“Digital Leviathan”: Scenarios for the Development of the Hobbesian Monster in the 21st Century

Abstract

In the research, the Hobbesian concept of “Leviathan” is used as a metaphor and a “heuristic scheme” describing the change of epochs and the formation of a new universal scale for innovative forms of socio-political organization. The subject of the research is the phenomenon of digitalization, as well as key changes caused by the digital transformation of public policy and power relations. “Digitalization” is considered as an ambiguous and multilevel phenomenon, reflecting a whole series of cardinal transformations in the sociopolitical life of society, which at the ideological, institutional, instrumental, technological and praxiological levels “clears space” for new forms of social organization. Аrgues that currently there is an acute competition to define, legitimize and promote a certain “projective image of the future” corresponding to the latest socio-political order and normative sociotechnological system (“engineering law”). In particular, the author considers contradictory trends, on the one hand, aimed at preserving and reproducing traditional political institutions, and on the other, related to forming new digital era institutions, digital governance structures and practices of public-power interactions. The research pays special attention to the competition of the state and new digital and technological actors in the political space. It discusses various scenarios of digital transformation of society, state, and government and considers such digital effects in the modern political process as “information noise”, “information overload”, “profile reconfigurations” of relations, the formation of alternative digital spaces (metaverses), as well as their influence on the current political order, power relations, socio-political dynamics.