AI, social media and echo chambers: From algorithmic prediction to antagonistic politics and the democratic potential

As an initial line of inquiry that brings post-Marxism and Bernard Stiegler’s post-phenomenological critique of digital technology into conversation, the present article outlines how the communicative coordinates of social and political life become restructured by AI-powered social media platforms. We argue that algorithmic governmentality replaces subjects’ anticipatory faculties with automated futures that incubate spaces of ideational homogenization in the form of echo chambers. Yet, the production of echo chambers paradoxically maximizes ideational heterogeneity at the systemic macro-level, by eroding shared spaces of communication. The struggle over political signification, once mediated within a shared public sphere, now unfolds between dislocated discursive economies—a configuration that, as we argue, favors antagonistic politics, which involve pronounced in-group/out-group logics through the deployment of rhetoric. In this sense, rhetorical antagonisms formalize the frontiers that AI-powered social media generate. We conclude by delineating the contours of a digital democratic strategy that is in line with social media ecology, by detailing how, in a fragmented digital public sphere, rhetorical antagonisms can be deployed to symbolically consolidate disparate democratic struggles and democratic demands.