Radical democracy after social media: technics, ontology and the political

The thesis is concerned with two central questions on the subject of democracy: (1) to what extent does social media expand or restrict possibilities for radical democracy? (2) To what extent does the relationship between politics and technology account for the difficulties of democratic reform, renewal and expansion?
I argue that we currently live in the technospheric condition, a series of social, cultural and technological factors that intersect with one another and produce certain subjectivities, the contemporary iteration of which is increasingly steered by social media. The technospheric condition distorts what is properly political (that is to say, democratically contestable) and makes it appear technical (an objective process grounded in efficiency to be deferred to experts). The hegemonic ideology of neoliberalism has benefited most from this trajectory, and done little to counter its effects. However, due to contemporary reconfigurations of our technological landscape through the ubiquity of social media and its platform model, new subjectivities are emerging that complement the return of the political. These subjectivities are open to the relitigation of all political questions, which provides counter-hegemonic actors an opportunity to contest the neoliberal-capitalist status quo (as well as far-right forces previously vanquished to regroup and attempt to normalise their positions). I conclude that through a political comprehension and reconfiguration of the platforms that exacerbate and cultivate the tendencies of hypersubjectivity, radical democratic actors and institutions may best critique and overhaul neoliberalism (and by extension, reinvigorate the forgotten promise of democracy as a political ideal).
The primary philosophical contention of the thesis is that radical democratic theory’s “ontological turn” is incomplete, insofar as it cannot adequately explain contemporary subjectivity without a critical examination of the inherent relatedness of the political and technics, which I here argue to be integral to any reformulation of radical democracy in the information age. The primary political contention of the thesis is that social media, amongst a combination of other factors, plays a role in reproducing the (neoliberal capitalist) status quo by contributing to the interpellation of the hypersubject, a subject formation inculcated into digital activity through constant stimulus distributed on curated profiles and feeds, and political passivity through a disorientating bombardment of information. However, as shall be later explained, the same economic model that incentivises designers to create tools that command the user’s attention to maximise profit, inadvertently provides the tools for countering the very neoliberal-capitalist principles that these technological corporations exploit. By constructing a new theory of ideology as a technics of interpellation, I aim to demonstrate the relationship between political and technical logics in the processes of subject production, and conclude that hypersubjectivity, as both a cultural condition, and a nascent form of technical mastery, provides an opportunity for the reinvigoration and reorientation of radical democratic theory as a political technique of “sphere-building”.

Keywords: hypersubjectivity
radical democratic theory
political ontology
technics
political theory
social media
politics of technology
Advisor: White, S