For a New Technology of Philosophy
Wednesday, October 14, 2026 at 1:08PM This is the abstract for a talk I’ve been invited to give at the one-day conference Post-Platform Media, taking place at the University of Westminster on 15 January 2027, organised by Paul Rekret and Henry Ivry.
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For a New Technology of Philosophy
A launch point for the thinking behind this talk was Anton Jäger’s 2023 book, Hyperpolitics, whose 2026 English edition is proving influential among the British left. Jäger identifies a new political era – hyperpolitics – as coming after the mass politics of the mid-20th century; the desocialised (NGO, PR consultant, technocrat-dominated) postpolitics of the 1990s, a term also associated with Chantal Mouffe, Slavoj Žižek and Jodi Dean; and the long decade of anti-politics (Arab Spring, Indignados, Occupy) that followed the 2008 financial crash. It’s an intriguing way of describing a moment characterised by the erosion of the parties, trade unions, civic organisations and other forms of collective association through which durable political engagement was once channelled. Platform capitalism, social media, algorithmic amplification, viral outrage, culture wars and increasingly fragmented and fleeting forms of identification (pirate parties, BLM, gilet jaunes, school climate strikes) have intensified this tendency, producing what Jäger calls a ‘market-friendly’ hyperpolitics: ‘extreme politicization’ without anything actually changing. As he says, the ‘people who go on marches subscribe to the same podcast, might follow the same pages on Instagram, might be on the same Telegram channels, but they don’t have an organisational history they shared before they entered the march.’
At the same time Mouffe, Žižek and Dean all provided illuminating and often influential diagnoses of earlier political conjunctures. Yet the subsequent rise of populist ethno-nationalism, illiberalism and authoritarian politics – from Trump and Farage, Modi and Milei to a wider resurgence of the radical right in Sweden, Germany and elsewhere – shows that even the most philosophically sophisticated accounts of a political situation do not necessarily help transform it in a progressive direction. Several questions arise. Is hyperpolitics a more persuasive diagnosis of our individualised and deinstitutionalised present than postpolitics? Is diagnosis itself the level at which intervention is most urgently needed? And might the production of such radical theory inadvertently help sustain the institutions, technologies, economic models, publishing practices and forms of intellectual labour – across both post- and pre-platform media – that perpetuate the very conditions it seeks to overcome?
It’s not an either/or, of course. We still need pre-platform forms of (market-friendly?) legacy theory to raise such questions. But this talk argues that, when it comes to issues of mediation, circulation, logistics, maintenance and social reproduction, what is also required is not so much a new philosophy of technology – adding to a lineage stretching from Heidegger, Adorno and Flusser, through Baudrillard and Virilio, to Stiegler, Haraway, Hayles and beyond – as a new technology of philosophy. This means shifting from developing new theoretical accounts of technology – including ‘how practices of archiving, curation, preservation, and transmission operate under conditions of infrastructural precarity and platform dependency’ – towards experimenting more with the material, institutional and technological conditions through which philosophy is itself created and performed. Rather than asking only what philosophy should think about the political present while leaving its forms of organisation and material conditions of labour masked, we might ask what emergent, independent, even insurgent kinds of media technologies, institutions, infrastructures, economic arrangements and collective practices are required for philosophy to become otherwise – and, from there, perhaps politics itself.