The "Digital (or Tech) Illiberalism" and the Metamorphoses of Liberal-Representative Democracy

Recently, in the context of crisis of political representation, scientific literature has highlighted the emergence of a new analytical category that stands at the confluence of two metamorphoses of politics: illiberalism, on the one hand, and technopolitics, on the other. This is what some scholars call “technological illiberalism” (Laruelle and Dall'Agnola, 2023), or “digital illiberalism” (Kanevskiy, 2023) - which could be defined, concerning the implementation of public policies - as “illiberal technocracy”. One of the elements emphasised by this literature is the fact that various corporations collaborate with autocratic powers, thus giving rise to an original illiberal “TechnoLeviathan”; or with the governments of Anglo-Saxon representative democracies, acquiring an unprecedented public-private status that is flexible in relation to regulatory and legal frameworks and windows of socio-political opportunity. The ICT revolution as a libertarian promise of a society dispensing increased individual empowerment has therefore generated what can be labelled as a kind of “digital counterrevolution”. Out of this comes a contraction of individual freedoms and the private sphere as well as a metamorphosis in a restrictive sense, and with the massive entry of exogenous (and private) forces, of the public space. This illiberal technocracy mixes with some variants of populism and fuels an “emocracy”, where emotional waves replace the modern version of public opinion as well as the trust-belief binomial. The most recent example is the alliance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk. The paper aims to analyse these different but converging perspectives in order to outline the hypothesis of an illiberal techno-democracy as a further expansion of the illiberal option and as a form of techno-essentialism. And it proposes to investigate, from a qualitative perspective, the implications of the forms of apparent disintermediation (and reintermediation) spread within the social circuits and mechanisms of political leadership by the paradigm of “illiberal technodemocracy”.