Digitalization and mediatization as tools for forming new types of subjectivity

The article explores the latest opportunities for refined control over individuals by power structures within the so-called surveillance capitalism of contemporary society. It highlights the use of advanced tools of digitalization and mediatization, as well as the formation of new types of subjectivity. It identifies the mechanisms through which modern power relations in a control society (domination and coercion of individuals) emerge, differing significantly from traditional forms of governance and control in pre-modern and early modern European societies. The discussion is based on Michel Foucault’s concept of socio-historical types of power relations in societies, including sovereign power, disciplinary society, and control society in its current digital form. The paper analyzes the history of concepts such as biopower, biopolitics, and biomass introduced by Foucault, starting with his studies of disciplinary society. It demonstrates that biopower, aimed at managing masses and controlling individuals, implemented mechanisms during the disciplinary society that have evolved further in today’s control society through digitalization and mediatization. Its essence involves transforming people into civilian individuals with formal democratic rights and freedoms while simultaneously maintaining the totalization of the population as biomass. The state is shown to simultaneously undertake the functions of totalization and individualization in the formation of modern subjectivity, from which individuals attempt to escape through nomadic practices and techniques of freedom that guarantee authentic subjectivation. It argues that with the extensive use of the socio-philosophical doctrine of neo-behaviorism, the formation of representations and behaviors of individuals is justified at all levels of their life activities. This creates conditions for the emergence of new types of subjectivity that fully satisfy neo-globalists. As a result of this long-term process of modern biopolitics, not only has the role of democratic institutions in contemporary society diminished, but neoliberalism could become the "breeding ground" for digital totalitarian regimes of governance and control.