Greening Autonomy through Digitalisation? Forms of Critique in the Social Web between Dispositive Structures and Emancipatory Transgression

Autonomy has regained importance in discourses on a socio-ecological transformation. Normative perspectives emphasise the need for collective autonomy to democratically define the societal limits that enable a good life for all within planetary boundaries. Given the inevitable role of digitalisation in contemporary societies, its opportunities and risks for such an green autonomy ̶ that implies enhanced modes of participation and deliberation, but moreover a restrenghtened emphasis of equality and morality, have been much discussed. In the meantime, political-economic, philosophical, and democratic theoretical perspectives have left the hopeful narratives rather behind by revealing how digitalisation in general and social media in particular lead to an erosion of autonomy in its various elements through e.g. manipulation and deception. Sharing the normative horizon of green autonomy for a socio-ecological transformation, this paper however, proposes to critically examine the current transformation of notions of autonomy within the social web, i.e. to exceed the assumptions of the sheer undermining of autonomy. It therefore takes issue with deterministic views of the relationship between digitalisation and democracy as two separate spheres and proposes to consider both in a dynamic interrelationship. Focusing on the issue of autonomy in social media, it links the perspective of digitalisation as socially shaped and socially shaping with the conceptualisation of autonomy in a Foucauldian sense, i.e. as the reproduction of self-constituting dispositions for ideal conduct and the critical capacity to transgress the former. The paper aims to depict how the technological affordances of agency in social media, which mainly prestructure the late modern ideal of singularity and authenticity within blurring boundaries of public and private, personal and political, individuation and collectivism, have been trangressed for forms of critique and mobilisation towards a notion of exclusionary self-determination that is anti-green in its rejection of equality within planetary boundaries, but not non-autonomous.