One-Dimensional Algorithm: Rereading Marcuse’s Critical Theory Through Platform Culture

This article rereads Herbert Marcuse’s critical theory through algorithmic curation on commercial social media platforms, pursuing a dialectical argument in two directions: first, that platform capitalism structurally reproduces Marcuse’s diagnoses of false needs, incorporation, and one-dimensional thought; second, that platform dynamics exceed his framework—in its passive-subject assumptions, its vagueness about resistance, and its inability to account for the simultaneous production of homogeneity and fragmentation. From this tension, the article develops the concept of algorithmic incorporation: the process by which oppositional thought, practice, and identity enter a platform-mediated cycle of visibility, normalization, commodification, and domestication. Drawing on #BlackLivesMatter as a sustained analytical case, it shows how the four phases operate and specifies observable indicators through which each could be empirically tested. The concept is distinguished from Marcuse’s incorporation, Gramsci’s transformism, and Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism, and corrects accounts—including Bennett and Segerberg’s connective action—that foreground platform infrastructure’s enabling dimensions without reckoning with its costs to movements. Because incorporation operates without a deciding agent, the article concludes, tactical evasion cannot substitute for infrastructural change.