Transparency, a paradigm for governing sociality, has come under extreme pressure. As power increasingly shifts from representative to performative modes, it reorganises the strata of society by creating divisions that affect bodies, minds and affiliations along quite different lines as to how class and consent have been contextualised historically. The logics of techno-capitalism, with its hyper-competitive monopolisation of the platform, thus rendered sovereign, have become a threat to the body politic – it not only restrains agency, but carves out new forms of exploitation, segregation and governmentality. Hence, the techno-capitalist platform constitutes the next crisis of democratic resolution that exacerbates, and exceeds, the non-transparency which capitalist interests were able to exert in pre-data platform times. The complex and intricate operations and machinations between humans and bots result in new data-driven resolutions that usually constrain, but can also resolve our perception, cognition and appreciation.
