Algorithmic disciplinarization: how AI reconfigures the governance of (in)dividuals by online platforms
Julian A. MorganAbstract
Purpose
This paper examines how artificial intelligence (AI) reconfigures platforms’ governance of individuals’ conduct and communication through a repurposing of the Foucauldian notion of disciplinary power. It offers a conceptualization of how AI-driven content moderation, data extraction, and predictive systems extend and transform disciplinary logics of governance, reshaping norms, decision-making, and subjectivity in digital infrastructures.
Design/Methodology
The paper adopts a theoretical and genealogical approach grounded in a Foucauldian analysis of disciplinary power. Through a synthesis of governmentality studies and platform studies, it proposes a conceptual framework to account for the emergence and stabilization of AI-driven platform power.
Findings
The paper finds that AI-driven platform power does not replace disciplinary power but intensifies and reconfigures it. Platform power operates through continuous, automated micro-decisions that render norms computable and largely imperceptible, shifting the logics of governance of information and communication from prohibitive forms of enforcement towards uninterrupted and anticipatory optimization. To foster a better understanding of these shifts, the paper conceptualizes four distinct yet interrelated processes: the consolidation of disciplinary norms and logics of governance, the embedding of disciplinary logics within the process of commodification, the invisibilization and implosion of the “decision,” and the datafication of subjects into “dividuals.”
Practical Implication
The findings suggest the need for regulatory and institutional mechanisms that re-politicize platform power and provide for meaningful explainability, contestability, and accountability of AI-enhanced techniques and logics of governance. Policymakers and platforms should address the opacity of AI and the concentration of epistemic authority within private infrastructures.
Social Implication
Algorithmic disciplinarization has significant implications for autonomy, individuation, democratic participation, and social equality. By structuring communicative possibilities and shaping subjectivity, platform power tends to narrow spaces for contestation and reinforce imperceptible forms of behavioral and informational control.
Originality/Value
The paper contributes a novel theoretical synthesis that reframes AI-driven platform power as a transformation of disciplinary power rather than as technological innovation or as automated censorship. By linking algorithmic decision-making, corporate imperatives, and subject formation, it offers a comprehensive conceptual lens for analyzing contemporary platform power over the processes of global communication.