All these design decisions prioritizing revenue generation over user experience have led to many platforms getting worse over time—what some people call “enshittification”. Some anecdotal examples: my Spotify library takes longer to load than ever, and offers me way less control than iTunes used to by hiding track metadata like beats per minute, which would make it much easier to sort through my library; Instagram frequently crashes when I try to do basic things like post to my feed; and even UberEats has become more tedious to navigate as restaurant menus are presented algorithmically.
Since platforms are largely (although not entirely) unregulated, there has been virtually nothing constraining these design decisions. This is in contrast to television—the media-reshaping technology of its time—which was heavily regulated across most of the world. In the absence of external constraints steering these platforms toward safeguarding the public interest, they have been shaped to be maximally useful to advertisers, or the ends of their owners.
6. Shaping behaviour, culture, politics
All this time spent on these platforms has changed how we think, speak, and relate to each other. That much seems uncontentious. Understanding exactly how we have changed is a lot harder, and I don’t think I’m seeing the full picture. I hear that solitude is on the rise, everyone’s attention spans are getting worse, and people are self-pathologizing like never before. I hear the youth are no longer so interested in sex, drugs, and drinking, everyone’s become more passive, and parasocial relationships to our peers have become the default. Perhaps this only applies to so-called WEIRD people—Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic—but I’m uncertain.
Meanwhile, social platforms have become inescapably political: not just because they are objects of political attention, but because they are sites where politics happens. This has been obvious since at least the Arab Spring—a series of anti-government protests that took place in Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain between 2010 and 2012, where social media played a major role in helping protestors organize protests and attract international attention—and it continues to be obvious today. I don’t understand the precise causality involved, but it seems plausible that platforms have been instrumental in fanning populism and authoritarianism across the globe (if only because this has happened across jurisdictions, in countries rich and poor, liberal and authoritarian).
So that’s what I think is going on. That’s the start of it, at least. Initially, I planned to hold off on sharing this until I had a deeper understanding of how platforms have changed the world. But the world moves too fast—it turns out that any “deeper understanding” is all but guaranteed to be outdated by the time it’s found. Meanwhile, swarms of increasingly advanced AI agents wait in the shadows, set to remake the world once more. I don’t think we’re ready.
As the world—never really still, not for a single moment—continues to churn, I think it’s helpful to remember: none of this was inevitable. None of it is immutable. The world as we know it, mediated by platforms, emerged from a set of intentional decisions intermingling with our fundamental impulses. Recent decades have seen billions of peoples’ relationship with information rewritten. It’s going to happen again. I don’t know exactly what that will look like, but my hope is that taking stock of how things have changed to date will help us navigate whatever comes next.