We the Platform

Reviews / Votes

We the Platform is the most persuasive and engaging account I've read of how the internet-rather than being a threat to literature-has become a legitimate and exciting site of literary creation, one where, as with all such sites, regular people and platform owners negotiate and renegotiate the balance of cultural power. A must-read. -- Vauhini Vara, author of <i>Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age</i> What do we see when we don't assume that what the internet has done to literature is all bad? Helping us explore the possibilities as well as the perils of the present, Aarthi Vadde's state-of-the-art account of our postscarcity literary world offers a wonderfully energizing tour of some of the most fascinating experiments it has inspired. -- Mark McGurl, author of <i>Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon</i> We all know that the internet changed literature-the ways it's written and circulated, what it is-but until We the Platform we haven't known how. Aarthi Vadde has given us the gift of a rigorous, at times thrilling account of how Web 2.0-the social web, the social media web, the web of Twitter, Wattpad, Goodreads-has transformed copyright and authorship and thus literary production writ large. -- Dan Sinykin, author of <i>Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature</i> It turns out that social media may not, in fact, have killed the literary star-such is Vadde's sharp and welcome rebuttal to the fatalistic 'end of literature' narrative. We the Platform maps the complex convergence of legacy publishing and platform capitalism, showing how literature endures by navigating, rather than fleeing, the logic of Web 2.0. -- Rita Raley, University of California, Santa Barbara