Digital Infrastructures of Cognition, Culture, and Democracy: Politics of Disengagement and Artificial Ignorance

Examining how artificial intelligence and cognitive automation reshape dispositions towards attention, learning and public life, this book offers a critical framework to counter technocratic drift and to rethink agency and democratic responsibility in an increasingly automated world.

Digital Infrastructures of Cognition, Culture, and Democracy rethinks the role of human intelligence and responsibility in environments increasingly guided by automated systems. It develops a critical understanding of how automated decision-making, data-driven platforms and algorithmic infrastructures, alongside neoliberal regimes of evaluation that discipline individual and institutional ethics through measurement, metrics and ranking, are transforming engagement with knowledge and the common good, redefining learning and notions of merit, reshaping social relations and democratic life. With case studies and discussions of emerging digital governance, this book offers new theoretical frameworks and socio‑pedagogical strategies for reimagining digital ecosystems and equips readers with conceptual tools to recognise subtle forms of algorithmic power and to cultivate more conscious, reflective uses of digital technologies and the possibilities of algorithmic activism.

This book will appeal to all those in need of analytical tools to assess the societal impact of AI, from researchers and students in sociology, media studies, communication, anthropology, political theory, philosophy of technology and education to professionals working in policymaking, digital governance and public administration.

Vania Baldi is Professor of Sociology and of Cultural and Communication Processes in both Italy and Portugal. His work explores the intersections between media environments, digital infrastructures, political communication, ethics and the social anthropology of technology. With a transdisciplinary approach, he examines how artificial intelligence, platform capitalism and data‑driven systems reshape mind, epistemology, public life, education and democratic culture. He has taught and conducted research across multiple institutions and international programmes, contributing to debates on critical media theory, algorithmic governance, epistemological transformations and the socio‑political implications of automated decision‑making.