Unbecoming

I (Breigha) came to Twitter at a time when it felt less like a platform and more like a space—one shaped not by algorithmic prediction, but by people. It was a space where humour, critique, and cultural expression moved quickly, often unpredictably, but with a kind of shared recognition. What would later be called Black Twitter was not a formal community, but a set of practices: ways of speaking, responding, witnessing, and making meaning together. That space was never perfect, but it was generative. It enabled forms of visibility that were difficult to sustain elsewhere. Over time, however, those conditions shifted, reorganised under pressures of scale, monetisation, and platform governance. What once felt like an expansion of possibility became increasingly structured by logics that rendered those same practices precarious. The story of Black Twitter is not simply one of emergence and decline; it illustrates a broader transformation in the design and governance of digital platforms—one that cannot be addressed through incremental reform alone. The heart of technology beats to the rhythms of modern social, economic, and political life. Yet the design logics and regulatory approaches that govern technological development have been disproportionately shaped by Silicon Valley and other Western industrial hubs. These principles, often presented as neutral or inevitable, are in fact deeply embedded in cultural and economic contexts that privilege profit over justice, efficiency over equity, and disruption over accountability (Flew, Regulating Platforms; Srnicek; Zuboff). The result is a sociotechnical order that amplifies existing inequalities while presenting itself as a universal and unavoidable trajectory of progress. Existing responses to these conditions—regulatory fixes, ethical guidelines, and frameworks for responsible innovation—have largely operated as after-the-fact adjustments layered onto infrastructures that remain fundamentally extractive (Thussu; Stilgoe et al.). While such interventions are necessary, they are insufficient. To meaningfully transform technology’s relationship to society, it is not enough to refine existing systems; we must also interrogate and undo the assumptions that shape their design and governance. We call this process unbecoming. Unbecoming operates in two interrelated senses. First, it names the misalignment between contemporary technological systems and democratic, justice-oriented values. Systems that reproduce racial hierarchies, amplify inequality, or privilege extraction over participation are not merely flawed—they are unbecoming of the societies they claim to serve (Benjamin; Noble; Wajcman). Second, unbecoming refers to a praxis of unlearning and dismantling: a deliberate effort to undo entrenched design logics, economic assumptions, and governance models in order to create space for alternative sociotechnical arrangements. Just as individuals sometimes need to unlearn habits or beliefs that no longer serve them, institutions and societies must actively unbecome in order to create space for more equitable and sustainable futures. To develop this framework, we trace the platformisation of the Internet through the trajectory of Twitter/X, examining how processes of scaling, monetisation, and governance transformation altered the conditions that once supported civic discourse and counterpublic formation. We then outline three principles for reimagining platform futures: socially informed capitalism, optimal scaling, and democratic governance. Together, these interventions position unbecoming as both a diagnostic lens and a practical orientation for rethinking how sociotechnical systems might be designed, governed, and sustained. Diagnosing Platformisation: When Infrastructure Turns Unbecoming The contemporary Internet is not simply a collection of tools, but a sociotechnical system structured by specific economic, political, and cultural logics (Plantin and Punathambekar). As van Dijck et al. argue, platforms increasingly organise public life itself, shaping how values such as equity, participation, and visibility are operationalised. To understand why current platforms so often fail to support equitable and democratic forms of social life, it is necessary to begin with a diagnosis of these underlying conditions. Unbecoming as Diagnosis It is within this context that unbecoming operates as a diagnostic term. Technologies that reproduce racial hierarchies, amplify gendered inequalities, or privilege extraction over participation are not merely flawed—they are fundamentally misaligned with the values they claim to support. At its most basic, unbecoming names the inappropriateness of current technological systems for marginalised users. Technologies that amplify racist stereotypes (Noble), reproduce racial hierarchies (Benjamin), or reinforce gendered inequalities (Wajcman) are not just flawed; they are unbecoming of a just and democratic society. This misalignment is not incidental but embedded in the design and governance of computational systems. Critical AI scholarship shows that such systems reproduce and intensify inequality through data and optimisation practices (Benjamin; Noble). As Benjamin argues, these processes encode racial hierarchies into seemingly neutral systems, while Noble demonstrates how algorithmic ranking privileges dominant groups; Browne situates these dynamics within longer histories of racialised surveillance, reframing platforms and AI as infrastructures of power rather than neutral tools. Importantly, this diagnosis extends beyond surface-level harms to the deeper logics that structure technological systems. Platform capitalism and surveillance capitalism (Srnicek; Zuboff) are not accidental outcomes but deliberate architectures that privilege data extraction and behavioural modification over wellbeing. To call these arrangements unbecoming is to insist that they are fundamentally misaligned with both democratic ideals and sustainable business models. This diagnosis, however, remains abstract without a concrete illustration of how such dynamics unfold over time. To make these processes visible, we turn to the platformisation of Twitter. Platformisation and the Logic of Extraction Initially heralded as a democratic and egalitarian technology, the Internet has become increasingly structured around corporate platforms that consolidate control, capture data, and monetise attention (Plantin and Punathambekar; Srnicek; Zuboff). This evolution illustrates not only the failures of regulatory approaches—often too slow, fragmented, or narrowly national to address global infrastructures—but also the failure of imagination in treating profit and justice as incompatible (Flew, Globalization). The challenge, then, is not simply to regulate platforms more effectively, but to rethink the values and practices that gave rise to them in the first place. The platformisation of the Internet led to the construction of micro-services associated with the delivery of pseudo-personalised feeds of social activity (Poell, Nieborg, and van Dijck). As Poell et al. argue, platformisation is not merely a technical shift but a broader reorganisation of cultural production, economic exchange, and governance through platform infrastructures. Generated algorithmically and on an alleged premise of personalisation, these streams of data are designed to appear on multiple screens and refresh at the behest of mysteriously programmed infrastructures, commonly labelled black box design (Costanza-Chock). Platformisation supports the packaging of data into small manageable chunks that can be refreshed, thus serving to update both the quality and the perceived value of the data feeds generated. The irony that scholars have not failed to point out is that users trade in their own private and personal data only to have them mixed up and served up in a menu of prescribed options; a social salad, to put it crudely, of personal drama, news, photos, and miscellaneous microbits of everyday occurrences. The privacy paradox involved at the heart of this structure rests on dubious legal terms (Fernback & Papacharissi; Papacharissi & Fernback) and a social contract that disregards context (Nissenbaum). We include the first references in the scholarly literature to these tendencies to reflect that scholarly concern pre-dated the platformisation of the Internet. Around the same time, Bruns described these tendencies as resting on an organisational logic that engaged citizens as both producers and consumers of data, termed produsage, supporting capabilities of ambient, always on feeds of refreshable data (Hermida). What might the Internet look like without platformisation? We caught only a brief glimpse of that possibility in early online communities—Usenet boards, personal homepages, blogs—before the Web became a nexus of monetised platforms. In their place, we have inherited a landscape of seemingly assembly-line mini apps that are increasingly ill-suited to the demands of civic and democratic life. To understand how this transformation occurred, we turn to Twitter/X—not as a bounded case, but as a site through which the processes of becoming and unbecoming can be traced over time. It offers a layered account of how platform infrastructures emerge, evolve, and, ultimately, erode the very conditions that once made them socially valuable. From Becoming to Collapse: Twitter as Sociotechnical Evidence Launched in 2006 as a way to send short, 140-character messages to small groups of people, Twitter, now commonly known as X, mystified the general public and only seemed to make sense to few who used it to type in inconsequential updates. Mass media sought to make sense of the phenomenon of people posting seemingly insignificant daily updates that featured what they had for breakfast, among other things. While the idea of food porn appears canonical and possibly even banal to mass audience