Geert Lovink 
Sad by Design 
On Platform Nihilism

Sadness is now a design problem. The highs and lows of melancholy are coded into social media platforms. After all the clicking, browsing, swiping and liking, all we are left with is the flat and empty aftermath of time lost to the app.



Sad by Design offers a critical analysis of the growing social media controversies such as fake news, toxic viral memes and online addiction. The failed search for a grand design has resulted in depoliticised internet studies unable to generate either radical critique or a search for alternatives.



Geert Lovink calls for us to embrace the engineered intimacy of social media, messenger apps and selfies, because boredom is the first stage of overcoming ‘platform nihilism’. Then, after the haze, we can organise to disrupt the data extraction industries at their core.

Table of Content

Series Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Society of the Social
1. Overcoming the Disillusioned Internet
2. Social Media as Ideology
3. Distraction and its Discontents
4. Sad by Design
5. Media Network Platform: Three Architectures
6. From Registration to Extermination: On Technological Violence
7. Narcissus Confirmed: Technologies of the Minimal Selfie
8. Mask Design: Aesthetics of the Faceless
9. Memes as Strategy: European Origins and Debates
10. Before Building the Avant-Garde of the Commons
Notes
Bibliography

About the author

Geert Lovink is a media theorist, internet critic and author of Zero Comments (Routledge, 2007), Networks Without a Cause (Polity, 2012), Social Media Abyss (Polity, 2016) and Sad By Design (Pluto, 2019). He founded the Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and teaches at the European Graduate School.