Platformed Intelligibility: 6 Phantom Belonging and Coordination Without Care

Platforms give us a sense of belonging. We join groups, follow accounts, like posts, comment, share. It feels social, real, and consequential.

But relationally, much of this belonging is phantom. It produces alignment without responsibility, consensus without commitment, and coordination without ethical grounding.

---

Taste and Belonging Without Community

Historically, belonging required participation in shared practices: apprenticeship, conversation, recognition, mutual adaptation. Taste was learned socially; responsibility was enacted.

On platforms:

• recommendation systems simulate taste

• affective cues suggest recognition

• repetition trains alignment

Yet none of this requires mutual recognition or shared effort. Belonging is experienced as if real, but it is largely illusory.

---

Coordination Without Accountability

Phantom belonging produces subtle but powerful effects:

• Users adopt patterns of style and affect that align with the system.

• Norms are reinforced automatically, without discussion or consent.

• Ethical responsibility is displaced: the system, not the participants, appears to manage consequences.

In short, platforms train participation without ethical stakes.

---

Why Solidarity Feels Easy

Traditional solidarity requires risk: disagreement, negotiation, persistence. Platforms offer alignment at zero cost:

• Outrage without effort

• Support without coordination

• Identity without mutual accountability

This superficially flattens difference while stabilising the system. Feeling “connected” no longer implies real relational work.

---

The Relational Consequence

Phantom belonging means that coordination occurs even in the absence of care:

• Patterns of attention, style, and affect are reproduced automatically.

• People feel part of a group while contributing to field shaping unknowingly.

• Resistance is neutralised because the field absorbs and repurposes it.

Participants are implicated even when unaware — alignment becomes self-propagating.

---

Subversion Under Phantom Conditions

Traditional interventions — persuasion, protest, messaging — often fail because they assume conscious engagement. Effective relational subversion now requires:

• Slowing pace: creating revisable, non-immediate spaces

• Stylistic disruption: challenging alignment subtly

• Opacity and ambiguity: resisting instant recognisability

The goal is not visibility, but reshaping what can be intelligibly taken up within the field.

---

Closing

Phantom belonging is the system’s quiet stabiliser. It aligns millions, trains taste, and reproduces norms — without asking anyone to care.

Responsibility is no longer personal alone; it is relational. To act ethically within platformed fields is to attend to uptake, coordination, and the conditions of intelligibility rather than to appearances, likes, or shares.

The next post will explore why slowness has become a politically radical stance, and how time itself can be used as a tool of subversive coordination.