‘We have no algorithms!’ DIY online radio as post-platform media

This article examines the emergence of do-it-yourself online radio stations as a form of ‘post-platform media’ that operates within, yet resists, the dominant logics of platform capitalism. Drawing on interviews with UK-based stations, we argue that do-it-yourself online radio stations constitute a novel form of cultural production that presses against and reconfigures existing frameworks across platform studies, cultural, media and radio studies, participatory and community media research, and cultural industries scholarship. Platform studies have shown how algorithmic systems reorganise cultural circulation around metrics and optimisation. Community media research has foregrounded civic representation and oppositional politics, while creative labour scholarship has theorised cultural work through frameworks of precarity and professionalisation. But do-it-yourself online radio stations operate according to a fundamentally aesthetic logic that presses at the limits of these approaches. They cultivate communities in which the boundary between producer and audience is porous, and cultural participation is grounded in human curation, embodied knowledge, and gift economies rather than algorithmic optimisation, explicitly political mandates, or career advancement. We conceive do-it-yourself online radio stations as sustaining alternative logics of value, curation, and social relation, even as they negotiate profound dependencies on commercial platforms for distribution and promotion. In this sense, do-it-yourself online radio stations exemplify constrained but significant modes of media resistance, offering insight into how cultural autonomy might be sustained within digital capitalism.