The Faceless Interface: Digital Empathy, Care, and the Other within the Logic of the Metasimulacrum

The article offers a phenomenological and normative analysis of digital empathy. It clarifies empathy as an embodied, imaginative, and fictional experience of the Other, and as a virtue that navigates a middle path between Proximism and Distantism. It then revisits Thomas Fuchs’s concept of the Virtual Other and introduces the Tamed Other – a media-constructed alterity, pre-sanitized and optimized for interface processing. On this basis, it develops the notion of a metasimulacrum of empathy, in which the sign of care precedes affect, regulates it, and becomes an operational unit within platform-based regimes of attention. Different configurations of mediation generate distinct ‘theaters of suffering’ and regimes of visibility. Genuine online empathy appears only as an exception within architectures oriented toward the managed visibility of the Other, calling for a rethinking of the ethics of digital care.