Why do visions of the digital future leave democracy out?

Listen to the technology companies describe the future. You will notice a pattern.

Smart cities, personalised medicine, autonomous transport, algorithmic governance, artificial general intelligence. The promises are generous, the details technical.

And in almost none of them is there any voting.

A study by Rob Gallagher of King's College London, published in Philosophy & Technology in May, argues that the gap is not accidental.

The article is called "Futures at the Threshold: Between Autonomy and Automation."

The central thesis#

Gallagher's claim is direct. Contemporary visions of the digital future frequently push democratic politics aside — sometimes to the point of openly proposing post-democratic futures.

This is not, however, a claim about conspiracy. The author locates the source of the phenomenon in a fundamental paradox:

the conceptual tension between autonomy as a political and ethical ideal and automation as a technological and economic imperative.

Autonomy means giving oneself one's own law — the central concept of modern moral and political philosophy since Kant.

Automation means making a process independent of human intervention. Efficiency is measured precisely by the removal of the human being from the loop.

The two words come from the same family — autos, self — but they look in opposite directions. In one it is the human being who gives the law; in the other it is the system that runs itself.

The paradox is not new#

One of Gallagher's important contributions is to show that this tension is not a contemporary invention.

The paradox is not incidental; it is historically lodged inside modernity's search for control and rationalisation. Turning to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the article foregrounds the constitutive role of metaphor in shaping socio-technical imaginaries.

That is a philosophically striking choice of method. The metaphor we use to describe a technology determines what we can do with it.

Was the brain a switchboard or a computer? Is society an organism or a machine? Is artificial intelligence a tool or an agent?

These metaphors are not descriptive; they are constitutive. The logic is the same as in Pocock's notion of "political languages", which we examined this month: the way a thing is described limits what can be said about it.

Today's discourses#

Coming to the present, the article examines three clusters of discourse: datafication, smartness and artificial intelligence.

Its finding is sharp. These discourses present themselves as open to contingency — the future is uncertain, the possibilities are endless, technology clears the way. In practice they lock us into paradigms that privilege financial speculation over democratic participation.

The mechanism works like this. A vision of the future attracts investment; investment builds infrastructure; once the infrastructure is in place the alternatives become expensive; and an expensive alternative stops being a subject of debate.

The future that looks "open" has thus already been narrowed in advance by capital. What decides is not an assembly but a funding round.

Against both paradigms at once#

The article's most original move comes at the end.

Gallagher argues that studying the digital past, present and future teaches us to be wary of two separate things.

The first: humanist discourses founded on rational individualism. The story in which the autonomous individual makes his own decisions — a story that conceals how far human beings depend on institutions, on language, on infrastructure.

The second: the smart systems and machine-learning models to which we are expected to delegate ever more agency.

This double refusal matters. Debate about technology usually gets stuck between those two poles: either we are told to put the human being at the centre, or we are told the system decides better.

Gallagher finds both inadequate and proposes a third way: ways of making futures that rest on embodied collective intelligence, that accept entanglement, and that leave room for alternative imaginaries.

What "post-human" means, and what it does not#

At this point a distinction is needed.

Posthumanism does not mean that the human being will cease to exist. Its question is this: why do we accept the concept of the human in its present form?

The tradition that runs from Donna Haraway's arguments about the cybernetic organism to Rosi Braidotti's posthumanist philosophy has interrogated the boundaries that separate the human being sharply from other beings.

Artificial intelligence gives the argument a concrete form. It grows steadily harder to say that a person whose memory sits in a telephone, whose knowledge sits in the cloud, whose decisions are shaped by algorithmic recommendation and whose communication passes through artificial intelligence is a subject standing "on his own".

But Gallagher's study refuses to draw an easy conclusion from this. The blurring of the boundaries of the human does not automatically justify delegating authority to machines. On the contrary: in a world where agency is distributed, how responsibility is to be distributed becomes an even more urgent political question.

Seen from Turkey#

In Turkey this argument runs mostly at the technical and regulatory level: data protection, artificial intelligence legislation, digital transformation.

Yet the question Gallagher points to is not regulatory but constitutive. When a decision is taken about a technology, who takes it, with which metaphors, and on what ground?

The study meets Judith Butler's critique of democracy, which we discussed in this column today, at the same point — by a different road. Butler says democracy has never fully been realised. Gallagher says the digital future is being designed in a way that will make realising it harder still.

Both issue the same warning: an order looking inevitable does not make it inevitable.