Organized Immaturity in a Post-Kantian Perspective: Toward a critical theory of surveillance capitalism

Infantilization

Zuboff (2019) documents instances of infantilization as dependency behaviours seeking protection from uncertainty and responsibility. Increasingly pervasive social media practices turn individuals of all ages into adolescents dominated by the pressure of others (p. 465). Aspirations to promote human society as a forum for asserting one’s individuality are replaced with aspirations to conformity with the behavioural hive. Fear of missing out and fear of exclusion from the hive operate as control mechanisms that keep individuals ‘aligned’ with the logic of the new socio-technological system, and thus erode their autonomy (pp. 465–466; see also Hari, 2022). The author remarks that the physical time span (measured in years) of ‘emerging adulthood’ has visibly increased in the recent generations of ‘digital natives’ (pp. 452–453), generalizing a ‘homing to the herd’ mentality and resulting in a weakened ability to differentiate oneself (as one’s self) from others.

Infantilization effects of technology are not new. Pre-21^st-century critiques have highlighted the propensity of modern socio-technological systems to ‘decide’ on behalf of individuals and thus significantly restrict spaces for autonomous decisions. Such systems push individuals into a pre-mature stage, whereby they wish to ‘escape from freedom’ (Fromm, 1941/1969) and, instead, rely on the directives of an authority that suppresses or controls their individuality either by setting restrictions and incentives for behaviour or by corrupting their consciousness. In this way, the individual maturation process is distorted, and even reversed (Habermas, 1990; Kohlberg, 1981; Selman, 1981). As a result, human beings are likely to be severely restricted or even prevented from developing moral consciousness and cognitive, communicative and social capacities that are constitutive of mature individuals as competent and enlightened members of democratic society (as described in Habermas, 1990).

Organization studies have also emphasized similar unprecedented infantilization effects of digitalization in the workplace, e.g. fear of exile (Hafermalz, 2021). However, in the absence of explicit antidotes, we contend that focusing on a revival of the Enlightenment project of achieving human maturity as independent (autonomous) exercise of public reason is essential for organization research to advance theory in an effective emancipatory direction.

Reductionism

Zuboff (2019) illustrates how comprehensive automation creates radical indifference as ‘observation without witness’ (p. 376) – namely, a form of ‘knowing’ about the individual without comprehending the human meaning of his or her experiences (see also Zizek, 2020). In this way, the human being is reduced to a set of predictable behaviours (see Alaimo & Kallinikos, 2017). At the same time, the new socio-technological system focuses on aspects that are built into their inner logic (i.e. the economizing on the commodification of human behaviour) while neglecting aspects that may be of significance for individuals (Lanier, 2018; Zuboff, 2019, 2022). This adds to the autonomy-eroding effect of infantilization: rather than being able to exercise reason independently, humans’ minds are conditioned, beyond individual control, in ways that serve the priorities of the socio-technological system.

Surveillance capitalism thus also erodes social relationships and fosters ‘instrumentarian collectives’: individuals are connected and controlled via a ubiquitous infrastructure that automatically collects big data on individual and collective behavioural patterns. This data is fed into an AI architecture that not only predicts but creates incentives to steer and control behaviour, so that this capacity to influence individual and collective behaviours can be economized and sold to third parties without the targets’ awareness (Zuboff, 2019, pp. 416–444; see also Gigerenzer, 2022). Consequently, individuality diminishes and makes room for controllable ‘organisms’ (Zuboff, 2019, p. 365) that display patterns of predictable swarm-like behaviour: ‘the automation of the self as the necessary condition of the automation of society, and all for the sake of others’ guaranteed outcomes’ (Zuboff, 2019, p. 382).

Forms of socio-technological reductionism have been criticized in the past – for example, by Marcuse (1964) in his book One Dimensional Man. However, what is unprecedented now is the ability of new technologies to replace functions such as experience, consciousness and understanding with algorithmic imitations of these functions, and to influence humans into adopting these imitations as if they were originals (or to make them perform even better than the originals, as suggested by Zizek, 2020). Organizational scholarship has noted the exploitive nature of social media and its tendency to reduce participants to sources of free labour (Beverungen et al., 2015), to trackable consumers (Martin, 2016), to disembodied presences in virtual space (Hafermalz & Riemer, 2020) or to ‘basic objects’ (Alaimo & Kallinikos, 2021, p. 1385). It is therefore timely that organization studies should research forms of reductionism induced by new technologies.

Totalization

Building on Zuboff’s narrative, the emergence of surveillance capitalism can be summarized in terms of three consecutive stages of socio-technological development (see also Scherer et al., 2023), with cumulative effects toward total surveillance and control: voluntary connection and data sharing; fragmented external surveillance; and integrated external surveillance. The first stage (voluntary submission) is illustrated by the advent of IT and social media platforms such as, respectively, Google and Facebook, to which users deliberately subscribe (Harcourt, 2015). While the explicit narrative is positive and imbued with an air of objective inevitability, key decisions about how these systems are being used by a few to extract economic rents and to control the many are not transparent, not democratically arrived at, and not sufficiently regulated by national or transnational law (Lanier, 2018). The second stage (fragmented control) involves a system such as the Internet of Things (IoT) – namely, a network of physical objects with sensors that collect data to be exchanged on the World Wide Web. The IoT is an enabler of conveniences and, at the same time, an uncanny, possibly illegitimate, ‘decision-maker’ and ‘moral agent’ in our lives (Lanier, 2018). Unlike the first, these second-stage systems do not require individuals to be subscribed to platforms. The systems collect data in passing, often leaving targeted individuals largely unaware of the surveillance procedure. Scholars are warning against privacy threats, and also against the potential for extending social control and political manipulation to non-subscribers (Lanier, 2018; Wachter, 2018; Zuboff, 2019). The third stage (integrated control) involves integrating the various data-collecting points and positioning the IoT to operate at both collective (e.g. from city to national) and individual (e.g. brain–machine interfaces) levels. Illustrative here is the concept and practice of Smart City – a fascinating idea with an equally powerful dark side that advances the fragmented systems of the second stage to fully integrated systems of surveillance and control (Bär et al., 2020; Vanolo, 2014). IoT networks with terminals in key City areas collect data from citizens, devices, buildings and other resources. This big data is processed and analysed (via machine learning) not only to observe but also to manage a multitude of dynamic urban systems (e.g. transport, utilities supply, waste management, crime policing, hospitals, schools). Beyond communicating data, these systems also decide and act, embracing the entirety of social life, and comprehensively monitoring and controlling individual behaviours. This potentially erodes individuals’ autonomous thinking and ability to control their own social environments (Colding & Barthel, 2017; Krivý, 2018), leaving them hardly any possibility to escape the systems’ enormous influence. Accordingly, integrated ICT systems condition and shape not only human behaviour but also human consciousness.

The totalizing propensities of modern technologies have already been critiqued by authors such as Arendt (1958/1998), Marcuse (1964) and Foucault (1982, 1984). However, what is new now is the insertion and intrusion of technology in aspects of human life previously ignored and unscrutinized by totalizing systems. Literally, surveillance technologies are reaching ‘under our skin’ (Harari, 2016; Musk & Neuralink, 2019; Zizek, 2020). Organization research has noted that new ICTs tend to submit all facets of human lifeworld to the totality of absolute standpoints, be it the rationality of the capitalist economic system or the doctrine of a political or religious ideology that leaves no alternative (de Vaujany et al., 2021; Fleming & Sturdy, 2011; Hancock & Tyler, 2004). Whereas, in totalitarian states of the pre-digital age, private realms were retreats where individuals could partly separate themselves from the forces of the surveilling apparatus, in surveillance capitalism the ubiquitous technical devices and IoT connecting points dilute and overcome the barriers between the private and the public (Trittin-Ulbrich et al., 2021). This process is intensified by private and state organizations colonizing the personal, autonomous spaces of employees or citizens in the name of meeting individual needs or serving collective interests. As a result, individuals are stripped of the potential to create their own future (Zuboff, 2019, p. 524).

In examining these three effects of surveillance capitalism on human individuals and society, we also note the unprecedented result of their combined actions, which reinforce each other and augment their domination beyond the simple sum of the parts. It is not just that there is little room left for individuals to protect their privacy and autonomy. Our deeper concern is that erosion of individuals’ capacity for public reason has generalized the success of impersonal systems in escaping social control and public accountability, thus posing unprecedented challenges to rule-of-law democracy. The presence of organized immaturity also explains how the values of democracy can be compromised while traditional democratic processes are still in place: generalized individual behaviours that are devoid of requisite maturity to exercise public reason can render democratic institutions powerless and meaningless.

In this context, the question to be raised is: Do we have the right concepts and theories to explain organized immaturity well enough so that effective avenues for emancipation could be created?

Kant’s mentalist conception of (im)maturity

The problem of immaturity was identified and examined as soon as the Enlightenment project of modern democracy took shape. In his Critique of Judgement (Kant, 1790/1914), Kant formulates three maxims as necessary conditions for the development of autonomous human beings (Kant, 1790/1914, § 40; see Clarke & Holt, 2010; Fleischacker, 2013, p. 22) – ‘to think for oneself; to put ourselves in thought on the place of everyone else and; always to think consistently’ (Kant, 1790/1914, § 40). We can elaborate on these maxims and formulate three principles of maturity: (K1) unprejudiced thought means that mature individuals need to rely on their own judgements rather than passively adopting the view of authorities, so-called ‘guardians’; (K2) enlarged thought means that mature individuals need to transcend the peculiarities of their ‘subjective private conditions’ and reflect upon their own judgements ‘from a universal standpoint’ which can only be determined by placing oneself ‘at the standpoint of others’ (Kant 1790/1914, § 40) and, therefore, subjective judgements are not taken for granted but continually reexamined through the imagined view of others in search for new alternatives, improved judgements and better solutions; and (K3) consecutive thought allows individuals to think consistently and to create links between the two other maxims based on logical coherence and fundamental epistemic and moral premises. As all three principles refer to an individual’s ability to engage in independent reflective thinking (or introspection), we may refer to this kind of ability as introspective maturity.

In contrast, the immaturity described by Kant represents the lack of introspective maturity required to effectively apply the above-mentioned principles – or at best a loss, limitation or erosion of this ability. In the German original of his seminal text ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’, Kant uses for immaturity the term Unmündigkeit, and not Unreife (which is connected to age and aging). Thus, following Kant, we understand immaturity not as a biological development stage but as a state of mind, ‘a lack of understanding’ that does not simply go away by aging but results ‘from the lack of resolve and courage to use one’s reason without the guidance of another’ (Kant, 1784, p. 481, translation by the authors), ¹ where this independent reasoning refers precisely to the notion of unprejudiced thought, as previously defined.

Yet, given current socio-technical contexts of surveillance capitalism and its three maturity eroding patterns as described above, the three Kantian principles are gradually replaced by unenlightened behaviours and patterns (see above), e.g. (1) letting authorities (what Kant [1784, p. 481, translation by the authors] called ‘guardians’), such as algorithms and artificial intelligence, think and decide on behalf of oneself (which leads to infantilization), (2) applying narrow and mono-dimensional thinking derived from the economic logics of surveillance capitalism (which gives way to reductionism), and (3) submitting one’s whole self to absolute standpoints that distort human consciousness in ways that feed the logics of the system (which in turn fosters totalization). Together, these three patterns lead to the erosion of autonomous thinking and, as a consequence, facilitate immaturity in humans. Here we are concerned, like Kant when exploring the unenlightened status of his fellow citizens, with the propensity of humans to embrace intellectual immaturity voluntarily. Kant describes this kind of ‘immaturity’ as being ‘self-inflicted’ (Kant, 1784, p. 481, translation by the authors).

While informative with regard to the exigences of a mature mind, these Kantian maxims are not sufficient to address the social-interactive requirements for public reason. Even though Kant demands reflection on one’s own judgements through the eyes of others (see the principle of enlarged thinking as mentioned above), this reflection is an entirely introspective and monological cognitive process. The Kantian subject does not speak or interact with others but simply imagines what others may say and takes this as a benchmark for her own judgements. Thus, Kant’s approach is largely based on what has been referred to as a ‘mentalist’ conception of the knowing subject and the knowledge generation process (Habermas, 2003, p. 175 ff., here p. 176).

According to Kant, the rational individual can, through a process of ‘awakening’, recognize her own state of immaturity and, therefore, deliberately shake off autonomy-eroding forces in order to reason freely about her condition and role in society (Fleischacker, 2013). As the power to resist immaturity lies within the individual, so does the responsibility to initiate any project for emancipation and/or social change, even though the state may in Kantian view have a co-responsibility not to prevent such maturization (see Fleischacker, 2013). Kantian solutions, if they are set into motion at all, are therefore likely to be local and individual-centric, so they will be inadequate for the challenges of surveillance capitalism and the fourth industrial revolution.

Hegelian historicism: (Im)maturity as a product of socio-cultural context

In his critique of Kant, Hegel (1807/2018) argues that, far from reasoning independently, the individual is from the very beginning embedded in a social and cultural world that shapes her consciousness (Hegel, 1807/2018; see Brandom, 2019; Habermas, 2003). Furthermore, while Kant assumes language to be readily available and thus unproblematic, Hegel (1807/2018) conceives of language, labour and social interaction as media through which the subject is (trans)formed and learns how to cope with the world. From a Hegelian perspective, there is no need ‘to bridge an original gap’ (Habermas, 2003, p. 182) between the self and the ‘other’, between the internal and the external world, between subjective consciousness and objective reality. Rather, the individual is connected with the world from the very beginning and is functioning as part of it by learning language to signify objects and to communicate with others, and by using tools to create artefacts that ‘work’ in the world. Hegel’s historicism enables us to observe and explain how the immaturity induced by surveillance capitalism is not inflicted upon individuals directly and explicitly but operates subliminally, throughout the social context in which individuals are embedded, via the cultural instruments of language and labour, through the very media by which socialized individuals speak and act.

Yet, nowadays, ‘[s]urveillance and control is something far more immanent to and embedded within our everyday social interactions’ (de Vaujany et al., 2021, p. 677). This also explains why and how immaturity is ‘organized’ through the social institutions of language and labour – through systems that: (a) are infantilizing, namely produce insecure, dependent, infantilized (and infantilizing) discourse-making processes – see Zuboff (2019) on the psychological needs of ‘homing to the herd’ (p. 467) and the ‘hive mind’ (p. 397); (b) are reductionist, in that they convert human beings into non-autonomous cogs in a (seemingly) deterministic socio-technological structure – see Zuboff (2019) on inevitabilism and instrumentarian power (pp. 195, 395); and (c) are totalizing, as they overtake all aspects of individual human life, including all spaces once consecrated to individual autonomy, and human society as a whole – see Zuboff (2019, 2022) on manifestations of instrumentarianism’s pursuit of totality (Zuboff, 2019, pp. 400–404).

However, despite clear progress from Kantian mentalism, the Hegelian conception can also be critiqued for ‘abandoning’ the subject to the contingency of socio-cultural and historical conditions and for being unable to defend universal reason against the forces of a culture’s embedded distributions of power, rules, values and lifestyles. Accordingly, the individual becomes socialized and develops her subjectivity and self-consciousness (including her maturity) only within the confines of a particular community and its given networks of mutual recognition. Hence, Hegel’s perspective may still not effectively account for resisting organized immaturity – be it in an awakening pre-Enlightenment society (as in Hegel, 1807/2018), the divided society of post-World War I Germany (Popper, 1945), or surveillance capitalist society (Zuboff, 2019, 2022). Critics of Hegelian historicism (see Kiesewetter, 1974; Popper, 1945) have described this position as cultural relativist, able to only embrace and affirm the status quo rather than develop a universal concept of reason and, therefore, lacking a basis for taking critical distance from the received conditions. But Hegel’s lack of confidence in the ability of individuals to drive emancipation is compensated by his ‘conviction that history as a whole follows the path of reason’ (Habermas, 2003, p. 208). In asserting that the development of world history is channelled by the ‘cunning of reason’ (Hegel, 1822-1831/2001, p. 47), he imagines a world where all individual goals and actions converge toward the higher end of history, which is realizing reason and individual freedom. Achieving this higher end does not depend on individuals consciously acting toward it.

Against Hegelian premises, Zuboff’s (2019, 2022) critical analysis suggests that the emergence of surveillance capitalism, far from being inevitable, can be counteracted and reversed by deliberate, concerted actions of organized citizens who can establish alternative institutions to protect their democracy. It is this documented optimism that encourages us to consider Habermas’s approach to deliberative democracy as the most productive theoretical basis for exploring how society’s communicative conditions could and should be changed, by purposefully organized collectives of citizens, in order to curb the effects of organized immaturity.

Habermas’s communicative conditions for effective exercise of maturity in public affairs

In his conceptions of communicative action, discourse ethics and deliberative democracy, Habermas (1984, 1998, 2021, 2022) has explored the communicative conditions of modern democratic society and their role in individual decision-making and collective will formation in the public sphere. Habermas identifies two conditions as crucial for legitimizing decision-making processes, as well as social and moral norms. He formulates these as normative principles – namely, universalization (which requires that all those affected by collective decisions and social and moral norms be included in the communicative processes) and discourse (which requires that decisions are based on rational argumentation) (Habermas, 1990, pp. 65–66). ² Whenever the comprehensibility, truth, rightness or sincerity of claims made in social interactions are challenged, individuals can check the validity of claims in discourses where arguments for and against are jointly assessed. Rational decisions can then be made based on the provisionally better argument (Habermas, 1990). While the discourse principle applies to claims made in both private and public affairs, the legitimation of collective decisions demands the application of the universalization principle, i.e. the inclusion of all concerned. These two principles are the main pillars of Habermas’s theory of communicative action (see, Habermas, 2022, p. 150, on inclusion and argumentation).

Although real communication situations tend to be distorted, power-laden and non-inclusive (and thus regularly fall short of these strict normative ideals), individuals tend to make a ‘counter-factual assumption’ and behave as if attaining these ideals were in principle possible, through open and rational discourses characterized by freedom to enter the debate, participation with equal rights, absence of coercion, and truthfulness on the part of participants (Habermas, 1995). In post-traditional societies, competent individuals regularly make this counter-factual assumption, having learned through experience that decisions based on reflection, reason and argumentation tend to have (overall) better outcomes than those made impulsively, arbitrarily or solely based on power and authority (Lorenzen, 1995; see also Gethmann, 2022; Habermas, 2003; Scherer, 2015; Wohlrapp, 2014 on constructive ethics).

Furthermore, in democratic societies the normative powers of religious values and feudalistic world views have gradually been replaced by the legitimating force of democratic procedures in which social and legal norms of the prevailing order are contested and advanced on a continuous basis by an exchange of arguments in the public sphere, where citizens deliberate on the validity of social norms, public policies, and other issues of public concern (see Habermas, 2022, pp. 150–151). In such conditions, individuals presuppose that the claims they advance can be checked, assessed and verified or falsified, in an inclusive and rational discourse that aims to reach a consensus on what is right or wrong, true or false, sincere or insincere. This occurs even when realizing that actual discourses fail to reach a consensus but arrive at a compromise at best. Thus, it is the discursive character of the argumentative exchange, and not the aim of a consensus (which normally will not be achieved), that secures the quality of the deliberations and contributions (see Habermas, 2022, p. 152).

Accordingly, in order to engage in public reason, citizens need no longer rely purely on a Kantian introspection into their ‘subjective certainties’, nor do they need to accept and obey contingent ‘socio-cultural circumstances’, in Hegelian fashion. Building on Kantian reflective thinking skills, they can engage in democratic procedures that are (more or less) inclusive and (more or less) discursive so that the legitimacy and effectiveness of collective decisions can be checked on a regular basis. Learning from each other in critical argumentative exchange ‘enables us to improve our beliefs through political disputes and get closer to correct solutions to problems’ (Habermas, 2022, p. 152).

The socio-technological conditions of surveillance capitalism undermine the communicative conditions of democratic institutions in various ways (see Habermas, 2022; Lanier, 2018; Zuboff, 2019). In particular, Zuboff (2022) discusses the ‘economic operations’ by which institutions and practices of surveillance capitalism undermine the ‘information integrity’ that is essential to any democracy. As a result, Habermasian rational discourse becomes even less likely, and the communications and results tend to be even more distorted. In technology-mediated communication such as social media, where individuals are targeted by algorithms that aim to predict and control their behaviour to serve the interests of opaque authorities, the ‘targets’ are confronted with fake news and ‘alternative truths’ (Knight & Tsoukas, 2019) but are unable to verify the claims. They find themselves in ‘echo chambers’ together with fellow citizens that think alike and exclude those who think differently – thus violating the universalization principle (which aims for inclusion, even of opposing views, in argumentative exchange). They are also attracted by stimuli that appeal to desires and emotions and largely limit the space for rational discourse as exchange of arguments – which dilutes the discourse principle. Nevertheless, the theory of communicative action still provides a useful normative framework to critically analyse and eventually change the socio-technological conditions of surveillance capitalism in order to improve communications in public and private realms, guided by discourse-ethical ideals (Habermas, 2022).

The rules of rational argumentation, as advanced in the Habermasian conception, are a reconstruction of the pragmatics of those experiences acquired by individuals when they are socialized in, and cope with, challenges in post-traditional societies (Habermas, 2003, 2022; Scherer, 2015). Yet, this social learning process in democratic societies is a precarious project, which can easily fail. This justifies the need to explore the essential communicative conditions that can nurture mature individuals, and to establish whether and to what extent they offer a favourable environment for socialization.

Habermas (1990) engages in this exploration by reconstructing Kohlberg’s (1981) theory of the development of moral consciousness from the perspective of taking communicative action. Kohlberg’s theory, which explains the genesis of mature autonomous subjects along three levels (comprising six stages) of development, while adaptable to different socio-cultural contexts with respect to the ‘content’ of moral rules, claims universality with respect to the ‘form’ of moral judgements (see Habermas, 1990, p. 117). The first two levels of development (pre-conventional and conventional) refer to pre-mature motivations for verifying the rightness of actions – from avoiding punishment to upholding the prevailing social order or the welfare of a particular social group. In contrast, it is only at the third (post-conventional) level that humans exercise maturity – by reflecting on the implications of social conventions, on reasonable foundations for agreement, or on underlying moral principles that may or should be treated as universal. The normative principles of Habermasian communicative action, universalization and discourse (rational argumentation), can only be met at this level.

As individuals gradually develop mature competences for moral judgement and decision-making, they become members of society who can contribute to society not just by complying with the status quo but by reassessing and changing social rules on a continuous basis. For the purposes of communicative action, moral judgements at post-conventional level can effectively apply three principles (see Habermas, 1990, pp. 122 ff.): (H1) reversibility of standpoints, i.e. the potential for ‘changing one’s mind’ and adopting a different position; (H2) inclusion, in the sense of including all concerned in the deliberation and agreement processes; and (H3) reciprocity, i.e. mutual recognition of all participants as individuals who are competent in (and entitled to) reasoning on private and public affairs. The post-conventional judgement abilities characterize what, in contrast with Kantian introspection, may be called socialized maturity.

Unfortunately, as illustrated by Habermas (2022, pp. 157 ff.), the socio-technological conditions of surveillance capitalism work against the three principles (H1, H2, H3). Communications are distorted in such a way that: (1) individuals tend to receive news and incentives via social media and embedded algorithms that constrain them to affirm (rather than reverse) their standpoints; (2) these media create communicative barriers between social groups with different identities, thus facilitating exclusion and fragmentation of communicative spaces; and (3) reciprocity is strengthened only in-group, among those who think alike, while the prevailing, subliminally encouraged attitudes vis-a-vis those outside the group (who think differently) is leading to animosity. Together, these distortions lead to ever more divided societal conditions that significantly undermine the mature exercise of public reason. As more and more individuals apprehend fellow citizens with opposing views as enemies and not as equals with valid concerns, communicative action is rendered practically impossible. Thus, open public discourse is under serious threat, not just because the current socio-technological system undermines it – but because individuals themselves are no longer able to develop the moral and communicative competences needed to become mature members of the communicative community who can actively work to establish (and recurrently re-establish) the communicative conditions required to keep open public discourse alive.

Habermas’s (2022) analysis helps us understand why, in surveillance capitalism, focus on individual resistance strategies (as illustrated by Zuboff, 2019 but critiqued in Zuboff, 2022) is not likely to be effective enough. The communicative approach we discuss here offers guidelines not only for taking critical distance from surveillance capitalism but also for creating and maintaining conditions that allow for more inclusive and argumentation-based opportunities for public deliberation. The challenge we are up against is significant, especially considering the increasing potential of new technologies to take control of human consciousness in such profound ways that humans are not even aware of it (see Zizek, 2020).

To summarize our historical examination of (im)maturity, we started from Kant’s definition of maturity in terms of unprejudiced, enlarged and consecutive thought – in order to account for an individual’s capacity for public use of reason, which is essential for citizens who can assemble into rule-of-law democracies to govern themselves. We infer that, conversely, individual immaturity is characterized by the absence of these three features and (consequently) of such self-governing capacity. However, an effective understanding of organized immaturity (as induced by socio-technological systems) has to be divorced from Kantian mentalism, which assumes the individual as existing somehow separately from her socio-cultural and historical contexts and, therefore, fully capable of achieving maturity by herself and fully responsible for it. Based on the examined evidence of surveillance capitalism patterns, we find ourselves unable to fully subscribe to the narrow premise that the source of immaturity resides entirely within the individual, and that this unenlightened condition is ultimately ‘self-inflicted’ due to nothing else than a lack of courage to think independently and to act as an autonomous self. We simply cannot ignore either the role of socio-cultural and historical context in the formation of the subject or the hegemonic influences of socio-technological systems on individuals’ thinking and behaviour. In other words, a purely Kantian perspective cannot explain how immaturity is actually organized – for example, based on the patterns observed to emerge in surveillance capitalism (namely, infantilization, reductionism and totalization).

While Hegel’s approach overcomes this limitation, it also assumes that the socio-cultural and historical context is itself totalizing, leaving no room for the individual to distance herself critically from it and to exercise autonomy by resisting and changing it. The Hegelian individual seems to have no choice but to accept the socio-technological status quo as inevitable and immovable. It is this kind of individual that informs, for example, Marx’s political economy: ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but rather their social existence that determines their consciousness’ (Marx, 1859/1904, pp. 11–12). As the individual is therefore unaware of her autonomy to rationally change things, it is rather the capitalist system behind all individuals that steers societal evolution. However, while Hegel (1822-1831/2001) appraises this overall evolution as progress, Marx (1859/1904) regards it as regress. It is therefore not surprising that Marx’s approach to addressing this problem is system-level social revolution.

Marxist critiques of technology-supported communication (see Mumby, 2020) emphasize how the resulting social order (defined as communicative capitalism in Dean, 2009) falls short of authentic Habermasian political and institutional conditions for deliberative democracy. Unlike surveillance capitalism, which controls citizens via digitalized observation, communicative capitalism achieves such control by creating the illusion of ultra-democratized communication (via digital technologies), by fuelling three fantasies (of abundance, of participation, and of wholeness). In contrast with Mumby (2020), who uses a Marxist critique of technology-supported communication to emphasize how communicative capitalism (Dean, 2009) undermines deliberative principles and democratic institutions of collective decision making, we question the possibility of revolutionary forms of Marxist resistance from within a technologically totalizing social order. We find that Marx’s system-level revolution approach is not acceptable either, as it does not explain how conceiving of such a revolution at the level of individual subjects is possible in the first place (Hollis, 1991): individuals are captured in false consciousness and unable to enact social change.

Taking distance from both Hegel and Kant, Habermas (1984, 1998, 2003, 2022) abandons the totalizing assumption altogether, and maintains the emancipation of the individual as a feasible project, via rational argument and public discourse. Accordingly, the ‘third-way’ approach we propose here is one that combines individual resistance with organizational and societal measures to counteract immaturity.

As illustrated in the previous section, Habermas offers a perspective that acknowledges the role of socio-cultural and historical contexts in the formation of the subject, while at the same time formulating principles for autonomous and critical distancing from these contexts, through public discourse, so that social change becomes possible. Consequently, this perspective can both account for organized immaturity, as observed through our critical analysis of surveillance capitalism and its specific forms of organization (namely, infantilization, reductionism and totalization), and provide a normative framework that establishes ideal-type communicative conditions needed to achieve (individual and collective) maturity. We will elaborate on how these conditions can be achieved in contemporary society, especially in the context of (and as an antidote to) governance by impersonal systems in surveillance capitalism.

Counteracting infantilization

The genuine exercise of Kantian introspective maturity in the context of Habermasian socialized maturity involves the individual’s ability to do the hard work of citizenship thinking on her own (albeit in interaction with others through deliberation), and the courage to fully own up to all her thinking, conclusions and (revised) standpoints. Affirming one’s autonomous thinking (K1) in public goes hand in hand with feeling comfortable about having a different standpoint while being included (H2) and acknowledged as a fully, equally legitimate partner in deliberation (H3). This courage is the attribute of citizens who value their freedom as an existential human condition instead of regarding it as a burden that leaves them unprotected in a world of uncertainty and contestation (see Fromm, 1941/1969). Such citizens are able to resist fears of missing out or urges of homing to the herd (Zuboff, 2019), to recognize infantilization pressures when they feel them, even when the pressures are exercised via impersonal systems (such as digital infrastructures), and to (re)act in order to protect their maturity and have it acknowledged and respected by the governance systems. In an information civilization as defined by Zuboff (2022), the global information and communication infrastructures engaged in public deliberation need to be purposefully modified and/or designed to protect the autonomy of individual standpoints, recognize their legitimacy, and mitigate against their exclusion. This means that the algorithm design process itself needs to be submitted to political processes whose purpose is to respect and protect citizens’ rights and democratic values such as truth, common good, and civility (Cohen & Fung, 2021). Whether private actors (e.g. ICT and/or media companies) or state actors (e.g. national broadcasting corporations such as the BBC), those in charge with developing digital infrastructures should exercise this authority only subject to democratic processes of authorization and control when assuming positions of ‘responsible stewardship’ (Zuboff, 2022, p. 53). Such stewardship should be defined as professional commitment to apply knowledge and technology in the service of a good society governed by mature citizens. This commitment by organizations designing digital infrastructures could take the form of their representatives providing professional oaths of the Hippocratic kind. Accordingly, executive managers of private concerns would be first and foremost committed to fulfilling a public role that would override any private interests, commercial or otherwise. Perhaps it is time for the MBA oath (see Anderson, 2009) to be revisited and adjusted for the purposes of maintaining democracy in a digitalized society. The oath could be articulated specifically to include a commitment to the Habermas-Kant principles of socialized and introspective maturity as outlined in this study.

Other actions against infantilization could involve citizens coming together to create new forms of resistance to the ‘need’ to conform, or to defer their authority, to ‘parental’ entities. An important part of this project would be the strict regulation of applications of ChatGPT/large language models, as they reinforce over-reliance on the generative powers of algorithms, thus having a negative impact on one’s critical thinking (Fuchs, 2023). A counterforce to the use of such applications is educating (one’s) children as individuals with personal skills that are independent of digital assistance. This would better support their ability to take responsibility for governing themselves and the community in reasonable dialogue with others, based on the Habermas-Kant framework proposed here. Recent studies have already signalled the need to help ‘students become aware and thoughtful about intended/unintended audiences and consequences of digital spaces (e.g., privacy, false information, etc.)’ and to teach them ‘how to practice civic dialog (a public act) when participants are anonymous entities (in private spaces)’ (Lo et al., 2022, p. 11). In response to questions such as ‘what are the norms of digital civic spaces?’, we offer the Habermas-Kant framework as a starting point for shaping digital civic behaviours.

Counteracting reductionism

The key values of diversity and plurality that inspire Habermasian communicative conditions function as essential antidotes to the reductionist effects of datafication and commodification of human behaviour. Mature individuals who come together to organize their public spaces for democratic governance can engage in mutual recognition of enlarged standpoints (H3, K2), include different (responsibly owned) standpoints in public deliberations (H2), and also reverse (change) their standpoints as a result of these deliberations (H1) while maintaining logical consistency (K3). These processes emphasize two crucial features of Habermasian public use of reason as responsible stewardship: the identifiable, personalized responsibility for public standpoints; and the dynamic, evolving nature of such standpoints as a result of their owners’ participation in public deliberation processes. Habermasian-Kantian principles can thus prevent the radical indifference of digital technology from creeping into public deliberation and governance spaces, in particular, by empowering citizens themselves to recognize socio-technological reductionism when it occurs – be it through assignments of virtual identity as disembodied and artificial constructions of the self, instrumentarian construction of the digital user as consumer, or illicit extraction of free labour from users. We see our approach as an antidote to cyborgization as a reductive tendency inherent to digitization-assisted organizing, and agree that the ‘cyborg is no longer an exotic metaphor [but] names the fragility of our deepest presumptions of reflexivity’ (Power, 2022, p. 14).

In terms of practical actions, more ‘personalized’ forms of governance should be predicated on recognizing the interdependent complexity of plural roles played by individuals in society and treating this role diversity as open and indefinite. Since the capabilities of technological systems for processing open and indefinite sets are inherently limited, it means that fair governance of such human complexity often can only be performed outside and in-between these systems. Citizens could grassroots-organize public spaces for datafication-free discourse and interactions where multiple roles could be acknowledged (Dryzek et al., 2019; Fast, 2013; Lidskog & Elander, 2010), or engage with experts in Hackathons that, under ideal conditions, can transform citizenship, development and education in a positive way (Endrissat & Islam, 2022; Irani, 2015).

Counteracting totalization

We note that the most entrenched and destructive feature of totalization is the absolute control claimed by surveillance capitalism over individuals’ public, private and inner lives. The determinacy of choice architectures induced by digitalization and subordinated to commodification logics incapable of acknowledging and tolerating alternatives is what needs to be countered by mature citizens who are capable of creating and maintaining their public deliberation and governance spaces open to autonomous, pluralistic and diverse decision-making on choice architectures prior to any digitalization of such decisions. This would ensure explicit accountability of all responsible factors (Binns, 2018; Brauneis & Goodman, 2018; Danaher, 2016; O’Neil, 2016), made visible by requirements to submit algorithm design to public, democratically legitimized political and legislative processes and institutions (such as Parliaments). Decisions on choice architectures would consider all standpoints, no matter how diverse (H2), as long as they are responsibly owned and promoted by introspectively mature citizens who can reason independently (K1), consistently (K3) and in other-serving (not self-serving) ways (K2). Reciprocal acknowledgment of standpoint legitimacy (H3) would be the ongoing test for accepting evolved standpoints resulting from the deliberations of responsible citizenry (H1). We appreciate that achieving favourable communicative conditions for organized maturity against totalization is not easy – and it is likely to become even harder as surveillance capitalism shapes different ‘consciousnesses’ across generations, thus creating new challenges to public deliberation in open, balanced and civic ways. The culture wars facilitated by the social media in contemporary public life (Boehm, 2022) are early examples of such challenges.

To counteract these effects, citizens can create and engage in ‘sites of listening and reflection’ (Dryzek et al., 2019, p. 1146) based on mutual respect, in an effort to avoid or sidestep the monopolization of the public sphere by surveillance capitalism, and to enact alternative socio-technological systems (such as open governance systems). Against the grand challenge posed by corporate power controlling society, citizens could also apply ‘open strategy’ practices such as ‘collective subpolitics and individualist whistleblowing’ supported by ‘globally networked professionals’ who could exercise normative pressures on corporations where markets and governments have failed to do so (Whittington & Yakis-Douglas, 2020, p. 1).

Here, effectiveness criteria are informed by deliberative ideals and a focus on the public interest rather than economic rationality or ideologies: transparency, citizen participation, open governance, and personalization of public accountability are key (Cohen & Fung, 2021; Fung, 2013). Since the recognition of pluralism is implicit in the Habermasian communicative approach, these criteria should be applied in the very process of initiating new socio-technological systems, and should also be established as constitutive of these systems – thus allowing a culture of mutual reinforcement to emerge (see, e.g., Fung, 2015).