Abstract
This study rethinks Herbert Marcuse’s philosophy of technology in relation to contemporary digital capitalism, focusing on how technological rationality is reproduced and intensified within platform infrastructures. It develops a philosophical and critical analysis that mobilises Marcuse’s framework to examine the epistemic, cultural, and affective dimensions of digital media, with particular attention to music-streaming platforms.
I aim to reconstruct the philosophical foundations of Marcuse’s critique by tracing its sources in ancient Greek technē, Heidegger’s ontology of technology, Marxian historical materialism, Lukács’s theory of reification, and Freudian psychoanalysis. Revisiting Marcuse’s analyses of sublimation, repression, and libidinal organisation, I argue that contemporary digital platforms reorganise desire and pleasure in ways that sustain domination through seemingly personalised and pleasurable forms of control.
To assess the continued relevance of Marcuse’s thought, the analysis examines social media and music-streaming environments, focusing on Spotify and the cooperative platform Resonate. These cases make it possible to test how key Marcusean concepts—technological rationality, administered pleasure, one-dimensionality, and the politicisation of desire—operate under algorithmic conditions. Spotify is analysed as an exemplary site where listening becomes data, aesthetic experience is shaped by prediction, and personalisation conceals processes of standardisation and commodification. The study clarifies how platform capitalism restructures cultural production and auditory experience through data-driven governance.
Resonate is discussed as a contrasting model that foregrounds transparency, shared ownership, and alternative economic arrangements. Although shaped by broader infrastructural constraints, it gestures towards technological forms more closely aligned with Marcuse’s vision of a liberated technē and non-repressive cultural production.
Overall, the thesis argues that Marcuse’s philosophy remains indispensable for understanding how digital technologies shape subjectivity, desire, and social life, and shows how a philosophically grounded analysis can illuminate the political and epistemic stakes of contemporary digital platform architectures while keeping open the possibility of emancipatory alternatives.