Networks of Digital Exhaustion: Platform Capitalism and Culture in Eastern Europe

What happens to critical thought when the infrastructures that make it publicly accessible also turn intellectual activity into a source of commercial value? Networks of Digital Exhaustion: Platform Capitalism and Culture in Eastern Europe investigates how digital platforms reshape the production of knowledge across the region, in a period when political and social consequences of platformization are already turning an era. Bringing together contributions on journalism, education, literary mediation, cinema, theatre, academic publishing, and cultural memory, the issue examines the tensions between participation and exploitation, public knowledge and private ownership, intellectual autonomy and infrastructural dependency in Romania, Serbia, Poland, Slovakia or Hungary. “Digital exhaustion” names a contradiction: the expansion of opportunities to produce and access knowledge coincides with growing demands on the labor and institutions that sustain these activities. The issue also considers the possibilities of cooperation and resistance within these conditions, from Polish platform cooperativism to Romanian online political communities and the persistence of non-commercial cultural mediation. Treating Eastern Europe as a site of theoretical inquiry, it asks how the region’s experiences can help us reconsider alienation, emancipation, solidarity, and the status of knowledge as a common good under platform capitalism.

The growing dependence of intellectual and cultural activity on digital platforms raises questions that require sustained philosophical reflection: what becomes of autonomy when public expression depends on privately governed infrastructures? How does the conversion of attention into economic value transform intellectual labor and critical judgement? Under what conditions can expanded access to knowledge support collective emancipation? This special issue brings these questions into dialogue with the historical experiences and contemporary contradictions of Eastern Europe. Its contribution lies in examining platform capitalism through institutions and practices already transformed by the transition from state socialism. A special issue is necessary to connect these problems across fields usually studied separately. Their comparative treatment allows concepts surrounding alienation and commodification to be tested against distinct institutional arrangements and lived experiences. Contributions on political education, cooperative organization, and residual cultural institutions examine the practical possibilities of collective agency within relations of dependency. While research on platform capitalism in Eastern Europe has concentrated on labor relations, economic dependency, and the social consequences of digitalization, the phantomization of the region’s artistic, educational, and intellectual life remains comparatively underexplored. International scholarship provides important frameworks for analysing platform-dependent cultural production (Nieborg and Poell, 2018; Nieborg, Duffy, and Poell, 2020) and the transformation of education through digital infrastructures (Decuypere, Grimaldi, and Landri, 2021), yet their implications for Eastern Europe require sustained investigation. As recent scholarship acknowledges, the predominant focus on Anglo-American and Northwestern European contexts has shaped the concepts through which platform-mediated cultural production is understood (Poell, Duffy, and Nieborg, 2024).

The proposed special issue builds on SEET’s established engagement with digital communication and the changing conditions of intellectual activity. Relevant precedents include Henrike Schmidt’s investigation of rural Russian online projects (2011), Andrey Logutov’s analysis of Russian intellectuals’ wartime media practices (2025), and Marlène Laruelle and Dusan Bozalka’s examination of Dugin’s profile as “digital influencer” (2026). The present proposal extends this conversation and clusters it around the concepts of “platform capitalism” and “digital exhaustion,” hopefully making SEET a crucial place where contemporary trends in culture & art can be studied. It also connects with the journal’s philosophical treatment of social transformations in Eastern Europe. Its suitability derives from SEET’s commitment to philosophical inquiry and intellectual history, including interdisciplinary research that connects philosophical questions with specific social and cultural problems.