Platforms as Infrastructural Religions: Authority, Visibility, and Algorithmic Power in the Digital Age

This paper extends the ongoing series Platforms as Infrastructural Religions: Authority, Visibility, and Algorithmic Power in the Digital Age by examining the role of artificial intelligence systems within platform governance architectures. Building on earlier installments that analyzed the migration of authority into infrastructure (Nault, 2026a), the embedding of social control within code (Nault, 2026b), the governance of visibility (Nault, 2026c), and the absorption of older religious forms into platform environments (Nault, 2026e), this paper advances a structural claim: automated systems increasingly perform clerical functions within digital infrastructures. The term “clerical” is employed analytically rather than theologically. It refers to governance functions historically associated with religious institutions—interpretive mediation, boundary adjudication, disciplinary enforcement, ritual administration, and preservation of normative coherence. Within contemporary platform environments, these functions are increasingly delegated to machine learning classifiers, recommendation systems, and generative AI models operating at scale. The paper argues that automation relocates interpretive and normative authority from identifiable human intermediaries to opaque statistical systems. Moderation classifiers operationalize policy through probabilistic inference. Recommendation systems allocate visibility as a form of governance. Generative AI systems synthesize and frame contested issues within alignment constraints that remain largely invisible to users. Appeals processes and interface prompts structure procedural cycles that habituate deference to system judgment. Through analysis of automation, opacity, ritualized interaction, and diffusion of accountability, the paper develops the concept of “automated clericalism” as a structural feature of platform governance. It does not claim that AI systems possess moral agency or theological status. Rather, it identifies functional convergence between clerical mediation and automated interpretive authority embedded within infrastructural systems. The broader theoretical concern is epistemic sovereignty: the capacity of individuals and communities to meaningfully contest, revise, and participate in collective truth recognition under conditions of platform-mediated governance. By situating AI alignment, moderation practices, and generative synthesis within the framework of infrastructural religion, the paper clarifies how interpretive authority is redistributed—and partially obscured—in contemporary digital societies.