In her 2014 book The People’s Platform, the writer and filmmaker Astra Taylor challenged the idea that the so-called digital revolution had democratized culture. In particular, she warned that the same problems of “consolidation, centralization, and commercialism” that defined our old media systems would continue to shape the digital world without a serious reckoning. “Networked technologies do not resolve the contradictions between art and commerce,” she wrote, “but rather make commercialism less visible and more pervasive.”1
