Critical Theory in the Age of Digital Capitalism

Dear Colleagues,

The Critical Theory tradition developed as an interdisciplinary philosophical response to the challenges of new social developments of 20th century capitalist societies. From the beginning, it was concerned with the latest innovations and transformations of social life that called for new forms of critical and emancipatory understanding, and the radical impact of new technologies was a central concern for Critical Theory from the start.

In recent decades, however, our social world has been rapidly and radically transformed by the ongoing digital revolution. Triggered by the advent of computers and the Internet, driven by the invention of the smartphone and social media, and now accelerated by generative AI, our socio-economic dynamics, communicative practices, politics, and even psychological processes of identity formation are being refashioned. Hardly any facet of public or private existence is untouched, and this is just the beginning. With the manipulative power of social media algorithms embedded in attention markets, and the commercial drive to engineer dependency on AI bots in every facet of work, leisure, and politics, we are now exposed to an unprecedented degree of—and perhaps a qualitatively new form of—technological domination.

Critical Theorists, like everyone else, write in and for their time, and these recent and ongoing technological transformations create new challenges and opportunities for contemporary scholars to reconsider the paradigms of the past in a new light, to reappraise, reevaluate, reinvigorate, or perhaps reinvent Critical Theory. Much work appeared in the 1990s and 2000s exploring the impact of computerisation and the Internet, but with the seismic changes of the last fifteen—and even three—years, any meaningful Critical Theory today is required to engage with the new and rapidly changing character of our subjugation to or by technological innovations. Recent work has just begun to take up these challenges and reflect on both the implications of today’s digital capitalism for Critical Theory, and on what insights Critical Theory can offer regarding such techno-social developments, and much remains to be done to update, renovate, and articulate Critical Theory for our technological moment.

These developments raise distinctively philosophical questions for Critical Theory, including the following: To what extent does the new algorithm—and the AI-mediated social world—undermine traditional assumptions about the availability of critical insight, emancipatory impulses, and individual resistance? To what extent can a commitment to discursive rationality or contestation for recognition as an emancipatory resource still be maintained in the face of current socio-technical advances? How far are new developments reshaping or distorting the terms of negotiations over gender and racial identities and dynamics? To what extent can the potential for emancipation that guides Critical Theory be sustained through current technological changes?

To this end, we invite original scholarly contributions for a Special Issue titled ‘Critical Theory in the Age of Digital Capitalism’. In the interdisciplinary spirit of the Critical Theory tradition, we are particularly interested in papers which confront canonical Critical Theory traditions or paradigms with thoroughly informed, concrete reflection on recent technological developments. Papers focused on evaluating or developing particular Critical Theory projects or thinkers are welcome, as are issue-driven papers that focus on specific questions or topics raised by digital capitalism, as long as in either case they shed new light on Critical Theory, digital capitalism, or (ideally) both.

We interpret the Critical Theory canon broadly and welcome contributions engaging with the Frankfurt School tradition—Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, Honneth, Jaeggi, etc.—as well as with the various other strands and influences of contemporary Critical Theory, including radical Aristotelianism, poststructuralist critiques of power and technology, psychoanalytic social criticism, feminism and queer theory, critical race and postcolonial theory, systems theory, actor–network theory, critical realism, speculative realism, posthumanism, etc.

Questions and topics may include (but are not limited to) philosophical aspects of the following:

• The algorithmic culture industry.
• Social media’s impact on
  • Public discourse and democracy;
  • Contemporary recognition struggles.
• Political economy of attention markets.
• The social ontology of the algorithm-mediated lifeworld.
• The psychodynamics of social media radicalisation.
• Fascism, conspiracy thinking, and digital capitalism.
• Gender, ‘toxic masculinity’, and the ‘manosphere’.
• AI’s impact on
  • The worlds of work, education and therapy;
  • Political discourse and democracy;
  • The capacity for experience and thought;
  • Individual identity formation and group psychology.

Papers should be written as clearly as possible. While technical philosophical terminology is unavoidable, authors should minimise use of jargon specific to particular thinkers and clearly explain the significance of any special terms deemed to be indispensable.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the Philosophies Editorial Office (philosophies@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors for the purposes of ensuring their proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

Dr. Craig Reeves
Dr. Jaakko Nevasto
Dr. Matthew Sinnicks
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Philosophies is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• critical theory
• digital capitalism
• social media
• AI
• work
• politics
• attention economy