Sad by Design

We live in a time of engineered intimacy, toxic memes and online addiction. Can we ever break free?

'Dystopian ... a scathing indictment of a technology that transforms the very notion of self into a sharing platform.'

'Sad by Design: on Platform Nihilism, despite the title, is not a sad book. It dissects our digital addictions with the dynamite power of critical theory. It's a savage journey into the heart of the digital self, and a wake-up call to break free of our own enslavement'

'Geert Lovink, who is expertly familiar with digital dynamics - technological as well as social - provides in this book a searing criticism of platform nihilism, considered above all as a perversion of computational design'

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.