The Invisible Collectivization Digitalization Between Centralization and Contingency

Abstract Recent analyses of platform capitalism argue that the hyper-individualistic ideology of Silicon Valley has paradoxically led to a new form of global collectivization. Digital infrastructures are said to function as privately owned yet collectively operating planning organs, thereby generating a form of “technocratic communism.” This article develops a critical counterposition. It argues that this diagnosis risks employing a totalizing concept of structure that underestimates both political contingency and technological ambiguity. Through a rereading of Foucault, Sloterdijk, Rosa, Serres, and Schmitt, it is argued that digital infrastructures do exhibit centralizing tendencies, but do not necessarily result in a coherent, systemic collectivization. Rather than constituting a new totality, they generate a field of asymmetrical, conflicting, and unstable power relations. The digital age is therefore understood not as the return of planning, but as the intensification of contingently organized power without a transcendent center.