Mike Pepi’s Against Platforms Exposes the Mirage of Digital Utopia

The promises of digital life have curdled into a trap. In Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia, released this year by Penguin Random House, technologist and cultural critic Mike Pepi rips open the myths that Silicon Valley spun and the world swallowed whole.

At the dawn of the millennium, the story was intoxicating: technology would dissolve barriers, flatten hierarchies, and connect us more deeply than ever before. Instead, a quarter century later, we’re left drained and fractured, sprinting to keep pace with platforms that dictate how we work, think, and even imagine community.

Pepi argues that this collapse was never an accident. Platforms weren’t neutral tools; they came loaded with ideology, designed to extract and control. In his telling, the utopian promises were marketing gloss, a lure that hollowed out the institutions—schools, media, museums, civic bodies—that once gave society grounding. What remains is a culture built for speed and profit, not memory or care.

Still, Pepi doesn’t write only in despair. His manifesto is a demand to rebuild. He insists we can disarm the hidden assumptions in the code and remake technology as an ally rather than a captor. To do so, we must craft new institutions that move slower, hold deeper, and serve human ends instead of venture capital spreadsheets.

The book has already drawn fierce praise. Rolling Stone lauded its reframing of the myths that carried us here. Kirkus called it “an unsparing exposé.” Cultural theorist Douglas Rushkoff hailed it as a way forward without surrendering to tech’s false prophets.

For the art world—Pepi’s other terrain—the warning cuts sharpest. If we fail to rebuild, art risks being consumed by the same logic that has devoured news and politics: attention over substance, clicks over care. The fight, Pepi makes clear, is not just over technology but over the survival of culture itself.

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