What do Facebook, Google, and TikTok see when they look at you? And more importantly, what do they miss?

I recorded this conversation with Petter Törnberg almost a year ago. It has aged into something closer to a warning.

Törnberg is Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science at the University of Amsterdam and co-author of Seeing Like a Platform: An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity. His claim is straightforward and uncomfortable: platforms have become the new eyes of power. Industrial modernity ruled from the top down and you could see it. Digital modernity rules through #algorithms you cannot see at all, and it is no less total for being invisible.

Algorithms do not reflect society. They rebuild it. Politics, culture, and your own sense of who you are.

We got into:

Why algorithmic tyranny does not need a tyrant. Why self-organization so often smuggles in a new hierarchy rather than dissolving the old one. Decentralization as camouflage. Whether #AI becomes the ultimate platform of platforms, the layer that sits above and swallows all the others. What is actually left for citizens, activists, and policymakers who want to push back.

That last one is where I pushed him hardest. He has an answer. It is not the comfortable one, and it is not the fatalistic one either.

The deeper question in this conversation is not really about #platforms. It is whether we can still imagine a shared future at all, or whether fragmentation is now the permanent condition of #DigitalModernity.

Watch or listen, then tell me if you think he is right.

Full interview here: [ https://snglrty.co/4mDn1Gb](https://snglrty.co/4mDn1Gb)

See this interview to discover Petter Törnberg’s insights on algorithmic tyranny, digital modernity, and how platforms reshape power.