Published January 28, 2026 | Version v1
Preprint Open

Platforms as Infrastructural Religions: Authority, Visibility, and the Migration of Social Control into Code

Authors/Creators

Description

This pre-print reframes large-scale digital platforms as systems of social authority rather than neutral communication tools, arguing that they now perform functions historically associated with organized religion by governing visibility, legitimacy, and participation. It introduces the concepts of platform orthodoxy, algorithmic nationalism, and geo-digital sovereignty to explain how ideological dominance, exclusion, and jurisdiction are produced through infrastructure and algorithmic enforcement rather than belief or doctrine. The paper offers a conceptual framework for analyzing platform power, AI-mediated governance, and the migration of authority into code.

Files

Platforms as Infrastructural Religions_preprintv2.pdf

Files (275.0 kB)

Additional details

References

  • Asad, T. (1993). Genealogies of religion: Discipline and reasons of power in Christianity and Islam. Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • Benkler, Y., Faris, R., & Roberts, H. (2018). Network propaganda: Manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in American politics. Oxford University Press.
  • Campbell, H. A. (2013). Digital religion: Understanding religious practice in new media worlds. Routledge.
  • Campbell, H. A., & Evolvi, G. (2020). Contextualizing current digital religion research on emerging technologies. Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies, 2(1), 5–17. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbe2.149
  • Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI: Power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. Yale University Press.
  • DeNardis, L. (2020). The global war for internet governance. Yale University Press.
  • Durkheim, É. (1912). The elementary forms of religious life (J. W. Swain, Trans.). George Allen & Unwin. (Original work published 1912)
  • Eubanks, V. (2018). Automating inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. St. Martin's Press.
  • Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Pantheon Books.
  • Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the internet: Platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. Yale University Press.
  • Hjarvard, S. (2008). The mediatization of religion: A theory of the media as agents of religious change. Northern Lights, 6(1), 9–26. https://doi.org/10.1386/nl.6.1.9/1
  • Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Harvard University Press.
  • Lessig, L. (1999). Code and other laws of cyberspace. Basic Books.
  • Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11
  • Pasquale, F. (2015). The black box society: The secret algorithms that control money and information. Harvard University Press.
  • Sassen, S. (2006). Territory, authority, rights: From medieval to global assemblages. Princeton University Press.
  • Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press.
  • Selbst, A. D., Boyd, D., Friedler, S. A., Venkatasubramanian, S., & Vertesi, J. (2019). Fairness and abstraction in sociotechnical systems. In Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 59–68). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3287560.3287598
  • Tufekci, Z. (2018). Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. Yale University Press.
  • Weber, M. (1978). Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology (G. Roth & C. Wittich, Eds.). University of California Press. (Original work published 1922)
  • Winner, L. (1980). Do artifacts have politics? Daedalus, 109(1), 121–136.
  • Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs.