Algorithmic Rationality, Affects, and the Formation of Informational Bubbles: Epicentric Effects, the Fear-Control-Domination Triangle, and the Hermeneutics of the Capable Subject in the Algorithmic Public Sphere

This working paper examines how algorithmic rationality reorganises the digital public sphere by structuring visibility through affective amplification and predictive feedback. Building on Lotman's semiotics of culture, the article proposes that informational bubbles function as micro-semiospheres whose boundaries are consolidated through a recurring epicentre-counter-epicentre dynamic, an affective sonar effect in which external discursive incursions, rather than opening bubbles to translation, trigger internal waves of polarising reaffirmation. This mechanism is illustrated with an empirical case of hydroxychloroquine disinformation on Brazilian Twitter during the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper then grounds the fear-control-domination triangle independently of any general theory of power, engages critically with Foucauldian governmentality as a partial but normatively insufficient description of the phenomenon, and establishes Ricoeur's hermeneutics of the capable subject as the article's theoretical axis, from which Freire's pedagogy of autonomy is derived as an operational, not merely complementary, consequence. The article closes by clarifying the epistemological status of its own synthesis between the systemic-procedural register of Habermasian communicative rationality and the existential-pedagogical register of Freirean praxis.