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We are living through a transition. The ground beneath us is moving, subtly but unmistakably — what previous generations might have called a new zeitgeist, or we might today simply call a vibe shift.
The once-venerated forces of competition have given way to moat-building, rent-seeking and the financialization of hype. In this world, economic power flows from control — of the platforms, data and algorithms that help make our lives more efficient but also opaque, unsettling and destructive.
Artificial intelligence is situated near the heart of this shift. It is no longer just a technological exploration but a battleground for political and economic dominance. The U.S. and China are pouring billions into AI research under the banner of national security, while Europe is hoping to reduce its technological dependence.
We’ve seen this before. The transition toward an industrialized society brought with it a similar sense of vertigo: changes in labor, culture and global order that confounded the logic of a prior age. “All that is solid melts into air,” as philosopher Marshall Berman, echoing Karl Marx, wrote of the onslaught of industrial modernity. What united those shifts was not simply material transformation but, as we argue in “Seeing Like a Platform,” something deeper: a change in how we understood ourselves — a remapping of how power is imagined, articulated and enacted — defined by the rise of a new set of metaphors.
We are, we believe, living through a similar reordering — this time into what might be called a digital modernity. And as before, some of the most profound changes don’t have to do with the figureheads of the age or the rise and fall of empires, but with subtler matters: the shifts in language we use to describe our social world. These shifts do more than reflect change; they enact it. Our aim, then, is to examine the epistemological foundations of digital modernity: the ways of knowing, speaking and imagining that define this new era.
To some, such an endeavor may feel like a distraction in a moment of brute power and naked violence. Surely metaphors alone do not define politics. But neither are they only the linguistic veneer of society; metaphors are tools in the hands of the powerful. They also help us define how we might envision an alternative world.
Henry Ford & Metaphors Of Power
To understand digital modernity, we must situate it historically. So, we first turn to an icon of industrial modernity: Henry Ford. In 1913, when Ford introduced the moving assembly line to his factory in Highland Park, Michigan, he did more than revolutionize manufacturing. He provided a new metaphor for modernity itself. The logic of the factory seeped beyond its walls, infiltrating bureaucracies, schools and governments. Society, it was now understood, could be engineered. Institutions became engines, citizens mere cogs. The machine became the guiding metaphor of the age, a template for power itself. Ford’s factory became the “epistemological building site on which the whole world-view was erected and from which it towered majestically over the totality of living experience,” sociologist Zygmunt Bauman memorably notes in “Liquid Modernity.”
The implicitly mechanistic language came not only to describe, but also to structure reality, bringing a world that saw itself in mechanical terms: precise, hierarchical and controlled. It inspired an active state characterized by a sometimes dangerous combination of ambition and self-esteem. Ford’s factory, in short, came to shape a new modernity — an industrial modernity.
Power always needs abstraction. To be controlled, reality’s unwieldy complexity needs to be slotted in models, categories and measures that allow for standardization and manipulation. Nature and social life are bureaucratically indigestible in their raw form and must be pre-processed to be seen and shaped. Power, in other words, requires maps. And maps are only useful because they are specific and leave things out.
When wielded by the state, maps become more than representations; they shape the world in their image. A state registry that designates taxable property-holders does not merely record a system of land tenure — it creates one, its categories made real by the force of law. Power has an epistemology, and that epistemology is inscribed onto reality itself.
This was the insight at the heart of political scientist James C. Scott’s “Seeing Like a State,” an influential meditation on how modern states, in their quest for “legibility,” remake the world to fit their own narrow field of vision. The modern state was inseparable from the rise of demographics and statistics (literally, the science of the state), which gave it a way of seeing — of rendering reality intelligible and, thus, governable. But vision, no matter how comprehensive it appears, is always selective. Certain things fall outside the field of view.
“Artificial intelligence is no longer just a technological exploration but a battleground for political and economic dominance.”
The modern state, confronted with the limits of its own perception, sought to make the world conform to its methods of representation. Diversity, mobility and local knowledge were obstacles to governance. The solution was to standardize, categorize and classify — to fix people in space, to assign them legible identities, to measure and control. Permanent surnames became standard. Borders hardened. Populations — a statistical concept — were sorted and segregated, compelled to reside among their designated categories. Forests were arranged in neat, monocultural rows. Cities were reimagined as grids, stripped of their messy, organic life.
These ambitions reached their zenith with Fordist industrialism, which shaped a modernity that celebrated mastery over nature and society, confident that human ingenuity could tame complexity through central planning and rational control. Yet, industrial modernity was contradictory, even schizophrenic, as it attempted to both fix reality through infrastructure and administration while simultaneously promoting incessant movement and continuous flow. And like any model, the imposition of this mechanical view was incomplete, uneven and contested.
Industrial modernity brought both progress and oppression. It raised the living standards of countless people, delivered affordable goods, stable jobs and a period of steady wage growth.
But it also imposed a stifling uniformity, crushing individuality and local variation in the name of efficiency. The combination of ambitious self-confidence and partial blindness resulted in catastrophic failures. While it may be necessary to bracket aspects of the world to make it legible, the world left outside the brackets will often return to haunt the interventions. The monoculture “scientific” forests were susceptible to disease outbreaks, pests, fires and storm-felling. The square-grid cities of Le Corbusier and Robert Moses left out the human scale — what the influential urban author Jane Jacobs called the “sidewalk ballet.” Where Moses and Le Corbusier viewed cities as hopelessly inefficient and outdated, Jacobs saw an intricate and historically evolved web of social relations that made cities livable, creative and innovative. In their zeal to engineer society as if it were a clockwork, modernists destroyed the very social tissue that held it together.
At its darkest extremes, industrial modernity took its way of seeing to a terrifying conclusion. Fixing, segregating and concentrating populations became means of exploitation and extermination. Ghettos. Apartheid. Camps.
Industrial modernity epitomized both the creative and destructive powers of humankind. For good or bad, its machinic metaphors suggested that societies could be designed according to the noblest or darkest ideologies — if societies are like machines, its human engineers decide their fate.
Liquid Modernity
The decline of industrial modernity was not merely the collapse of an economic model but the unraveling of a worldview. The once-seamless fusion of mass production, rising wages and stable employment began to disintegrate in the 1970s. The postwar boom had reached its limits. The once-devastated economies of Western Europe and Japan had completed their recoveries, their markets growing increasingly saturated. A central contradiction emerged: industrial modernity’s blueprints created its own discontents and could not contain capitalism’s dynamism.
Inflation soared, stagnation took hold and an environmental consciousness emerged in response to smog-choked cities and the growing awareness of planetary limits. At the same time, demands for greater democracy — and resistance to standardization — gathered force. Factory workers went on strike. Students rebelled. Civil rights activists and anti-war movements challenged the authority of states that had long assumed their legitimacy was self-evident. And then, in 1973, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries imposed an embargo in retaliation for the West’s support of Israel, sending the price of oil — industrial modernity’s lifeblood — skyrocketing. The system wobbled. Then it buckled.
In response to falling profit margins, many corporations looked outward. Where once industrial capitalism had been a closed loop — wages fueling consumption, consumption driving production — firms now sought refuge in the low-wage economies of the Global South. The consequences were epochal. By breaking the link between domestic production and domestic wages, globalization shattered the fragile balance that had sustained rapidly rising incomes and relatively low inequality in the West. The truce between capitalism and democracy — one that had defined the postwar order — came to an end.
Politically, it marked the demise of the self-confident state. The era in which governments widely saw themselves as stewards of economic progress gave way to something far less ambitious. The state no longer sought to design economic and social life, but rather to lubricate the machinery of production in order to compete in a global market. Neoliberalism did not simply shrink the state — it redefined its purpose.
“In their zeal to engineer society as if it were a clockwork, modernists destroyed the very social tissue that held it together.”
No longer an agent of redistribution, the state became a facilitator of wealth growth, shedding its old obligations in favor of deregulation, privatization and the steady erosion of public goods. The industrial state had sought to counteract or even transcend capitalism; the neoliberal state, by contrast, sought merely competitive advantages vis-à-vis other states. In place of engineering a cycle of investment and growth, grand infrastructure projects and social guarantees, it offered tax cuts, asset sales and subsidies for corporate investment.
Economically, the shift was equally stark. Manufacturing, once the engine of modernity, ceded its position to finance, technology and the culture industries. The dominance of mass production was replaced by what theorist David Harvey called flexible accumulation — a system in which markets became more fragmented, production more dispersed and labor more precarious.
If industrial modernity was defined by economies of scale — factories producing standardized goods for standardized consumers — the new order was defined by economies of scope: diversity, differentiation and niche markets took precedence over mass production. In this new landscape, financialization became paramount. Profits were no longer driven primarily by the production of goods but by the endless churn of capital itself — trading, speculation, and the extraction of value from debt.
As production shifted, so too did culture. The rigid structures of industrial society — its mass markets, mass media, and mass identities — gave way to something more fluid and fragmented: a postmodern consumer culture saturated with images, advertisements and aesthetic bricolage. Traditional categories blurred. Styles mixed. The past was repackaged as aesthetic fodder. Identity, once grounded in work and social class, became a matter of lifestyle curation, shaped by brands, social media and the omnipresent logic of consumer choice.
This cultural shift was more than a matter of taste — it reflected a deeper epistemic transformation. The decline of the industrial state was accompanied by a broader erosion of the modernist belief in universal truths, objective knowledge and rational planning. If Scott’s “Seeing Like a State” had exposed the limits of bureaucratic reason, postmodern thinkers went further, questioning whether such knowledge was ever more than a construct, a tool of power masquerading as truth. The old dream of a knowable, controllable world gave way to skepticism, relativism and pluralism. Grand narratives collapsed, replaced by fragments.
As Bauman observed, this was the arrival of liquid modernity. Where industrial modernity was rigid and hierarchical, liquid modernity was fluid and unstable. The institutions that had once provided security — stable jobs, lifelong careers, fixed social roles — dissolved under the pressures of globalization, technological acceleration and individualization. While industrial society had imposed conformity, it had at least offered predictability. Liquid modernity, by contrast, offered neither.
Toward Digital Modernity
The last decades have seen the gradual emergence of a new way of seeing. One that, in its metaphors and mechanics, offers something distinct from both the centralized command of the industrial era and the disoriented flux of its postmodern successor.
Digitalization first took root as part of the capitalist reorganization in the wake of the Fordist crisis of the 1970s. Replacing mass production with flexible specialization meant restructuring production toward automation and digitalization. Digital technology provided the infrastructure for the global financial system, enabling the acceleration and deepening of securitization, financialization and capital mobility.
But within these systems, something else was stirring. Geeks, hackers and countercultural thinkers found in computers the seeds of a different logic — one that resisted hierarchy, celebrated emergence and suggested that order did not need to be imposed from above but could arise from the interactions of many. The digital world was not a factory to be managed but an ecosystem to be explored. The internet, still in its infancy, became both a medium and a metaphor for an alternative social order.
At the same time, a similar revolution was underway in science. The old mechanical metaphors, built on equilibrium and linear causality, struggled to explain the messy complexity of real-world systems. Physics’ conventional mechanistic understanding of nature — with its emphasis on reductionism, linearity, equilibria and analytical solutions — could only represent part of the natural world.
Pendula and two-body gravity systems may be simple enough to solve precisely or well-structured and machine-like enough to take apart into component pieces. But when a pendulum is subjected to too much initial force, or when a third body joins the gravitational system, the methods fail — and the systems effectively become unpredictable, entering the realm of what mathematicians call chaos.
“Neoliberalism did not simply shrink the state — it redefined its purpose.”
A growing movement of so-called complexity scientists argued that such chaos and complexity were not the exception but the norm. Reality was not a machine but a web of interactions where intelligence and order emerged from the bottom up. A single ant, they observed, is a simple creature, but together, ants form colonies capable of astonishingly sophisticated behavior; far more efficient than top-down coordination. Nature, it seemed, had been running a decentralized system all along.
Digital technology allowed these ideas to be put into practice. Organic metaphors came to replace machinic metaphors. Instead of designing closed and comprehensive systems, programmers learned to create systems that evolve. The most fascinating computational experiments of the era — artificial life, cellular automata, simulations like the “Game of Life” — did not create order through command but through interaction. We see here the emergence of a new epistemology, one that saw the world not as a grid but as a complex, adaptive system. Wikipedia, Linux and open-source communities generally seemed to validate the promise: Social coordination does not require hierarchy. The network had replaced the machine as the central metaphor of the age. We were no longer cogs in a machine but birds in a swarm.
For a moment, digitalization appeared to offer an alternative to both markets and the state — enabling leaderless and non-monetized forms of social organization through online experiments like Wikipedia or the original Couchsurfing. Social movements embraced its tools, imagining new models of collective decision-making beyond the slow bureaucracies of representative democracy. Theorists proposed ideas like the “sharing economy” and “commons-based peer production,” suggesting that digital technology could enable a more cooperative, decentralized world. The platforms that emerged in the 2000s — Facebook, Uber, Airbnb — initially presented themselves as the realization of this dream: breaking down barriers, bypassing gatekeepers, creating seamless peer-to-peer interactions. Crowds and swarms would replace states and corporations.
But power is never so easily displaced. Platforms, venture capitalists soon discovered, enabled their own form of power and control. They provide infrastructures to constrain and shape the dynamics of interaction. Digital interfaces and algorithms do not use force or command to steer their users — as in the scientific management typical of Fordist factories — but rather nudge, cajole and incentivize. If rules governing the interactions of ants shape their collective intelligence and enable them to build complex infrastructures, platforms now designed and tweaked their rules of interactions to maximize engagement, advertisement revenue and data extraction. Collective intelligence and emergence, so dangerous for the blueprint designs of Fordist modernity, now fed corporate power.
Rather than eliminating intermediaries, digital platforms became them — only with more opaque and pervasive forms of control. What once appeared as decentralization revealed itself as a new structure of intermediation, one that expanded the market into ever more intimate corners of human life. The promise of a free and open internet curdled into an architecture of surveillance and commodification.
Platforms brought more than an expansion of commodification; they represented the rise of a new form of power: They revealed how decentralization and bottom-up systems could paradoxically function as a means of control. While industrial power was tied to repression and coercion, the power of the platform encourages our active participation and agency — making us complicit in the very systems that control our behavior, preferences and opportunities.
Individuality shifted from a threat to the homogeneity and obedience upon which industrial modernity rested, to a resource which could be channeled to fuel innovation and control. The billions of people who use Facebook or Instagram for their own creative, transgressive, mundane purposes fortify Meta’s power by feeding content and directing attention to its platforms.
More recently, the weaponization of swarm dynamics has taken a more explicitly political turn. For Elon Musk, his platform X can be “thought of as a collective, cybernetic super-intelligence” because “it consists of billions of bidirectional interactions.” So much is true. But unlike colonies of ants, X does have an owner with the oversight and power to tweak algorithms and parameters to achieve a desired colony dynamic.
The transformation has been epistemic as much as economic. Traditional governance, built on census data and static categories, relied on segmentation: populations were classified, counted and regulated. Digital governance works differently. Instead of imposing fixed grids, it detects patterns, clusters and trends, steering individuals through nudges rather than commands. It does not discipline through direct intervention but through the subtle orchestration of flows — shaping consumption, curating news, sorting visibility. The factory organizes workers into regimented shifts; the platform organizes them into fluid, ever-adapting supply chains. Uber drivers, delivery workers, ghost kitchen workers, content creators — all governed by an invisible web of feedback loops, ratings and automated incentives.
“If industrial modernity’s blind spot was its erasure of complexity, digital modernity’s is its naturalization of inequality.”
This shift in control reflects a deeper transformation in how we conceptualize society itself. If the industrial world was understood in mechanical terms — systems of input and output, gears and engines — today’s digital world is understood as organic: webs, networks, ecosystems.
Governance is no longer a matter of enforcing stability but of guiding adaptation. The dominant institutions of the digital age, from Amazon to TikTok, condition their users’ actions by providing platforms where particular social patterns emerge through interaction. A TikTok video does not go viral because an editor selects it — it spreads because an algorithm learns from user behavior, amplifying certain trends while burying others. Power operates not through decree but through design.
Like all paradigms, this way of seeing both reveals and obscures. If industrial modernity’s blind spot was its erasure of complexity, digital modernity’s is its naturalization of inequality. Self-organization, for all its promise, does not ensure fairness. Networks are not inherently democratic. The very structures that enable swarm dynamics also enable the consolidation of unprecedented power. A few platforms, largely insulated from oversight, shape the conditions under which culture, social life and economic exchange take place.
In this model, control is exerted not through direct coercion but through environmental structuring. The platform does not force participation, but it makes certain behaviors more likely, certain choices more available and certain patterns of attention more profitable. This is the logic of the algorithmic feed, the personalized ad, the gamified social contract. It governs not by mandate but by suggestion — and in doing so, it rewires the very conditions under which power is recognized.
The robber barons and oligarchs of the digital era draw their power from their capacity to shape the infrastructures that control the flow of attention and data.
This marks a fundamental departure from earlier forms of governance. The industrial-modern state sought to see its population through demographic and statistical techniques to manage it — hence its obsession with classification, legibility and making things measurable. Power in digital modernity does not need to see individuals in quite the same way; instead, it detects behavioral patterns, clusters of interactions, tendencies that can be guided rather than commanded. What it loses in clarity, it gains in flexibility. Rather than mapping reality onto a rigid statistical model, it responds in real-time, adjusting itself to flows of data.
If the industrial state’s failure was its attempt to fit people and nature into rigid grids, the failure of digital power might be its attempt to render the world as a series of dynamic patterns. The metaphors of networks and clusters are equally as partial and incomplete as the metaphor of the homogeneous grid before it.
And just as industrial modernity shaped the world by stamping it with the imprint of its designs, seeking to make it fit its partial vision of grids and uniformity, so digital power will leave its imprint: reshaping how we work, how we are governed, how we understand ourselves. Every governing logic has its blind spots, and every attempt to impose order on the world creates new forms of disorder. The question is not whether those who wield power within digital modernity will succeed in realizing their visions, but what will emerge in the gaps — in the places where digital modernity’s models fail and something is inevitably left out.
The Politics Of Digital Modernity
What we are living through is not just a vibe shift, then — it is the slow, seismic arrival of a new modernity. A digital modernity.
But modernities are not monoliths. They are fragmented, volatile and contested — sites of struggle as much as transformation. If past modernities are any indication, the answer will not be determined in theory but in practice. The metaphors we use to describe digital modernity will shape how we navigate it, just as those of industrial modernity once informed the dreams and designs of factory owners, bureaucrats and revolutionaries.
As industrial modernity waned, it left behind a shared skepticism of top-down power — of institutions, bureaucracies and all forms of delegation. The left and right envisioned different futures but found common cause in distrusting anything that descended from above. For the right, this translated into an embrace of market logic. For the left, it inspired a politics shaped by figures like Jane Jacobs, Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson: defenders of local communities and ecosystems, critics of top-heavy schemes, champions of decentralization and legal constraint.
“The robber barons and oligarchs of the digital era draw their power from their capacity to shape the infrastructures that control the flow of attention and data.”
Digitalization didn’t invent these impulses; it turbocharged them. On the left, it promised more convivial, horizontal modes of exchange, liberated from both state and market. On the right, it lent new vigor to free-market mythology, as platforms assumed tasks once reserved for public institutions: regulating, coordinating, even building infrastructure.
But the skepticism toward institutions reshaped more than policy, it reshaped politics itself. The post-industrial left, deeply suspicious of hierarchy, increasingly eschewed delegation and organization. The right shared this disdain for traditional authority but had a release valve: a willingness to rally behind charismatic strongmen. The left, lacking such a mechanism, struggled to convert its energy into power, or its ideals into durable structures.
Digital culture amplified these anti-institutional reflexes. The left, disenchanted with bureaucracy, was seduced by the allure of frictionless mobilization. Why endure the tedium of organizational work when a hashtag could summon thousands? Why compromise one’s individuality when one could move, like a bird in a murmuration, beautiful and leaderless? Even when the left endorses public institutions, the support is tepid — unmoored from the tradition that once built and defended them. The problem runs deeper than policy: A political imagination that equates democracy with spontaneous, bottom-up emergence cannot sustain the investments — emotional, financial, political — required for long-term, collective action.
Our visions of liberation remain stuck in the metaphors of industrial modernity. Oppression is still imagined as imposed, mechanistic, external. Freedom, by contrast, is seen as organic and self-organizing. But these metaphors falter in the face of digital power. They obscure more than they reveal — about the world we live in and the one we might want to change.
The authoritarianism of digital modernity does not wear the mask of faceless bureaucracy. It operates through faceless collectivity. Its commands arrive not as decrees but as design choices. Its tyrannies are those of the nudge, the notification, the algorithm. The swarm replaces the structure; the feed replaces the plan.
If democracy is to endure, it must be reimagined not as a retreat to the local or the decentralized, but as a renewed assertion of our collective capacity to shape society deliberately and at scale. We must rediscover forms of organizing that enable rather than dilute collective power. As the sociologist Ruha Benjamin has written, resistance is not enough. We need creation. The vast technical and financial energies now aimed at achieving speculative goals like the AI singularity or Mars colonization could be redirected toward more urgent, earthly matters: housing shortages, economic precarity, the quiet crises of everyday life.
The high priests of digital modernity — epitomized by Musk — envision a world where collective wealth serves elite ambition, while the rest of us are reduced to reactive swarms: intelligent, maybe, but rudderless and dreamless. To critique the metaphors of digital modernity is to reclaim coordination and collective action not as a compromise, but as an act of imaginative solidarity.
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