Pre-Order the Kindle version now here. Print versions will be available April 22, 2022
In 1513, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote The Prince as a guidebook for rulers—how to seize power, how to keep it, and how to appear noble while doing neither. On the surface, it was advice for kings. But the subtext was something far more dangerous.
It was written to enlighten the regular people.
To help those at the bottom see the machinery of control.
To make power legible.
To whisper: this is how it works, and this is how it will use you.
In 2025, I’ve written The Platform Prince with the same dual purpose. It appears to speak to the kings of our era, platform founders, tech elites, digital landlords. But in truth, it’s for those of us down here, those who spent years building audiences, identities, even careers inside systems that now gatekeep us out. I feel we are entering a new phase of history. Not post-capitalist. Not communist. Not democratic. Something older, and far more familiar: Techno-Feudalism.
In this new order, you don’t own the land, you’re merely a tenant on someone else’s platform. You are subject to their rules, changes, and whims. You don’t own your audience, no matter how many followers you have, it's the algorithm that determines who actually sees your content, when, and how often. And you don’t truly own your voice, it’s constantly being filtered, ranked, suppressed, or amplified based on invisible systems you don’t control and barely understand. Your labor is content. Your time is tithed. Your value is measured in clicks.
The Platform Prince is a survival map drawn from the wreckage of digital life.
It’s part essay, part treatise, part confession. It’s for the builders and thinkers and artists who once believed the internet was a blank canvas, only to learn it’s a castle with no doors.
This book is for the creators who poured their energy into building an audience, only to watch their reach disappear overnight, buried by shifting algorithms or platform updates beyond their control. It's for the builders who invested time, skill, and vision into crafting something meaningful, yet were never given the chance to truly own what they created, always operating on borrowed ground. It's for the artists who dared to be original, only to see their work scraped, copied, and repackaged by machines, stripped of context and soul. And it's for anyone who has started to feel that becoming “a brand” was never empowerment, but a polished, modern leash disguised as freedom.
The seed for this book came from my art series Dystopian Selfies, a visual thesis on algorithmic identity, glitch aesthetics, and the emotional collapse behind curated digital lives. What began as a reaction to platform fatigue and surveillance capitalism evolved into a larger meditation on the systems we live inside. That’s when I realized: we weren’t just tired, we were being ruled.
Two new pieces from the Dystopian Selfies series will be on display at Ol’ Blue Gallery in Hannibal, Missouri, opening April 18th. Just days before the official release of The Platform Prince on April 22nd, 2025, it felt fitting to return to where this project began. Being inside the image of a person breaking apart under a system they can’t see.