Author: The editorial team of Globalproject.info
The digital transformation is rewriting the global power’s balance, fueling momentous geopolitical changes. In a world that’s more and more connected, the digital infrastructure is not just a tool, but a true political environment: it conditions production, governs social relations and shapes the very organisation of social life. Platforms, algorithms and surveillance devices are not neutral elements, but instruments of power that define who can speak, who can act, who can be visible.
Contemporary capitalism has transcended the boundaries of traditional production: today, economic value is extracted not only from work, but from life itself. Gestures, emotions, relationships: every aspect of everyday experience is monitored, analysed, transformed into data to be monetised. In this scenario, so-called “social reproduction” – everything related to care, education, communication – is no longer a marginal area. It has become one of the main fields of exploitation and control in the platform economy.
Algorithmic governance is today the beating heart of the new power since it manages uncertainty not by reacting, but by anticipating. It predicts, orients, decides in advance who can speak, who can be seen, who counts as a political subject. It does not merely control but shapes the domain of the possible. And yet, in this very regulated terrain, breaches open up. In the folds of control, practices of resistance, spaces of conflict, attempts at collective construction emerge. But they are fragile, intermittent, continually threatened by an underground war that is fought not only on territories, but on words, on images, on the ability to imagine an alternative.
The line between peace and conflict is becoming increasingly blurred. The digital devices we use every day – smartphones, apps, platforms – are not just tools for communication, but also gears of command and surveillance. Predictive control, attention manipulation, constant tracking, are no longer just side effects, but structural functions of a system that aims to govern society as a whole. Platforms, once seen as mere intermediaries, now act as new centres of sovereign power, deciding who can be visible, who can participate, who can count as a subject.
As Nick Srnicek [Nick Srnicek, Platform capitalism (2016)] has explained, platform capitalism has profoundly reshaped global power relations, redistributing resources and power through digital networks that cut across every aspect of daily life. In this new economy, the raw material is no longer manual or industrial labour, but people’s data, behaviour and attention. Shoshana Zuboff calls it “surveillance capitalism”[Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019)]: a system in which human experience is treated as a free resource, to be transformed into predictive models and sold in behavioural futures markets. Decision-making power thus moves away from the public and democratic sphere, to concentrate in private and opaque spaces, where algorithms and artificial intelligences make decisions without transparency or accountability.
Control is not only technical, but symbolic: it orients imaginaries, regulates desires, constructs truths.
Politics does not disappear, but is transformed. According to Anthony Jager, we live in an era of “hyperpolitics” where everything seems political, everything is exposed, but this overexposure generates a paralysis of real conflict and renders it harmless. Struggles are neutralised in the very form in which they manifest themselves, consumed in the rapidity of images and the performative logic of the media [Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitik (2023)].
This new type of power is more subtle and pervasive than any previous form. It acts in the shadows, without the need for public legitimacy. Control is hidden in digital infrastructures, in invisible protocols that decide what can be seen, said, thought. Conflict is not only anticipated, but captured before it even emerges. Platforms operate like a headless Leviathan, a form of Faced with all this, the question that arises is inevitable: what is to be done? The answer is clear: do not give in to the idea that this system is invincible. As Zuboff reminds us, the power of platforms feeds on our participation: if we stop feeding it, the system starts to creak. Tiziana Terranova interprets this phase as a radical appropriation, but also as a possibility for renewal: digital capitalism may try to encompass every aspect of life, but it never succeeds completely. The social forces that traverse the web, shared knowledge, and collective intelligence are still partially free, not completely subjugated [Tiziana Terranova, After the Internet. Digital Networks between Capital and the Common (2022)].sovereignty that invisibly shapes the conditions of our existence, invisible yet omnipresent.
There are concrete examples of how this dynamic can lead to explicit forms of digital authoritarianism. The alliance between Trump and Musk, with direct control of a platform like X (formerly Twitter), represented a fundamental symbolic passage: the fusion of political and technological power, the possibility of imposing oneself by circumventing all institutional mediation. In this hybrid, communication becomes vertical, instantaneous, manipulated; censorship is selective, and alternative narratives are systematically excluded.
According to Benkler, Faris and Roberts, media polarisation is not an accident, but a genuine strategy. It serves to capture attention, to divide, to paralyse critical thinking. In an information ecosystem dominated by emotional and divisive content, the capacity for rational confrontation dissolves, and conflict is managed in a molecular way: keeping people divided, confused, constantly reactive. The loss of collective purpose is not a side effect, but a goal of digital control [Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (2018)].
The Internet is not dead. It has been transformed, captured, but it still retains vital potential. It is up to us to rethink infrastructures, to build autonomous spaces where communication is not just a commodity, but relation, cooperation, and collective inventiveness. This means uniting different practices, rethinking for instance the relationship between media activism, digital activism and real social movements – to create new media ecologies capable of escaping the logic of algorithmic anticipation.
It is not enough to produce alternative content. We must sabotage the infrastructure of polarisation, break the link between attention, economic value and social control. The real battles today are fought on this ground: not on what we think, but on how it is possible to think it, on what material conditions make critical thinking possible or impossible, a voice out of the chorus.
As Ciammella and Ciofalo point out, media activism can become a way out, but only if it goes beyond mere counter-information. It is necessary to build independent spaces of expression, networks of relationships that challenge the narrative monopoly of platforms. The real challenge is not only to resist predictive governance, but to imagine another way of communicating, organising, living. It is from here that a new practice of liberation can emerge.
* This editorial is a development of the workshop “Infosphere, Digital Platforms, Communication,” held as part of the Euronomade conference “Organising in the Crisis” (Padua, May 9–11, 2025).