Digital Therapeutic Cultures and Their New Regime of Psychological Truth

Abstract

The article focuses on contemporary digital therapeutic cultures’ new regime of truth. This entails describing and critically analysing the sociomaterial apparatuses that distinguish truth from false and produce specific modes of subjectivation. The article shows that the digital regime of psychological truth is heir to the behavioural mistrust of subjectivity and the epistemological shift from the causal-comprehensive model towards the probabilistic-predictive one. However, the psychological subject has not been excluded, but her role has changed. The article introduces the distinction between valuable and spurious truths to analyse this shift. Algorithms do not need the psychological subject to produce true outcomes, but they depend on her and psy-knowledges to distinguish significative from irrelevant truths. Following Maurizio Lazzarato, the article concludes that digital therapeutic cultures share one of the main features of contemporary capitalism: to produce value at the intersection of processes of subjectivation and de-subjectivation.