Hip Hop after Platform Capitalism: Fighting for and against Big Tech Overseers
Day and time: Friday (March 20) · 14:00–15:30
Location: Auditorium
Format: Panel
Hip Hop after Platform Capitalism: Fighting for and against Big Tech Overseers
Presented by: Steven Gamble, Khairah Boukhatem & Lizzie Bowes
This panel considers how, in the contemporary era, Hip Hop continues to fight the power through negotiations with a different kind of monster: the encroachment of venture-capital funded technology companies on Hip Hop’s digital economy. Some have hewed close to techno-utopian logics of extraction and unchecked growth, exemplified by Timbaland’s controversial partnership with music generative AI company Suno. Others have fiercely resisted the paternalistic intrusion of tech platforms into everyday lives, from Noname’s anti-privatisation book club to a range of rap critiques about cultural confusions caused because the internet. Yet Silicon Valley’s sociotechnical imaginary regarding innovation (not least the generative AI boom’s processes of reuse and reproduction) are tricky in the Hip Hop context, where sampling and remixing form the bedrock of our cultural practice. Still, platform power dynamics are deeply interwoven with gendered and racialised logics that continue to frustrate some Hip Hop visions of justice. It may be that intersectional perspectives—particularly Hip Hop feminism and practices in global and diasporic Hip Hop scenes—offer blueprints for more equitable forms of creative and technological participation.
The panel features Hip Hop scholars whose work spans music studies, internet studies, digital humanities, sociology, digital media and communication, and political history, and those also active as creative practitioners. Through a dialogic combination of concise, reflective provocations (8–10 minutes), listening and reading prompts, and audience discussion activities, this panel will generate thoughtful and inclusive debates regarding Hip Hop, technosocial change, and resistance in the internet era. How does Hip Hop challenge, upset, comply with, or otherwise participate in the power dynamics sustained by the media platform oligopoly? Can we act through forms of Hip Hop practice to flip the script? Should we valorise means of Hip Hop resistance or does cash still rule everything around us? The reflections and provocations in this panel will investigate, prompting urgent debate on Hip Hop’s political potential to imagine more justice-oriented technosocial futures.
