EXISTENTIAL CHALLENGES AND THREATS TO THE MODERN INDIVIDUAL IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of contemporary forms of biopolitics and its transformation into digital psychopolitics under conditions of rapid digitalization and the dominance of global media elites. It examines how digitalization and the implementation of artificial intelligence create new dispositifs of control capable of penetrating the inner world of the individual, tracking emotional states, unconscious desires, and shaping behavioral patterns at the level of neural reactions. Using the concepts of Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben, Franco Berardi, Rosi Braidotti, and Byung-Chul Han, the author demonstrates how contemporary digital psychopolitics combines traditional elements of disciplinary power with neural violence and neoliberal ideology, transmitting the «internal motivation» of individuals for achieving success, self-improvement, and submission to the demands of the global system. It is demonstrated that the new variant of biopolitics in the form of psychopolitics has practically transferred all the features of the disciplinary society, in the form of external surveillance and control in the digital society, into an even more rigid internal control of individuals, in particular as expectations of success and self-improvement, as well as futile expectations, hopes, and aspirations. It is revealed that, in order to ensure the governance of human biomasses and at the same time control over each individual, biopower significantly modernizes the Foucauldian biopolitical strategy through further digitalization and the expansion of the use of artificial intelligence. This organizes the process of subjectivation of individuals in a completely different way than in a disciplinary society. Due to digitalization, a mechanism of total control over individuals is being implemented in civilizational society. That is, in contemporary society, control and governing influence have undergone further development. Its main content can be formulated as follows – the individual, control yourself, while biopower will continuously ensure and improve all possible digital technologies for this purpose. It can be stated that the launched global digital technologies for managing the actions, behavior, and desires of individuals through individual digitization significantly transform the forms of subjectivation of modern individuals, where it is no longer a question of individual freedoms, as they cease to be relevant trends. Particular attention is paid to the existential consequences of digital biopolitics for the subjectivity of individuals, including the transformation of their individual and collective practices of freedom, as well as potential mechanisms of resistance to biopolitical structural influences. As a result of this long-term process of the digitalization of corporeality and the implementation of psychopolitics as contemporary biopolitics, there is a probability of the loss by individuals of the significance of various forms of freedom and a substantial reduction in the role of democratic institutions in contemporary society, while neoliberalism may become a «nutrient medium» for the creation of digital totalitarian regimes of governance precisely within «democratic» societies. The article emphasizes the necessity of a critical reflection on the digital order that shapes a new ethics of a «safe digital world» and its impact on the psychological and social space of the modern individual.